The winners of the 2025 Paul Lowin Prize winners have been announced. Lou Bennett and Paul Stanhope have won the Song Cycle Prize for nyilamum song cycles, and James Ledger has won the Orchestral Prize for The Last Thing.

Presented by the Australian Music Centre in Sydney, the ceremony also included the annual Peggy Glanville-Hicks Address, which was delivered by harpist and Australian Music Centre Chair Marshall McGuire.

nyilamum song cycles at the 2025 Adelaide Festival. Photo by Tony Lewis

Structured through six songs, Bennett and Stanhope’s nyilamum song cycles explores a story shared to Bennett by her family, also traced in her earlier work jaara nyilamam. It concerns the body of a baby girl discovered in a felled tree in Jaara Jharr by a farmer, wrapped in a Djukum Djukum (possum skin cloak). Passed on to the State Museum in Melbourne, the body was kept in a steel drawer for 99 years before Bennett’s family repatriated her remains. In nyilamum song cycles, a vocalist and strings become the voice of Country, guiding the child home to rest in Jaara Jharr as the sun rises and sets.

The...