Young Brisbane author Emily O’Grady has been awarded The 2018 Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award for her debut novel, The Yellow House. Set deep in the Australian outback, the novel is a powerful story about loyalty and betrayal, the legacies of violence and the possibilities of redemption. The story follows ten-year-old Cub, who is forced to come to terms with her family’s murky history when dark secrets begin to bubble to the surface. Megan O’Brien, bookseller and one of the three judges of this year’s award had nothing but positive things to say about the novel. “The Yellow House is a visually delightful and compelling narrative with a terrific balance of tension, horror and beauty – quintessentially Australian,” she said.
Born in Brisbane in 1991, Emily is currently completing her PHD at the Queensland University of Technology. Emily’s fiction and poetry has appeared in Review of Australian Fiction, Westerly, Australian Poetry Journal, The Lifted Brow, Kill Your Darlings, The Big Issue Fiction Edition and Award Winning Australian Writing. In 2012 she won the QUT Undergraduate Writing Prize, followed by the QUT Postgraduate Writing Prize in 2013. The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award is one of Australia’s most prestigious awards for an unpublished manuscript. It is awarded annually to an author under the age of thirty five and has launched the careers of over 100 Australian authors including Tim Winton, Kate Grenville, Andrew McGahan and Gillian Mears.
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