The Kate Challis RAKA Award is an arts award worth A$20,000, awarded annually by the University of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia to Indigenous Australian creative artists. It is awarded in a five-year cycle, each year in a different area of the arts: creative prose, drama, the visual arts, script-writing (screenplay or for theatre) and poetry. [1]
The award is sponsored by Professor Emeritius Bernard Smith, art and cultural historian, in honour his late wife, Kate Challis, who was earlier known as Ruth Adeney. "RAKA" is an acronym for "Ruth Adeney Koori Award". In the Pintupi language, "raka" means "five", and in Warlpiri, "rdaka" means "hand". [1]
It has been awarded since 1991.
Past winners include: [2]
Catherine Elizabeth Grenville is an Australian author. She has published fifteen books, including fiction, non-fiction, biography, and books about the writing process. In 2001, she won the Orange Prize for The Idea of Perfection, and in 2006 she won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for The Secret River. The Secret River was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
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Bernard William Smith was an Australian art historian, art critic and academic, considered the founding father of Australian art history, and one of the country's most important thinkers. His book Place, Taste and Tradition: a Study of Australian Art Since 1788 is a key text in Australian art history, and influence on Robert Hughes. Smith was associated with the Communist Party of Australia, and after leaving the party remained a prominent left-wing intellectual and Marxist thinker. Following the death of his wife in 1989, he sold much of their art collection to establish the Kate Challis RAKA, one of the first prizes in the country for Indigenous artists and writers.
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