We don’t exactly judge a book by its cover here at the Wheeler Centre … but we do appreciate a good-looking book cover, nonetheless.
The Australian Publishers' Association celebrates the best in Australian cover design once a year, with the APA Design Awards. This year’s winners were announced last week; here’s some of them.
Love Lace: Powerhouse Museum International Lace Award, Powerhouse Publishing, designed by Toko.
The Art of Pasta, Lucio Galletto & David Dale, Penguin, designed by Daniel New, artist Luke Sciberras.
Hannah Robinson for And Red Galoshes, pictured, Glenda Millard & Jonathan Bentley, Hardie Grant; The Elegant Art of Falling Apart, Jessica Jones, Hachette; Wide Open Road, Tony Davis, ABC Books; and Chasing Odysseus, S.D. Gentill, Pantera Press.
August, Bernard Beckett, Text, designed by W.H. Chong and Susan Miller.
Love in the Years of Lunacy, Mandy Sayer, A&U, designed by Emily O'Neill.
Hiroshima Nagasaki, Paul Ham, HarperCollins, designed by Matt Stanton and HarperCollins Design Studio.
Foal’s Bread, Gillian Mears, A&U, designed by Sandy Cull, gogoGinko, and Yolande Gray.
The Flight Attendant’s Shoe, Prudence Black, NewSouth, designed by Di Quick.
Alaska, Sue Saliba, Penguin, designed by Allison Colpoys.
Ben & Duck, Sara Acton, Scholastic, designed by Nicole Stofberg.
Star League 1: Lights, Camera, Action Hero!, H.J. Harper, Random House, designed by Nahum Ziersch and Astred Hicks, Design Cherry.
The full list of winners is available at Bookseller and Publisher online.
In the first of a new event series on the art of book design, multi-award-winning cover designer W.H. Chong will present an illustrated talk on how he turned much-loved Australian classics into art for Text Publishing’s Australian Classics series.
Beautiful Books: How To Design an Australian Classic with W.H. Chong will be held at the Wheeler Centre on Thursday 31 May at 6.15pm. Free, but please book.
Arts lovers around Australia have now digested the news that brand new Queensland premier Campbell Newman has axed the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards, as a cost-cutting measure.
The move, which comes during our National Year of Reading, will save the Queensland government just $244,000; the state’s debt is $85 billion.
‘The most important ramification of Newman’s decision is a symbolic one,’ says the Australian’s literary editor, Stephen Romei. ‘It says this is a government that doesn’t care about books, or writing, or reading. By extension, it says this is a government that thinks the average Queenslander feels the same. I know this is not true. Certainly, it’s a strange decision to make in Australia’s National Year of Reading.’
‘As a decision it comes with an enormous amount of baggage,’ says author Matthew Condon, editor of the Courier Mail’s weekend magazine, Q. ‘It comes with the memory of the cultural vacuum and, in turn, the national laughing-stock that vacuum had made of Queensland more than 25 years ago.’
‘Being an author who has been shortlisted for a premier’s award in the past, I know the most important thing is the kudos of the nomination,’ says fellow Queensland author Krissy Kneen. ‘The prize money is a bonus but it’s not what it’s all about.’
Matthew Condon and Krissy Kneen have teamed up, with the support of Brisbane independent bookshop Avid Reader and other industry stakeholders, to establish the Queensland Literary Awards.
‘We’re going to do this as a grassroots movement,’ said Kneen. ‘We are in the process of contacting all the current judges to make sure they are still keen to judge the awards on a voluntary basis.’
The awards will attempt to reward and recognise established and emerging writers across the 14 original categories which constituted previous Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards, at a ceremony to be held later in 2012. The organisers hope winners can be announced on September 6, the first day of the Brisbane Writers Festival.
Avid Reader will be the centre for publishers and writers to send their awards submissions, which will close on 6 May.
Bookshop owner Fiona Stager told the Australian that the literary awards added ‘far greater value to Queensland’s collective culture than what they cost’.
Avid Reader has also actively supported the movement for The Stella Prize, a national prize to reward Australian women’s writing.
