There could have hardly been a more poignant moment at an awards ceremony. Georgia Blain, the novelist, short-story writer and memoirist who died in December, has won this year's Victorian Premier's Award for fiction for her final novel, Between a Wolf and a Dog. The $25,000 prize was accepted by her partner, Andrew Taylor.
The book is about a woman dying from brain cancer. Not long after Blain finished the final editing, she received her own terminal diagnosis of the same disease. Taylor said it was terrible that life had imitated art. "It's great that she won, but it's sad and cruel that she can't be here. She would have been honoured and thrilled."
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He said she had been told about the shortlisting before her death and had last year also won the Queensland Premier's Award for fiction.
"All sorts of books win awards, but often quiet ones don't. It would be a source of pride for her and I'm glad her work has been acknowledged."
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Other winners of the VPL awards were: for poetry, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Carrying the World; non-fiction, Madeline Gleeson, Offshore: Behind the Wire on Manus and Nauru; drama, Leah Purcell, The Drover's Wife, and young-adult fiction, Randa Abdel-Fattah, When Michael met Mina.
All the winners were considered for the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature, along with the previously announced winner of the prize for Indigenous writing, Tony Birch (Ghost River), and the winner of the unpublished manuscript award, Melanie Cheng (Australia Day). For the second year in a row, the richest prize for Australian writing was won by the dramatist.
Purcell said her play, a radical reworking of the classic Henry Lawson short story, has been performed only at Sydney's Belvoir Theatre. "I just wanted to write a good story, but with the Black Lives Matter movement it's so relevant it's ridiculous.
"I always want my work to affect people. When I go to the theatre I want to be moved. I don't mind if I love it or hate it, I want to be stimulated, I want to be shocked. I want fear. That's what live theatre's all about."
With the exception, perhaps, of Blain's, all the winning books have remarkable relevance to current events. Abdel-Fattah's young-adult novel is about an encounter between two teenagers at a rally for refugees – but Mina, from Afghanistan, and Michael, a private schoolboy, have opposing views.
"It's mirroring what's happening in the world and just this week alone it validates the importance of writing stories that speak out against racism and really tell the story of the lived experience of racism."
Gleeson said she had almost hoped her book about Australian refugee policy and the offshore camps would have become irrelevant by the time it was published – "but unfortunately that was not the case". She said President Trump's move to restrict Muslims from entering the US was very dangerous. "It is extreme and extremism in any form is dangerous, especially when it is coupled with fear not fact."
Clarke said she was particularly pleased to win the poetry award "because I feel my work has all sprung out of my poetry".
Her collection of short stories, Foreign Soil, has just been published in the US to enthusiastic reviews, but she has withdrawn her memoir, The Hate Race, which was also shortlisted in the non-fiction category, from publication there because the imprint of Simon & Schuster was bringing out a book by controversial US alt-right figure Milo Yiannopoulos.
"It's a book about hate speech; how could I let them publish it?"