Wednesday 29 September 2010

MC Casey Bennetto kicked off the night in song with a ballad to the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards that struck a chord with the audience. And before the awards even began, Chrissy Sharp announced the Unpublished Manuscript Fellowship, which gives all the shortlisted authors from the Unpublished Manuscript by an Emerging Victorian Writer prize the chance to write for 3 months at the Wheeler Centre with a stipend courtesy of the Readings Foundation.

Then the prizes were awarded with winner of the Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript by an Emerging Victorian Writer going to Peggy Frew who thanked her parents for reading to her. Winner of the Louis Esson Prize for Drama Tom Holloway was also emotional as he talked about many of the nominees for this year’s prize were emerging writers. Liz Jackson, co-recipient of the John Curtain Prize for Journalism, made an impassioned call for justice on behalf of the subject of her Four Corners report, “Who Killed Mr Ward?”.

It was left to winner of the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, Peter Temple, to bring the house down with his acceptance speech that had many speculating on Temple doing a Comedy Festival show. He opened by saying he had a list of complaints, because “there had been too many thanks already”. He added that “everyone involved with this book was an impediment to it” and cheekily commented that his prize money should be exempt from tax because writing is like gambling with tax not paid unless you make a living on gambling. But he warmed to the evening saying the wine wasn’t bad and the entertainment so good “that next time Casey [Bennetto] present a night of entertainment and the writers simply meet in the laneway”.

Screenwriter and journalist David Simon has been awarded the 2010 MacArthur Genius Fellowship for his work on TV shows The Wire and New Orleans-based Treme.

Over the next five years Simon will receive US$500,000 to pursue his next project, giving him substantial creative freedom. Simon told USA Today “It makes it easier to go into the room with the network and argue against doing the usual thing in television.”

Joining Simon in the winner’s circle are over twenty other influential thinkers, researchers and artists including language preservationist Jessie Little Doe Bird, type designer Matthew Carter and theatre director David Cromer

But Simon isn’t being allowed to let the victory go to his head. As USA Today reports it: “The morning after his wife, best-selling novelist Laura Lippman, heard the news, she told him, ‘Hey Genius — you forgot to take the trash out last night.’”