Local writers Brandy Nalani McDougall and Susan Scott have won the Elliot Cades Awards for Literature this year, considered the most prestigious literary honor in Hawaii.

McDougall is the current Poet Laureate of Hawaii and author of “‘Aina Hanau: Birth Land and The Salt-Wind: Ka Makani Pa‘akai.” An associate professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, she also wrote “Finding Meaning: Kaona and Contemporary Hawaiian Literature.”

Scott wrote the weekly OceanWatch column for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and later the Honolulu Star- Advertiser from 1987 to 2020. She is the author and co-author of nine books about nature in Hawaii, and wrote “Call Me Captain, A Memoir of a Woman at Sea.” In 2020, Scott helped revise the seventh edition of the Hawaii Audubon Society’s book, “Hawai‘i’s Birds.”

The Hawai‘i Literary Arts Council also announced that Joy Kobayashi-Cintron, managing editor of Bamboo Ridge Press, and Wing Tek Luman, an award-winning poet and business manager of Bamboo Ridge, have been selected as this year’s recipients of the Loretta D. Petrie Award for years of outstanding service to the literary community.