‘In the 90s, when just about every state seemed to have [premier’s literary awards] and we didn’t, it was another contributor to the perception that we were a backwater that hadn’t shifted since the mid-20th century,’ writes Brisbane author Nick Earls on his blog. ‘Peter Beattie’s introduction of the awards in 1999 wasn’t some bizarre act of state largesse – it merely brought us in line with the rest of the country.’
Beattie himself says that the whole purpose of the awards was to try to create a ‘creative culture’ within Queensland.
‘It’s all part of building a culture where creative people are welcome and encouraged – creative industries are one of the fastest-growing parts of the world economy, and this isn’t just about the money, it’s about building up the sort of environment where scientists, game operators, these sorts of people, feel welcome.’
Amanda Lohrey, winner of the fiction prize last year for Reading Madame Bovary, told the Australian that the axing was ‘punitive’.
‘Given the very poor public relations and the damage to the Queensland brand, you would also have to wonder at a government who in the first week found it a priority. That seems to suggest that it is a blow in some sort of culture war. In one gesture they head back to the 50s.’
One of the awards under the former umbrella of the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards was the David Unaipon Award for the Best Indigenous Manuscript, the only prize of its kind.
‘It’s important that people understand that the Unaipon award was devised by UQP,’ said University of Queensland Press chief executive officer Greg Bain. ‘In the early 2000s it was brought under the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards which give it a lot more prominence but it’s actually not theirs to axe,’ he said.
Previous winners of the Unaipon Award include Doris Pilkington, for Caprice, the prequel to The Rabbit-Proof Fence, Larissa Behrendt, for her first novel, Home, and Tara June Winch, for her short-story collection Swallow the Air.
Expressing her disappointment about the axing of the awards, Winch said her win ‘completely changed’ her life.
Playwright Sam Watson says the David Unapion category of the awards was the only recognition for indigenous writers. ‘If we lose the Unaipon award then our writers, our storytellers, our performers will all slip back into the darkness and they will never come forward again.’
‘The prize money may come from the Premier’s Department but the award comes from UQP,’ said Greg Bain. ‘We are pledging to continue publishing the winner of the Unaipon award each year as well as the winner of the emerging Queensland author category.’
Emerging Mackay author Sharon Johnston has started a petition calling on Campbell Newman to reinstate the awards on Change.org, which has collected nearly 3000 signatures so far.
Christos Tsiolkas, author of The Slap, has been nominated for a Bad Sex Award by the Literary Review. It’s the 19th year the awards have been held to celebrate the worst depictions of sexual activity in literature. Nominated for the award is a passage from Dead Europe, Tsiolkas' third novel, which has been published in the United Kingdom this year (along with Tsiolkas' first book, Loaded) on the back of the success of The Slap.
It’s hardly a slap in the face for the Melbourne writer – Dead Europe has received some admiring reviews, and at any rate there’s always been something, ahem, tongue-in-cheek about the award. Indeed, Tsiolkas is in august company. Haruki Murakami is a nominee, as is Stephen King. Extracts of all the nominees are available on the Guardian website, which on its Woman’s Blog page asks the question, why are men so bad at writing sex?
“[A]lthough the Man Booker can change a writer’s life, a prize is only a prize,” Booker Prize judge Gaby Wood has written in the Telegraph. “It’s not an investigation, it’s not a work of criticism, and it’s not the result of common-or-garden enjoyment, either. There are all sorts of other lives books can have.”
The judge’s words seem to be a direct response to unprecedented criticism levelled at the Man Booker Prize this year. The prize, worth a little over A$75,000, is arguably the highest-profile English-language literary award. For what it’s worth, Julian Barnes took the honours this year, after having been thrice shortlisted, for his novel, The Sense of an Ending. According to Michael Wood in the London Review of Books, the novel, the chief theme of which is “Englishness”, is “the story of an obtuseness that generally cannot see the damage it does, and yet in a brief moment of illumination grasps the malevolence lurking in what it took to be its quiet life.”
