Jasmine Seymour’s bilingual masterpiece Open Your Heart to Country has been shortlisted for the Indigenous Writers’ Prize in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.

Jasmine tells the story in two languages, English and Dharug. ‘Dharug language has been spoken by people who have lived across the Sydney Basin for thousands of years,’ she says. ‘Because no two languages ever follow exactly the same sentence patterns, and all cultures express concepts and ideas in their own way, we learn a lot about how different societies think when we listen to and learn new languages.’

 This is the third award that the book has been shortlisted and longlisted for.

The winners will be announced in Sydney at the NSW State Library on Monday 22 May.