Quentin Sprague shortlisted for the 2026 Prime Ministers Literary Award for Non-Fiction

Congratulations to Quentin Sprague, ANU Drill Hall Gallery Hassell Writers Fellow, who has been shortlisted for the 2026 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Sprague, winner of the 2021 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, for his book The Stranger Artist: Life at the Edge of Kimberley Painting, has been shortlisted for his collection of essays What Artists See, published in 2025. 

What Artists See  

Quentin Sprague 
Monash University Publishing 

A luminous collection of essays on art, obsession and creativity from one of Australia’s best critics. 

Why do we revere the figure of the artist? Is the drive to create an innate human instinct or a form of compulsion? Is the provocateur more lauded than the realist? Why do artists do what they do, day after day, in a display of discipline and will? 

The twelve essays in this collection offer glimpses into the lives of some of Australia’s best contemporary artists, exploring the impetus for creativity and the role of art in making meaning. Tied together by an enduring curiosity for how artists practice, what motivates them, what confounds them and what compels them to keep creating, these pieces span the islands of Carpentaria to suburban Perth, the streets of Malaysia to the deserts of the Northern Territory. What emerges is art as an act of wilful vision: of alternative ways of seeing that illuminate the otherwise invisible.

About the author 

Quentin Sprague is the author of The Stranger Artist, which won the 2021 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Nonfiction, and a monograph on the late Australian painter Ken Whisson. His art criticism appears widely, including regularly in The Monthly, as well as in monographs and exhibition catalogues published by the National Gallery of Victoria, Monash University Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. He has worked variously as a curator, an academic, an art coordinator and an artist, and lives in Canberra, on Ngunnawal Country. 

Judges’ comments

What Artists See is as meticulously researched and keenly analytical as it is formally playful. There is a sense that each essay in this collection takes the shape that its material demands of it, and that Sprague’s approach displays the kind of artistry that he interrogates within his subjects. Some of these essays are biographical, while others are relational; some are strikingly intimate, while others are dispassionate in their telling. 

The twelve essays in What Artists See discuss the lives, works, practices and enduring obsessions of twelve contemporary artists, as well as their relationships to place, to the art world and its institutions and to each other. They are guided always by Sprague’s sustained curiosity and driven by writing that is richly textured and beautifully lyrical. It takes great skill to translate visual art into language in a way that is evocative and energetic enough to capture something of the movement and impact of the artwork, and What Artists See displays this in spades. Sprague’s essays, moreover, are as engaging as they are intellectually rigorous. This is a work of great heart, beautiful craftsmanship and big ideas.

From: https://creative.gov.au/news-events/events/prime-ministers-literary-awards

Under Drill Hall Gallery Publishing, the Hassall Writers Fellowship aims to produce monographs of significant Australian artists, not currently recognised by major institutions — works which Hassall Fellow Quentin Sprague says fill a crucial gap in the recognition of mid to late career practice, meeting a rare opportunity in Australia by placing the artist’s work in its historic context through long-form writing.