The Booker’s profile is matched, as Guy Rundle points out on Crikey, by its idiosyncrasies. “Everything about the Booker is bizarre,” Rundle writes, “from its name – which fuses current sponsor the Man Group, with half of the original sponsor, Booker-McConnell – to the ever-changing judges, to the degree of anguished debate it draws about the state of the culture”. Much of the Booker anguish this year has been about an alleged dumbing-down of the award, following statements by the chief judgment, former British spy chief (and spy novelist) Stella Riminton, in which she stressed that the judges had prioritised “readable” novels in the shortlisting process: “"We want people to buy these books and read them, not buy them and admire them.”
Jeanette Winterson weighed in impressively on the debate in The Guardian. Under the headline, ‘Ignore the Booker brouhaha: readability is no test for literature’, she writes that the row “is a misunderstanding about literature and its purpose. We are nervous about anything that seems elitist or inaccessible, and we apologise for the arts in a way that we never do for science.”
According to Rundle, the dumbing-down began about a decade ago (and signals the death of “reflexive humanism”). But the Booker’s been odd ever since it was first awarded in 1969. The official website says the prize is awarded to “the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland.” Given the Commonwealth is an accident of history nowadays as peculiar as it is irrelevant (Mozambique, anyone?), it should be of no surprise that these two character traits are reflected in the Booker – and yet the table-thumping oddly persists. The Booker is a booster for British publishing (Barnes' publisher is printing an additional 25,000 extra copies of The Sense of an Ending as a result of his win) and, given the inwardness of US literary prizes, the English language – arguably the globe’s most fecund literary language – has hitherto lacked a truly all-encompassing literary prize.
No more, following news that a new prize, dubbed the Prize for Literature, will be set up to reward to reward “quality and ambition”. The prizemoney is still being raised, but an impressive phalanx of writers (including John Banville, Pat Barker, Nicole Krauss and David Mitchell) are reported to be backing the prize.
Last week we reported on the betting frenzy surrounding the lead-up to the announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The frontrunner was the Syrian poet Adonis, although there were serious pushes for Philip Roth and Bob Dylan too. In the end, the actual winner, announced on Thursday, surprised everyone. Swede Tomas Tranströmer, a psychologist by profession, known for the still, crystalline quality of his verse, is the first poet Nobel laureate since the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska won 15 years ago. Several of his titles are available in English, and – perhaps not entirely uncoincidentally – a new edition of his Collected Poems has only recently been published. In 1990, a stroke left him mute and able to use only one hand. A lifelong pianist, he continued to play the piano one-handed and will perform on the piano, instead of delivering the usual oration, when he accepts the prize in December.
The poet’s win has seen the hype machine kick into overdrive, delivering lavish panegyrics about a poet who, until last Thursday, was largely unknown outside Sweden. In the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks explains how the Nobel Prize for Literature works, reminding us along the way of “the essential silliness of the prize and our own foolishness at taking it seriously”. In a comparative review essay in the same publication, Helen Vendler finds parallels between the two most recent poet Nobel laureates, Tranströmer and Szymborska.
The annual game of shadows and mirrors that accompanies the October announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature is in full swing. The Millions, a US online literary magazine, has published ‘An Open Letter to the Swedish Academy’, practically begging that Philip Roth be granted the prize, currently worth in excess of A$1,000,000. The letter’s writer is Michael Bourne, a Brooklyn writer of fiction and literary journalism, who writes, “Can we please stop the nonsense and give Philip Roth a Nobel Prize for Literature before he dies?”
While the stature of Roth’s achievement is undeniable, his position as a writer of great prose isn’t beyond argument. Earlier this year, when Roth was granted the biennial Man Booker International prize at the Sydney Writers' Festival, Carmen Callil, one of the judges, quit over the decision, saying,“I don’t rate him as a writer at all, I made it clear that I wouldn’t have put him on the long list, so I was amazed when he stayed there. He was the only one I didn’t admire – all the others were fine.”
