Kate Challis RAKA Award

Call for entries

Applications are invited for the 2012 Kate Challis (RAKA) Award. This year the award will be given to an Indigenous playwright.

It will acknowledge the winning playwright for a play that has been produced professionally in the past five years.

This award for Indigenous creative artists has been made available through the generosity of Professor Emeritus Bernard Smith, eminent art and cultural historian. The prize was established to honour the memory of his late wife, Kate Challis, who was known in her youth as Ruth Adeney (RAKA is an acronym for the Ruth Adeney Koori Award).

In the Pintupi language RAKA means 'five' and in the Warlpiri RDAKA means 'hand', and both meanings are particularly apt for a prize to be awarded in a cycle of five years to individual artists—novelists, poets, musicians, painters and playwrights—whose 'hands' are the basic means of creativity.

The $25,000 award is offered in a five-year cycle with a different area of the arts—creative prose, drama, the visual arts, scriptwriting and poetry—being rewarded each year.

Previous winners of the award include Vivien Cleven, David Milroy for Windmill Baby, John Harding for Up the Road, Jane Harrison for Stolen, Dallas Winmar for Aliwa! and Jack Davis for No Sugar.

Click to download the application form (pdf) and eligibility requirements.

Applications close, Monday, 2 July 2012.

Go to the Australian Centre's website for further information.