Nib Literary Awards 2023

2023 Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award winners announced

On Thursday 9 November at the Bondi Pavilion, Waverley Council announced that Alison Bashford, author and Professor at the University of New South Wales has been awarded the 2023 Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award for her book An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family (Allen Lane). Presented tonight by author and broadcaster James O’Loghlin, this year’s award offers Bashford a major prize of $40,000.

Now in its 22nd year, the Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award has evolved into one of Australia’s most prestigious and respected literary awards. The Nib Award’s independent, expert judging panel determines winners whose work best fulfills the criteria of high literary merit, quality research, readability and value to the community.

In An Intimate History of Evolution, Bashford tells the story of the Huxleys: the Victorian natural historian T. H. Huxley (“Darwin’s Bulldog”) and his grandson, the scientist, conservationist, and zoologist Julian Huxley. Between them, they communicated to the world the great modern story of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Bashford writes seamlessly about these omnivorous intellects together, almost as if they were a single man whose long, vital life bookended the colossal shifts in world history from the Age of Sail to the Space Age, and from colonial wars to world wars to the Cold War.

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