Detail of the Nobel Prize gold medal, featuring the profile of the Prize’s benefactor, Swedish tycoon Alfred Nobel
While the million-dollar purse and ‘lifetime achievement’ quality makes the Nobel Prize for Literature the world’s highest-profile literary award, like every other prize the Nobel has its fair share of eccentricities. Not least among them is the stipulation by the endowment’s original benefactor, dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel, that the prize be granted to a writer who has produced “in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. Precisely what an “ideal direction” might be is hard to define – Leo Tolstoy allegedly didn’t win a Nobel because his work wasn’t perceived as being “ideal” enough.
In a recent Guardian online podcast, Peter Englund, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, defined literary worth and cultural importance as the two most significant qualities in deciding on the Nobel winner. In the same interview, Englund acknowledges that European literature is disproportionately represented among Nobel winners, adding that this is a natural consequence of the fact that the Swedish academicians are most exposed to European literature. Englund rejects the charge that Nobels are occasionally awarded on the basis of positive discrimination and adds that the Academy tries to be more inclusive by commissioning special, secret translations of major works by significant authors writing in non-European languages. Many canonical authors, including Tolstoy, Chekhov, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov and Borges, are not on the list of winners, which instead features names that have fallen into complete oblivion, like the inaugural 1901 winner, Sully Prudhomme, who was praised at the time for his “poetic composition, which gives evidence of lofty idealism, artistic perfection and a rare combination of the qualities of both heart and intellect”.
There is no shortlist for the Nobel, but this in itself isn’t enough to dissuade publishers from re-releasing certain novels in the lead-up to the announcement and speculators from putting their hard-earned on the rumoured favourites. This year, the 81 year-old Syrian poet Adonis, the pen name of Ali Ahmad Said Asbar, is the odds-on favourite, not just because of his own achievements but also because of the events known as the Arabic Spring. “A combination of artistic excellence and social justice have often played well with the Nobel committee,” writes the LA Times blog, Jacket Copy.
Postscript: the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature.
Kim Scott’s novel That Deadman Dance took out the inaugural Victorian Prize for Literature last night at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards dinner. All five category VPLA category winners – also announced last night – were eligible for the prize.
The category winners were Scott for fiction, Cate Kennedy’s The Taste of River Water for poetry, Mark McKenna’s An Eye for Eternity for non-fiction, Patricia Cornelius' Do not go gentle… for drama and Cassandra Golds' The Three Loves of Persimmon for young adult fiction. Each category winner receives $25,000, while the winner of the Victorian Prize for Literature wins an additional $100,000, making it the richest literary prize in the country.
When accepting the prize, Kim Scott, whose novel about early relations between indigenous and settler Western Australians has already taken out this year’s Miles Franklin award, spoke of the importance of story-telling in bridging the gap between the Australian nation-state and the continent of Australia and its first peoples.
The Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards were announced last night – the same night as the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Among the many category winners were: Amanda Lohrey, who took out the Fiction Book Award for Reading Madame Bovary; Mark McKenna, whose biography of Manning Clark, An Eye for Eternity, took out the Non-Fiction Book Award (he also won the equivalent prize in the VPLA, making it two prizes in a night); and John Tranter’s Starlight took out the poetry category. Click here for a full list of winners.
The Queensland award winners were inadvertently released before the official announcement when a press release containing the winner’s names was sent to media outlets earlier yesterday. Many would have been impressed with Queensland Premier Anna Bligh’s response: a second press release apologising for the mishap included a quote from Oscar Wilde: “Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.”
Our awards wrap for today concludes with news of the release of the Booker Prize shortlist. The shortlisted books are: Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending; Carol Birch’s Jamrach’s Menagerie; Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers; Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues; Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English; and AD Miller’s Snowdrops. Surprises include the omissionof Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child. For more comment, see the Guardian’s wrap.
Congratulations to Fiona McGregor, whose third novel Indelible Ink was announced winner of The Age Book of the Year Award last night at the opening of the Melbourne Writers Festival. Indelible Ink also won the fiction category, while Jim Davidson’s biography of historian Keith Hancock took out the gong in the non-fiction category and John Tranter won the poetry award for Starlight: 150 Poems (more information). Congratulations to the winners and shortlisted writers.
