In late August, we gathered at the Woollahra Library to celebrate and acknowledge Australian Jewish writers. We are thrilled to announce the winners and highly commended authors across all five awards. A special thank you to all writers who submitted their works, our generous donors and judges.

The Leslie and Sophie Caplan Award for Jewish Non-Fiction

 WINNER

Jana Vytrhlik, Treasures of Old Jewish Sydney

In Treasures of Old Jewish Sydney Dr Jana Vytrhlik’s curatorial and historical skills are on display as she brings together artefacts, images, documents and architecture to recreate and retell the very beginnings of Sydney’s Jewish community. An extraordinary work of historical recovery, it is also a visually stunning book that brings the personalities and places of Sydney’s early community to life. Accompanied by original essays, this volume has filled a much-needed gap in the historiography, and in so doing has enriched our knowledge of Jewish life, practice and history in Australia.

 SHORTLISTED

Dr Anna Jacobson, How to Knit a Human: A Memoir

Dr Anna Jacobson was the inaugural winner of The Jewish Independent Award for Young Jewish Writers in 2024. Her follow up, How to Knit a Human, is an achingly sad yet also moving and sometimes funny memoir. Following Jacobson’s journey of rediscovery, achievement and the desire for love cannot help but bring tears of joy to the reader. This work reinforces the feeling that Jacobson is an emerging talent whose future writing career will attract an ever-growing readership.

 SHORTLISTED

Prof Jayne Persian, Fascists in Exile

In Fascists in Exile, Professor Jayne Persian sheds light on the failure of Australian politicians and bureaucrats who, in the post–World War Two period, allowed war criminals, ultranationalists, and mass murderers to migrate to Australia with minimal scrutiny. Alongside this disturbing record, Persian highlights the prevailing official attitudes towards Jewish migration at the time, including the stark admission: “We have never wanted these people (Jews) in Australia, and we still don’t want them.” The book not only documents the entry of Nazi collaborators into Australia but also traces their involvement in far-right political activity after settling in the country. Based on extensive archival research in both Australia and Europe, this important scholarly work offers a timely and significant contribution to our understanding of Australia’s post-war history.

SHORTLISTED

John Safran, Squat

Squat is a brave and idiosyncratic work of narrative nonfiction that candidly explores the nature of modern-day antisemitism, bringing much insight as well as wit to this otherwise grave quandary. John Safran, a serial risktaker, frequently puts himself in danger, including physical, as he delves into the worlds of the age-old hatred and the contemporary celebrity cult. Readers will reap the rewards of these risks.

 SHORTLISTED

Michael Visontay, Noble Fragments

In Noble Fragments, Michael Visontay marries together two very different worlds – the sombre as well as hopeful narrative of surviving the Holocaust with the glamorous albeit quaint universe of antiquarian book trade – and the result is original and thematically rich. This well researched and well told book is a story about obsessions, literary intrigues, and the whimsical nature of history and how it can shape individual lives.   

  

The Jewish Independent Award for Young Jewish Writers

 WINNER

Ellie Bouhadana, Ellie’s Table: Food from Memory and Food from Home

Ellie’s Table is more than a cookbook—it’s an elegant act of cultural retrieval, a weaving of cultural memory into the textures of inherited cuisine. What distinguishes Bouhadana’s debut is not just the recipes themselves, though many—like her Roman fried zucchini or chapter on focaccia and whipped butters—are genuinely tempting. It’s the way she structures the book like a dinner party, guiding the reader not through courses but through relationships, rituals, and remembered gestures. The writing is clear but emotionally textured, capturing the quiet intimacy of a safta’s kitchen or the improvisational joy of shared meals during lockdown. Without overstating its own premise, the book locates a living Jewishness not in abstraction but in salt, oil, repetition, and care. It’s a moving and beautifully realised debut.

 SHORTLISTED

Dassi Erlich with Ellen Whinnett, In Bad Faith

Dassi Erlich bravely exposes the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her revered ultra-Orthodox school principal Malka Leifer. Her memoir, In Bad Faith, charts the arduous journey she faced for justice over more than 15 years of court cases, political interference and community pushback against the revelations from her and her sisters. Dassi poignantly shares the toll this journey took on her and her family and the strength it took to reclaim their lives and to find their voices.

