Writer awards celebrate talent in face of discrimination

Australian Jewish writers report suffering discrimination since October 7. Award winners at the second annual Shalom Collective Australian Jewish Writers Awards, held on Sunday, told the audience they had experienced difficulty closing publishing deals. In some cases, booksellers had refused to restock sold-out books with Jewish themes.

Writers made the disclosures while in discussionn with Shalom Collective’s program director Alon Meltzer about the challenges of using their various genres to tell Jewish stories to larger audiences.

Meltzer described the 2025 awards as an opportunity to "celebrate the talent in our community".

The Jewish Independent Young Jewish Writers Award ($5,000) went to self-taught chef Ellie Bouhadana for her enticing cookbook, Ellie’s Table: Food from Memory and Food from Home.

The Melbourne-based chef, who has an Instagram following of almost 58,000, was the former chef at Hope St Radio. Her cookbook taps into the bold flavours of her Jewish heritage, bringing delicious recipes to life from her father’s Moroccan background and her mother’s Ashkenazi roots.

The award is open to works of fiction and non-fiction on Jewish subjects by authors across Australia aged 18 to 40. Last year’s inaugural award was won by author and poet Anna Jacobson for her illustrated poetry collection Anxious in a Sweet Store. Jacobson was also shortlisted this year for How to Knit a Human: A Memoir.