Photo: Hasib Hourani with his award-winning book rock flight at the 2025 NSW Literary Awards. Credit: Hasib Hourani / Instagram
The NSW Literary Awards 2025, held on Monday 19 May 2025 at the State Library of NSW, recognised outstanding contributions to Australian literature, awarding $360,000 across 14 categories.
The awards recognise the best Australian writers, including novelists, poets, playwrights, scriptwriters and authors of non-fiction and children’s books.
One of the standout honours of the evening went to Hasib Hourani, a Lebanese-Palestinian poet and arts worker based on Wangal Country in Sydney, who won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry for his debut book rock flight (Giramondo, 2024).
Judges praised the collection as “a rendering of crimes, a guide for survival, and a recognition of the disruptive potential of paper, voice and stone.”
Formally inventive and politically urgent, rock flight blends free verse, erasure, typographical experimentation and lyric essay to explore what it means to be “born stateless” and “made refugees by inheritance.”
Hourani’s writing reflects a deep engagement with both the personal and structural realities of displacement, creating what the judges called “a multilayered call to action.”
“This masterful long poem shows astonishing control over a wide variety of formal and technical elements,” they wrote. “The writing locates the human and immediate in events that have been distorted, ignored or manipulated by government and media.”
A 2020 recipient of The Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter Scheme, Hourani’s work has been published in Meanjin, Overland, Australian Poetry and Cordite.
Hourani’s win is particularly poignant in a year marked by ongoing genocide in Gaza where the death toll has passed 53,000 men, women and children. His voice, shaped by the experience of being “born stateless,” speaks urgently to both personal grief and collective resistance.
Other finalists in the 2025 awards reflected similarly rich and nuanced explorations of identity and community.
Jumaana Abdu
Jumaana Abdu was shortlisted for the Multicultural NSW Award for her debut novel Translations, a quiet, lyrical story about a woman and her daughter forging a new life in rural New South Wales after profound personal loss.
“There is an elegant and quiet power in Abdu’s tale,” wrote the judges. “Translations is about the connective tissue of relationships… Her writing is elevated and evocative.”
Samah Sabawi
Samah Sabawi was shortlisted for her intergenerational memoir Cactus Pear For My Beloved — a sweeping narrative that follows her family’s journey from British-ruled Palestine to Redland Bay, Queensland. The book is a tribute to culture, land, memory and resistance.
“A luminous and lyrical tribute to family, exile and resistance, Cactus Pear For My Beloved traces a century of Palestinian displacement through intimate storytelling.” the judges said, “Sabawi’s prose is infused with memory and longing, crafting a powerful meditation on love, loss and the enduring connection to land and identity.”
Abbas El-Zein
In the nonfiction category, Abbas El-Zein was shortlisted for the Douglas Stewart Prize for Bullet, Paper, Rock, a vivid memoir that weaves personal history with political upheaval, from 1970s Beirut to the Arab Spring and beyond.
“El-Zein’s writing is a dazzling combination of precision and playfulness,” noted the panel. “It shimmers, shapeshifts and beckons the reader to follow.”
Comments