An Irish author has, by dint of sheer chutzpah, managed a way to be nominated for a literary award before his book has been published. Two weekends ago, Julian Gough posted a plea for help on his website under the title, ‘Help save civilisation by reading a funny book’. Gough asked readers to read and review his forthcoming comic novel Jude in London for the Guardian’s annual Not the Booker Prize.
Publishers are usually understandably loathe to distribute copies of a book before its publication date for intellectual property reasons – which is where Gough’s “save the civilisation” angle came in. Gough claimed that by reading a copy of his book publication, readers would be undermining capitalism.
The Not the Booker Prize is, in Gough’s own words, “the most entertaining prize in the literary calendar; an annual online flame-war-slash-literary-debate that can be very helpful in drawing attention to unusual books. (The prize itself is a mug, worth about £1.50. But the glory is incalculable!)” The only catch is that, as Jude in London hasn’t been published yet and could only be shortlisted if nominated by a reader by last Wednesday. Gough offered to send readers a digital copy of his book. He asked them in return to write a 150-word review of the book before the deadline lapsed.
If Gough’s publisher had reservations about the stunt, they’ll have dissipated by now: it seems to worked a treat. Not only was Gough’s book nominated for the prize – it is now the clear frontrunner for the prize.
The Age has announced the shortlists for its Book of the Year prizes. The prizes will be awarded to books in three categories with $10,000 each (fiction, non-fiction and poetry) with an overall prize to be chosen from among the three, worth an additional $10,000.
The shortlists are:
Like Being a Wife, Catherine Harris (Vintage)
The Mary Smokes Boys, Patrick Holland (Transit Lounge)
Indelible Ink, Fiona McGregfor (Scribe)
Bright and Distant Shores, Dominic Smith (Allen & Unwin)
Bereft, Chris Womersely (Scribe)
Sydney, Delia Falconer (New South)
A Three-Cornered Life: The Historian W. K. Hancock, Jim Davidson (UNSW Press)
When It Rains, Maggie MacKellar (Vintage)
When Horse Became Saw, Anthony Macris (Viking)
The Many Worlds of R.H. Mathews: In Search of an Australian Anthropologist, Martin Thomas (Allen & Unwin)
Sly Mongose, Ken Bolton (Puncher &Wattmann)
Supermodernprayerbook, Susan Bradley Smith (Salt)
This Floating World, Libby Hart (5 Islands Press)
Porch Music, Cameron Lowe (Whitmore Press)
Starlight: 150 Poems, John Tranter (University of Queensland Press)
The winners will be announced at the opening event of the Melbourne Writers Festival, which will also feature a keynote address by US novelist Jonathan Franzen.
Today we finish our week-long series of reviews written by Victorian librarians of books shortlisted for the Premier’s 21. There are five categories, and we’ve published a different category every day. At an awards dinner on Tuesday 6 September the Premier will announce the winners of all five categories. One of these five titles will then be announced as the winner of the Victorian Prize for Literature.
Until then, we’re inviting you to explore all 21 titles. If you’ve read one or more of the titles, write us a review and vote for the title you’d most like to see win the overall prize. The title receiving the most votes will win the People’s Choice award.
Monday we began with reviews of the three poetry books shortlisted for the CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry. Tuesday saw the publication of reviews of the six novels shortlisted to win the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction. We continued on Wednesday with six reviews of non-fiction titles shortlisted to win the Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-Fiction. Yesterday, we published reviews of the titles shortlisted to win the Prize for Writing for Young Adults.
Today, Carnegie Library’s Rosemary Pullan looks at Sappho … in 9 fragments, South Yarra Library’s Michele Bence explores the “involving drama” that is Patricia Cornelius' Do not go gentle…, and the State Library’s Des Cowley reviews Raimondo Cortese’s Intimacy, describing it as “a play that explores the simple human connections we are able to make with others.”
