Romance Writers of Australia have announced the winners of the Ruby Awards, the 2023 Romantic Book of the Year Awards.
The winners are:
Romantic elements – The Library at Wagtail Ridge by Janet Gover
Romantic suspense – Jackson by Nyssa Kathryn
Historical romance – Under The Dark Moon by Susanne Bellamy
Contemporary short – Hometown Cowboy by Dakota Harrison
Contemporary long – Larapinta by Annie Seaton
Novella – The Portrait Sitting by Alivia Fleur
Speculative fiction – Kingdom of Chains by Tanya Bird
The winners were announced at the RWA annual conference during the gala dinner on 12 August. The Ruby Awards are for novels and novellas published by Australian or New Zealand authors in the previous year.
ABOUT ROMANCE WRITERS AUSTRALIA
In August 1991 an historic meeting of eight women took place in Sydney – a meeting that gave birth to Romance Writers of Australia.
Although we began with only eight members, we now support over 700 members and our membership includes writers from Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, the United States and the United Kingdom. RWA has become internationally recognised and respected by both category and mainstream publishers of romance.
The core elements of our mission statement have remained the same since 1991, with a small change recently to show our commitment to supporting all of our members, from all walks of life:
to promote excellence in romantic fiction, to help aspiring writers become published and published authors to maintain and establish their careers, to foster a safe, equitable, inclusive and diverse community, and to provide continuing support for romance writers – whatever their genre – within the romance publishing industry.
FROM THE ROMANCE WRITERS OF AUSTRALIA
Somewhere very close to you, we’re writing romance novels.
You might not see us at first glance. We writers are, by nature, usually quite solitary and introverted. But we’re there. We promise. Just look a little closer.
We’re enjoying a cup of tea and writing in a notebook next to the crisp Western Australian coast. We’re in a camping chair with a glass of wine, tapping away on a laptop in front of a caravan in the sunburnt Northern Territory outback, or taking inspirational photos in the depths of the Tasmanian bush.
We’re writing during lunch breaks from our day jobs, looking out of our high-rise offices at the bustling center of the Melbourne CBD. We’re on a park bench making notes in our phone gazing at the majestic Sydney Harbour Bridge.
We’re in the front seats of our cars with our iPads while we support our children at sporting events in Queensland, and dreaming up plot ideas while we chug along on a vineyard tour bus in South Australia. Some of us are Australians at heart or away from home, living in far-off lands.
We’re parents, grandparents, children, and siblings. We’re hairdressers, lawyers, teachers, mechanics, HR specialists, health professionals and farmers. We come from a range of cultural backgrounds, and our journeys to becoming writers and published authors are as diverse and multi-faceted as we are. But as different as we are, we all have one thing in common.
We love to write romance.