 SHORTLISTED

Anna Jacobson, How to Knit a Human: A Memoir

Anna Jacobson’s debut memoir, How to Knit a Human: A Memoir, weaves multiple strands of the author’s life and artistic practice together in telling the story of her experience of psychosis and receiving Electroconvulsive Therapy, dealing with memory loss, and finding ways to reintegrate her split ‘selves’. Jacobson has used powerful prose, poetry and illustrations in the book, and also tells us her story from behind the lens of a camera, as she plays the French horn, or learns to knit – each medium offering rich insights into her life experiences. The memoir also explores her family’s Jewish rituals, identity and history, which are an important part of her past and present as she works to regain a sense of agency.

 The Szymon (Simon) Klitenik Award for Jewish Fiction

 WINNER

Linda Margolin Royal, The Star on the Grave

The Star on the Grave by Linda Margolin Royal brings to life a story that has been underrepresented in Holocaust literature – that of ambassador, Chiune Sugihara, often referred to as the Japanese Schindler. Through measured and evocative prose, Margolin Royal layers storylines beautifully, moving between timelines and perspectives without losing clarity, and gracefully taking the reader along with her. The emotional arc is subtle but devastating, drawing people into the lives of characters who feel real and flawed.

Rather than retread familiar ground, The Star on the Grave finds freshness in its approach, using family secrets, buried grief and how we make sense of loss to preserve history, while addressing themes of identity, resilience and healing. A moving read.

 SHORTLISTED

Shelley Davidow, The Girl with the Violin

The Girl with the Violin opens at the collapse of the Berlin Wall but goes on to traverse decades and continents in telling the sweeping story of its protagonist, Susanna. On one level, it is a novel about a young Australia-Jewish violinist and her reckoning with the traumas of her German past. But at every turn, it speaks to deeper things. This is a story about loss and recovery, truth and silence, and most profoundly, the way that art can help us survive uncontainable pain. Brilliantly observed, thrillingly plotted and sensuously described Susanna’s story shines through the grimmest of twentieth-century history. Shelley Davidow has a dextrous and sensitive presence on the page, knowing exactly when to move us along and when to let us linger. A vast and gorgeous offering, as symphonic and resonant as the finest classical composition.

 SHORTLISTED

Joanne Fedler, The Whale’s Last Song

Joanne Fedler’s The Whale’s Last Song is a tender fable that is both timeless in its structure and very much a story for our times. Teo is a young girl with one eye who lives her life as a boy. She leaves home on a difficult quest from her much-loved sister to find what she thinks will cure her sister from the pox. Her father has given himself to a “scientific experiment” to find a cure by the Marquis and leaves the girls alone.  The story of Teo runs in parallel with the father’s story and both are augmented by delicate hand-drawn illustrations which enhance the sense of this being a modern fairy tale. The writing throughout is lovely, taut and poetic, with big, embodied themes around transformation, forgiveness and sacrifice handled with subtlety and care: “Two stories – one inherited, one embodied – tussled inside Teo’s heart. The scent of seaweeds and pulses called to her, the smell from her dream.”  Like every fable there are heroes, a nasty villain, and a quest and these are allowed to exist in fable form without trying to modernise them, but the parallels to the modern world are clear: we are what we leave behind, our frailties and our loves, whalefall and connection.

 SHORTLISTED

Jonathan Seidler, All the Beautiful Things You Love

All the Beautiful Things You Love by Jonathan Seidler is a funny, poignant story about Elly and Enzo, a couple whose perfect marriage ends abruptly after 11 years. The book is structured into objects that Elly is selling on Facebook Marketplace, and each chapter contains the story of that item and develops a new pathway for the object as it morphs into something new, forging a relationship between Elly and the purchaser.  The book’s slick structure, shifting narrative, the edgy London setting and the self-contained nature of each chapter makes this a fun, engaging and super-fast read. As you would expect from a music critic, Seidler’s writing about music is particularly good, and there are musical references throughout the book which are nicely rooted in the characterisation. This is most definitely a rom-com and not a book that is meant to be taken too seriously, despite the heartbreak between Elly and Enzo, but it’s pure pleasure to read.

 

The Edith Hausmann Award for Jewish Playwrights

 WINNER

Elise Hearst, Batsheva

Batsheva is a beautifully poetic and restrained monologue. It makes contemporary, current and relevant the inherent humanity of one of the most beautiful, symbolic and controversial stories in the Bible, and in turn, Jewish culture.