All week, we’ve been publishing, category by category, reviews of titles shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. The reviews are by librarians from libraries across Victoria – perhaps the very librarian who checked out that book you borrowed last time you were at your local library.
Monday we began with reviews of the three poetry books shortlisted for the CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry. Tuesday saw the publication of reviews of the six novels shortlisted to win the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction. We continued on Wednesday with six reviews of non-fiction titles shortlisted to win the Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-Fiction.
We continue the series today with reviews of the titles shortlisted to win the Prize for Writing for Young Adults. Frankston Library’s Kimberley Rickard calls Doug MacLeod’s Life of a Teenage Body-Snatcher “cleverly written and humorous”; Geelong Library’s Maryanne Hyde thinks Cath Crowley’s Graffiti Moon “sure packs a big punch”; and St Kilda Library’s Linda Todd writes that, in The Three Loves of Persimmon, Cassandra Golds creates “a fantastical world where the poetry of flowers speak to the heart, where an ornamental talking cabbage called Rose is a true friend, and where pink scented envelopes arrive from beyond the grave.”
And, just as importantly, write us a review of your own and vote for the book you think best deserves to win the overall prize – the richest single literary prize in Australia.
We conclude the series tomorrow with reviews of the three titles shortlisted to win the Louis Esson Prize for Drama.
Today we continue our publication of reviews by librarians that began Monday with six reviews of the titles shortlisted to win the Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-Fiction. Check out what Roslyn Irons of Camberwell Library thought of Stephen Foster’s A Private Empire; why Louise Anderson of Preston Library thought Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender will challenge readers' preconceptions; why Moonee Ponds Library’s Letizia Mondello thinks Fiona Capp’s My Blood’s Country is such a fine tribute to Judith Wright; what impressed Sale library’s Marion Silk about Anna Krien’s Into the Woods; why Melbourne City Library’s Aimee Rhodes thought Tim Bonyhady’s Good Living Street was “impressive”; and why, in the view of Hastings Library’s Victoria Matthews, Mark McKenna’s An Eye for Eternity is a “major achievement”.
All week we’re publishing reviews by Victorian librarians of titles shortlisted for the Premier’s 21. The reviews will be published by category, and today we publish reviews of titles shortlisted to win the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction.
Read what Ballarat Library’s Tara Hossack wrote about Gail Jones' Five Bells (“I couldn’t put it down”); what Loueen Twyford from Wangaratta Library thought of Roger McDonald’s When Colts Ran (“a challenging yet rewarding read”); and what Box Hill Library’s Katie Norton thought of the central character in Rohan Wilson’s The Roving Party (“fascinatingly conflicted”). Yarra Plenty Library’s Blaise van Hecke dubs Dominic Smith’s Bright and Distant Shores “a yarn of epic proportions”; Williamstown Library’s Amanda Peckham calls Craig Sherborne’s Amateur Science of Love “an honest account of dishonesty”; and Jan Wilson from Mildura writes that Kim Scott, in That Deadman Dance, “captures the essence of the place so poetically and exactly that the reader can visualize with certainty the beauty of the untainted Australian bush”.
Tomorrow, we’ll publish librarians' reviews of titles shortlisted for the Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-Fiction.
Every day this week we’ll be publishing reviews of each of the Premier’s 21 titles shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. These reviews are not written by professional reviewers though – they’re written by librarians from across the state. Today, we’re publishing reviews of the three nominees for the CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry: Claire Potter’s Swallow, Libby Hart’s This Floating World and Cate Kennedy’s The Taste of River Water. The reviews have been written by Debra Trayler of Casey-Cardinia Libraries, Leonie Clark of Eastern Regional Libraries and Emma Bruty of Darebin Libraries, respectively.
If you’ve read any of the Premier’s 21 titles, we’d like to hear from you too: leave us a snapshot of what you thought of the book, or vote for the book you think should win the overall prize and it might just win the People’s Choice award on awards night, Tuesday, 6 September.
