Davitt Award

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DAVITT AWARDS

Details of the 2007 Davitt Awards Winners

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Sisters in Crime Australia is proud to sponsor a national crime writing award – The Davitt – awarded for the best crime novel by an Australian woman published in book form in Australia in the previous year. There are three categories to the Davitt:

the best adult novel
the best young fiction book
and the Reader's Choice award, voted by members of Sisters in Crime.
The Davitt has been awarded in 2001, 2002 , 2003, 2004.,2005 and 2006

Sisters in Crime named the award The Davitt in honour of Ellen Davitt (1812-1879) who wrote Australia’s first mystery novel, Force and Fraud in 1865. Her achievement is extraordinary when it is considered that Wilke’s Collins’ The Woman in White, generally regarded as the first full-length mystery novel, was published only in 1860. Force and Fraud was serialised in the Australian Journal, starting with its very first issue. It begins with a murder and ends with its solution, with red herrings, blackmail, and a dramatic court scene in between:

Born in Yorkshire, Ellen married teacher Arthur Davitt, and emigrated to Australia in 1854. The pair were powerful figures in colonial education and Ellen was also a public lecturer and an exhibited artist. She is vilified in the Australian Dictionary of Biography as having ‘overbearing self-esteem’ (translation: she was confident, a fighter, and not afraid of male authority). Davitt died in poverty, of cancer.

In 1993, Sisters in Crime Australia placed a plaque on her unmarked grave in Geelong cemetery; the same year Force and Fraud was reprinted by Mulini Press. A distant relative, English author Joanna Trollope, unveiled the plaque and spoke movingly about her contribution to Australian literature.