Dr Gabriel Rolfe has won the 2026 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for his proposal for a book-length essay, Interior Station, described as ‘a genre-bending account of colonial violence and complicity’. The book centers around the 2019 killing of a young Warlpiri man by police in Yuendumu, a remote Aboriginal township in the Central Desert Region of Australia. One of the arresting officers was charged with murder and, following a highly publicized trial, was acquitted by a jury with no Aboriginal representation. After learning that he shares a family name with the officer, Rolfe sets out to trace his ancestral roots in the violent settlement of the Australian colonies, weaving fiction, memoir and literary criticism into an exploration of kinship and collective guilt.

Rolfe, who grew up in Australia, completed his doctoral studies earlier this year, with a thesis on academic labour in the work of Geoffrey Hill and J. H. Prynne. He was awarded the John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan Prize in 2022 for his poem/prose commentary ‘Nullarbor’, a meditation on the conflict of First Nations and Settler place names.

Link to further information:  https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/prizes/essay-prize