“To win book of the year after being a kid who had issues with reading and writing means maybe I’m not so bad at it,” Anh Do told ABC radio Tuesday. It was a quote reprinted in a report in The Age yesterday claiming that Do, author of the bestselling memoir The Happiest Refugee, wrote the book with the help of ghostwriter Michael Visontay. The memoir won three awards at the Australian Book Industry Awards earlier this week, including book of the year. Marie McCaskill, CEO of the Australian Publishers Association, is cited in the report as saying that ghostwritten books are eligible to win the awards.
In the report, Do explained the process of writing the memoir. Visontay conducted a series of interviews, the transcripts of which became the basis of the final manuscript, which was written by Do. Visontay wasn’t given an author credit but is listed in the book’s acknowledgments and is receiving a percentage of the royalties. The Age ran an editorial in the same issue citing Do’s story, among others, as a credit to the contribution refugees can make to society.
It isn’t often that an award-winning book is credited to more than one writer. There’s something about writing, perhaps convention or reader expectation, that demands a single creative source – even when it’s demonstrably not the case. In the case of autobiography, the lines between writer and subject have long been blurred. But it occurs in fiction too – in general fiction and in literary fiction (to borrow the distinction the Australian Booksellers Association makes in its award categories). Perhaps the most famous example is that of Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov and his wife Vera. In her biography, Vera, Stacy Schiff argued that there is strong evidence to conclude that Vera deserves some co-authoring credit for the work of her husband. Needless to say, she didn’t get it, but Vladimir did dedicate every book he published to her, and his preoccupation with duality, Schiff argues, may be attributable to Vera’s constant guiding presence.
The Booker Prize longlist for 2011 has been released. The judges chose books that include “one former Man Booker Prize winner; two previously shortlisted writers and one longlisted author; four first time novelists and three Canadian writers”. The longlist is:
Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape – Random House)
Sebastian Barry, On Canaan’s Side (Faber)
Carol Birch, Jamrach’s Menagerie (Canongate Books)
Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers (Granta)
Esi Edugyan, Half Blood Blues (Serpent’s Tail – Profile)
Yvvette Edwards, A Cupboard Full of Coats (Oneworld) – this title wasn’t reviewed by any national UK newspaper or magazine, one of four that “failed to make it on to the radar of newspaper literary editors”, according to The Guardian
Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child (Picador – Pan Macmillan) – the early favourite
Stephen Kelman, Pigeon English (Bloomsbury)
Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days (Seren Books)
A.D. Miller, Snowdrops (Atlantic)
Alison Pick, Far to Go (Headline Review)
Jane Rogers, The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press)
D.J. Taylor, Derby Day (Chatto & Windus – Random House)
The chair of judges, Stella Rimington, commented, “We are delighted by the quality and breadth of our longlist, which emerged from an impassioned discussion. The list ranges from the Wild West to multi-ethnic London via post-Cold War Moscow and Bucharest.”
Previously, The Guardian published a speculative longlist, of which only two made the actual longlist (the first two below). We thought we’d republish it because of what it says about the lotto-like nature of such awards.
Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child (“the great stylist tackles the whole of the 20th century in a disquisition on poetry and reputation”)
Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (“At 160 pages this is on the short side for Booker novel, but if Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam could do it …”)
Edward St Aubyn, At Last (“this final instalment brings the semi-autobiographical Melrose saga to an elegant conclusion”)
Ross Raisin, Waterline (“one of the most exciting new voices of the last few years forsakes his native Yorkshire for Glasgow in an extraordinary feat of ventriloquism”)
Belinda McKeon, Solace (“there are usually a few debuts on the list, and this is one of the most accomplished, set against the Irish financial crash”)
Ali Smith, There but for the (“all the usual playfulness, but is this novel mainstream enough for the Booker?”)
Paul Wilson, Visiting Angel (“Manchester-set care-home novel which may appeal to chair Stella Rimington as it turns into a thriller of sorts, though less of a "whodunnit?” than a “who is it?”)
