Want a chance to win $50,000? Enter the 2016 Barbara Jefferis Award

With generous prize money up for grabs, the Barbara Jefferis Award is offered for the best novel that positively depicts females.

If you are an Australian author with a novel that fits the brief, now is your chance to enter!

From the press release:

Coinciding with International Women's Day, the Australian Society of Authors (ASA) is delighted to announce that entries for the Barbara Jefferis Award 2016 are now open. This year, the prize pool for the award includes $50,000 for the winner and $1000 each for the five runners up.

Juliet Rogers, CEO of the ASA, said, “The ASA is very pleased to once again present this important literary award in honour of Barbara Jefferis, a distinguished author, supporter of the rights of women, and vigorous advocate for the ASA.”

The Barbara Jefferis Award is for “the best novel written by an Australian author that depicts women and girls in a positive way or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in society”. It was established as a result of a bequest from Barbara Jefferis' husband, ABC film critic John Hinde.

Barbara Jefferis was a feminist, a founding member of the Australian Society of Authors, its first woman President and, in the words of Thomas Keneally, “a rare being amongst authors, being both a fine writer but also organisationally gifted. She was a professional and internationally published writer long before most of us dreamed of such things.”

Previous winners of the Award include Anna Funder (All That I Am), GL Osborne (Come Inside), Kristina Olsson (The China Garden), Helen Garner (The Spare Room), Rhyll McMaster (Feather Man), Margo Lanagan (Sea Hearts) and Fiona McFarlane (The Night Guest).

The ASA will accept digital-only publications and self-published titles with mainstream distribution, to reflect changes in the publishing industry. The Award is for a novel first published and distributed in English in book form for the period of 1 January 2014 – 31 December 2015.

Applications close Monday 2 May 2016, with the winner announced in October 2016.

For more information, visit the ASA website