What is particularly exciting about this work is its ambiguity. It achieves a rare but very important literary quality of activating the reader (and hopefully the spectator). It doesn’t unpack every detail of meaning, but rather, like poetry or music, invites the reader to participate, to analyse and to respond, individually.

So many aspects of the story are imagined subjectively, which puts us in conversation with the work, authoring our own imagined understanding.

The potential of this script is truly great.

 HIGHLY COMMENDED

Ziggy Enoch The Flood

The Flood is a powerful, funny, and haunting play by a writer with a fiercely original voice.  The characters team with life.  And their dialogue is electric with humour and texture.  This is a highly visual and poetic play, and it leaves lasting images and echoes in your mind long after you read it. It has been written with great theatrical imagination and freedom and would challenge and engage producers and audiences in a very inspiring and exciting way.

 HIGHLY COMMENDED

Zoe (Ziggy) Resnick Untitled

This is a very clever and multifaceted play. Mixing serious character development and narrative with very relevant contemporary agendas. It reads like a wonderfully confronting and witty TV series… and I mean that as a huge compliment.

What I love about it particularly, is the mix of contradictory worlds. And I believe these types of contradictions are at the core of both great writing and the essence of Jewish thought. Mixing the sacred and the profane, or in Jewish terms, the heretical with the orthodox or traditional, is at the heart of Jewish discourse and philosophy. To be a ‘heretical’ Jew is very Jewish. Humanity is at the core of this thinking and at the core of this play.

A potential staging of Untitled could represent the double meanings and metaphors at the heart of this play even more than the writing alone.

 HIGHLY COMMENDED

Jessica Bellamy Daughter to his Blood

This play is a compelling and clever read. It is thought-through and sophisticated. Using the Shylock reference and analogy to mirror a very current and complicated contemporary reality potentially triggers a response and an understanding from the audience that is both inside the story, and self-consciously revealing of truths, as well as an understanding of important current public agendas that affect our real lives.

 HIGHLY COMMENDED

Adiel Cohen Pigging Out: A Play that’s off the derech

Pigging Out deftly uses humour and engaging storytelling to take the audience on a journey of what role food plays in Jewish identity and within families. The voice is assured and full of humour and pathos as the narrator seeks to question, test and tease out his understanding of himself through his relationship to food.  A highly enjoyable and beautifully written short play.

 

The Rosalind Sharbanee Meyer Award for Young Jewish Storytellers

 Winner: Short Story category

Hayley Kaplan, The Question in the Margin

The Question in the Margin holds deep observation and specificity of details that connects the reader to the narrator in Sydney. A narrator who compassionately works with her parts of self to understand her whole self and who she wants to be through her faith. Hayley Kaplan doesn’t shy away from complexities and nuances and tackles her topic with courage, honesty, and passion. This is effective storytelling of an inner journey, through meaningful prose.

 Winner: Poetry category

Mimi Baron, Dear Liri

Finding moments of hope in the ceremonies and songs of her Jewish culture, this is a powerful epistolary poem from Mimi Barton to Liri, that gives goosebumps and stays with the reader. Braiding timelines like challah, the poet shares her experiences and thoughts, including during one Shabbat prior to Rosh Hashanah in Sydney. Dear Liri explores what it means to live with courage and hold faith, honouring Liri and what she represents to the poet: strength. As the poet experiences and witnesses rising antisemitism in Australia and her city of Sydney, she finds solace by connecting with Liri’s strength. This is generous and intimate storytelling through poetry.

Runner up

Sophie Rosen, Matzo Do About Nothing

A fast-paced rollicking Passover detective story with everything from matzah balls to dybbuks to Intelligence Officer rabbis. Each piece of dialogue unearths new humour and wit. A fresh and original voice filled to the brim with Yiddishe references that brings Jewish speculative fiction to a new level, all while set in Sydney with a twist.

 Highly Commended

Manon Gur, Letter to Shiri

Illuminating how we are still connected to each other through time and space, ‘Letter to Shiri’ by Manon Gur is a ripple of echoed resonances. An honouring and remembrance of those who are taken in violence from us, who are far away but are like our own family. A witnessing and communication of grief to Shiri by a Sydney diaspora poet, who connects with Shiri’s family through the sounds of the ocean waves in Sydney.