Aspiring Australian writers lament the fact that few publishers are accepting unsolicited fiction manuscripts. Those that do accept them lament the fact that they are inundated by around a thousand submissions each year. What’s the solution? Increasingly, it seems, awards for unpublished work with publication as the prize. Writers know their work will at least be looked at; publishers can outsource to judges the culling of what would otherwise be their slush pile. It is no longer just the 24-year-old Vogel Award, with its promise of publication by Allen & Unwin. State-based awards now guarantee publication by UQP, FACP and Wakefield Press.

Both of these new novels bear the weight of expectation that attaches to winning such an award: Drown Them in the Sea was one of two winners of the 2003 The Australian / Vogel Literary Award; Jillian Watkinson’s The Hanging Tree follows her first novel, The Architect (2000), which won the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award in 2002 for the best manuscript by an emerging Queensland writer.