‘A tale of strength’: Veronica Gorrie wins Australia’s richest literary prize for police memoir

A Gunai/Kurnai woman who spent a decade working as a police officer has won Australia’s richest literary prize, for her “powerful” memoir detailing her experiences with racism and domestic violence.

Veronica Gorrie, who worked in the Victorian and Queensland police forces, collected the $100,000 Victorian prize for literature at the Victorian Premier’s literary awards for her book Black and Blue: A Memoir of Racism and Resilience.

The memoir, which was selected by Guardian Australia as one of the top 25 Australian books of 2021, also won the $25,000 category for Indigenous writing.

Accepting the award on Thursday night, Gorrie said “truly wasn’t expecting this … I truly don’t feel like I deserve it.”

She used her speech to appeal to the Victorian state government to raise the age of criminal responsibility.

“No child should be locked up. It breaks my heart to know that it’s kids as young as 10 caged up right now without their family,” she said.

The Melbourne-based writer Melissa Manning won the fiction category for her debut Smokehouse, a collection on interlinked stories set in her birthplace of southern Tasmania.

Announcing the winners at Melbourne’s The Wheeler Centre on Thursday, Victoria’s creative industries minister, Danny Pearson, said the awards celebrated emerging artists as well as established writers.

“The winning works tell stories that are urgent, eye-opening, poignant and powerful, and reflect the extraordinary talent we have here in Victoria and across the country,” he said.

Gorrie’s Black and Blue documents her childhood in Bung Yarnda (Lake Tyers) in eastern Victoria and her early adult life as a struggling single mother and conflicted rookie cop.

The book confronts corruption, racism, domestic violence and tackles a number of failures in Australian policing history, including the notorious 2004 Palm Island death in custody of Cameron Doomadgee, which fuelled a series of riots and ultimately led to a $30m class action settlement to victims 14 years later.

Gorrie, who joined the police force in order to break the cycle of fear that law enforcement authorities had instilled in her family for generations, was medically discharged from the force in 2011.

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The prize judges praised Gorrie for her simple yet captivating style of storytelling.

“Free from pretension and condescension, through telling her story Gorrie challenges the reader to ask what they can do in their personal and professional lives to confront racism in all its guises,” the judges wrote.

“The work is a demonstrated tale of strength, resilience and humour in settings where none of those attributes would normally exist.”

The judges described Manning’s winning collection Smokehouse as “atmospheric, mesmerising stories by an incredibly skilled writer”.

“Manning has created an entire world in this small Tasmanian town; a place glistening with pathos, empathy and the essence of human connection,” the judges said.

“With an innovative structure, perfectly spare prose, and great emotional weight, Smokehouse is a celebration of ordinary lives made extraordinary.”

The non-fiction prize went to the western Sydney artist, lawyer and women’s rights advocate Amani Haydar for her personal account of domestic violence, The Mother Wound.

In 2015 Haydar’s mother was stabbed to death by the writer’s father. Judges described The Mother Wound as a heroic and critical portrayal of a “diasporic patriarchal cultural milieu as it intersects with a broader Australian patriarchal culture and legal system”.

Dylan Van Den Berg, a Palawa writer from north-east Tasmania, won the drama prize for his play Milk, and the Victorian poet Maria Takolander won for her collection of poetry Trigger Warning. The prize for young adult writing was won by Felicity Castagna for her novel Girls in Boys’ Cars.

The category winners each take home $25,000.