Gabriel Rolfe has won the 2026 Fitzcarraldo Editions / Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize for his proposal for Interior Station, a genre-bending account of colonial violence and complicity.

Am I that name? In 2019, a young Warlpiri-Luritja man, Kumanjayi Walker, was killed by police in Yuendumu, a remote Aboriginal township in the Central Desert Region of Australia. One of the arresting officers was charged with murder but, after a highly publicized trial that laid bare the ongoing genocide against First Nations people, was acquitted by a jury with no Aboriginal representation. After learning that he shares a family name with the officer, Gabriel Rolfe sets out to trace his ancestral roots in the violent settlement of the Australian colonies. In Interior Station: An Essay in Complicity, Rolfe draws on archival work and a complex family history to grapple with these connections, and with the sudden loss of his own mother in the wake of the trial, weaving memoir, essay and fiction into an exploration of colonial brutality, addiction and collective guilt.

Gabriel Rolfe is an Australian writer, teacher and researcher based in London. Until December 2025, he was a Vice-Chancellor’s Scholar at the University of Cambridge, where he wrote a doctoral thesis on the poetics of scholarship, while supervising undergraduates in their own work on postcolonial literature and ethics. His experimental prose work/poem, ‘Nullarbor’, a meditation on the conflict of First Nations and Settler languages, was awarded the John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan Prize in 2022.

The other shortlisted authors, chosen from 150 entries, are Emily Cooper for Relics, Douglas Gerrard for Mambesak, Orsod Malik for Qissas, Cara Marks for Soft-Bodied Monsters and Brendton Steele for Fabulous Muscles.

The Fitzcarraldo Editions / Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize is an annual competition for unpublished writers. Initially made possible by an Arts Council Grant in 2015, the prize awards £4,000 to the best proposal for a book-length essay (minimum 25,000 words) by a writer resident in the UK & Ireland who has yet to secure a publishing deal. In addition to the £4,000 prize, the winner has the opportunity to spend up to six weeks in residency at the Mahler & LeWitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy to work on their book.

The 2026 Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize was judged by Joanna Biggs, Brian Dillon, Max Porter, Joanna Kavenna and Jacques Testard. The judges were looking for essays that explore and expand the possibilities of the essay form, with no restrictions on theme or subject matter. The prize aims to find the best emerging essay writers and to give them a chance to develop and showcase their talent. It also provides the winner with their first experience of publishing a book, from the planning, research and writing of it through to the editing, production and publicity stages. Matthew McNaught won the inaugural prize in 2016 for Immanuel (published in 2022), followed by Katy Whitehead in 2017 for Adventures in Synthetic Fun, Joanna Pocock in 2018 with Surrender (published in 2019), Polly Barton in 2019 for Fifty Sounds (published in 2021), Thea Lenarduzzi for Dandelions in 2020 (published in 2022), Heather McCalden for The Observable Universe in 2021 (published in 2024), Marianne Brooker for Intervals in 2022 (published in 2024), Ghalya Saadawi for Between October and November in 2023 (publication forthcoming), Lucy Mercer for Afterlife in 2024 (publication forthcoming) and Sarai Kirshner for On Refusal in 2025 (publication forthcoming).

www.gabrielrolfe.com