Monday 2 August 2010

The weekend paper saw the announcement of the Age Book of the Year shortlist.

In the fiction category, Cate Kennedy’s debut novel The World Beneath got the nod as it “cleverly plays with the challenges of being a parent as well as a citizen” while recent visitor Peter Carey’s re-imagining of de Tocqueville Parrot and Olivier in America also caught the judges' eye. The newcomer on the list is GL Osborne (aka Glenys Osborne) for her debut novel Come Inside though she’s no stranger to Age readers as she was runner-up in the Age Short Story Competition in both 2007 and 2008.

In non fiction, Ann Summers' The Lost Mother was shortlisted for as it was a “plangent and powerful book” re-discovering Melbourne artist Constance Stokes. Maria Tumarkind journeys back to the Russia she remembers in Otherland, while Ros Moriaty in Listening to Country looks closer to home examining her marriage to John Moriaty and her acceptance into the Yanyuwa clan in a book which judges felt “laid bare the ugly wreckage of the contemporary Aboriginal reality.”

In poetry Les Murray’s Taller When Prone got a guernsey, as did the prolific Ken Bolton who was shortlisted for A Whistled Bit of Bop though he was also in contention for his verse novel The Circus.

Winners will read from their work at a special event at the Melbourne Writers Festival.

Novelist Anne Rice posted a message on her Facebook page last week saying “I quit being a Christian.”

Best known for her Vampire Chronicles series, Rice’s reasons for leaving the church are not so much spiritual as secular. She used her Facebook status to directly tell her fans, “I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of …Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.”

Rice returned to Catholicism in 1998 after leaving the church when she was 18 years old. While there has been criticism from the religious press, Michael Rowe at the Huffington Post believes she has never been more of a Christian. He writes, “The undeniable fact is that the decision of this sensitive, passionate, and devout woman to leave Christianity is one that Christ himself would likely understand, even applaud.”