Lloyd Jones, Hand Me Down World (“clever picaresque of an African woman in search of her child”)
Tahmima Anam, The Good Muslim (“unflinchingly political second instalment of a family saga set in Bangladesh)
Shehan Karunatilaka, Chinaman (“match-fixers, terrorists, dodgy government officials and everything you need to know about cricket in Sri Lanka”)
John Burnside, A Summer of Drowning (“mythmaking in the Arctic from a poet with a gift for fictional metaphor”)
Anne Enright, The Forgotten Waltz (“delicately written account of adultery set against the backdrop of Dublin’s property crash”)
Andrew Miller, Pure (“vivid characters, picturesque setting and grand themes on eve of the French Revolution”)
After announcing the shortlists for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards yesterday, today we’re publishing the judges' comments for each title. Click here to be taken to the VPLA page and click on a title to view the comments.
The judges of three of the categories provided us with summaries of their observations.
The judges for the Louis Esson Prize for Drama – Richard Watts (convenor), Wendy Lasica and Jason Whittaker – noted: “The 2011 Louis Esson Prize for Drama attracted 25 entries, ranging from works staged by mainstage companies and independent theatres to intimate radio dramas. The best entries told their stories imaginatively and originally, were intrinsically and uniquely theatrical, and boasted rich and full characters that leapt off the page into the mind of the reader. Many of the works under consideration were reflective, questioning perceptions of self and longing for another time – another life, when dreams still seemed possible. The three shortlisted scripts carry the weight of history yet connect with contemporary audiences in profound ways; all are propelled by strong, authentic voices that resonate in the here and now.
“The judges also wish to commend The Wild Duck by Simon Stone with Chris Ryan, after Henrik Ibsen (Belvoir Street Theatre). Stone’s recreation of The Wild Duck is as brutal as it is precise, stripping bare Ibsen’s narrative, couching its story in contemporary vernacular and behavioural mores, and revealing the stark cost of the quest for absolute truth.”
The judges for the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction – Matthia Dempsey (convenor), Stephen Armstrong and Tony Birch – noted: “In assessing the entries for this year’s Vance Palmer Award for Fiction, the judges were particularly impressed with the quality of the debut novels submitted. Two of these, The Amateur Science of Love (Craig Sherborne, Text) and The Roving Party (Rohan Wilson, Allen & Unwin), made it onto the judges’ shortlist, but the assurance and originality shown in novels such as Stephen Daisley’s Traitor (Text), Favel Parrett’s Past the Shallows (Hachette Australia), Corey Taylor’s Me and Mr Brooker (Text), John Tesarch’s The Philanthropist (Sleepers) and Meg Mundell’s Black Glass (Scribe), augur well for the future of Australian literary fiction.”
The judges for the Prize for Writing by Young Adults – Mike Shuttleworth (convenor), Leesa Lambert and Andrew McDonald – noted:
“The universe of young adult literature continues to expand in interesting and exciting ways. This year’s Victorian Premier’s Literary Award is an opportunity to assess some of these developments – in particular, those books that express and explore the specific aesthetic potential that writing for young people affords. This year, 68 titles were submitted to the award. The committee noted the continuing publication of nuanced realistic fiction, especially dealing with the intersection of identity, gender, family and community. Also evident is the emergence of urban fantasy. We applaud those authors whose work seeks to develop a unique voice and identity within the urban fantasy genre.
“A shortlist of just three titles cannot fully represent the developments and tensions within the broad field of Australian young adult fiction. We therefore note the following titles as important achievements in a year of quality writing and lament that that the shortlist is just that. Inspired by Charles Blackman’s paintings, The Golden Day by Ursula Dubosarsky beguiles readers with a haunting story of memory and loss. Scot Gardner’s chiseled writing charts the dramatic life of a marginalised young man in The Dead I Know. Rebecca Burton’s closely observed story of obsession and desire in Beyond Evie and Laura Buzo’s assured debut Good Oil point to writers with a serious future. Lili Wilkinson showed a light touch, exploiting the tropes of domestic crime fiction in A Pocketful of Eyes. Leanne Hall’s debut novel This is Shyness introduces a boldly imagined world of dark urban fantasy. Rebecca Lim’s impressive novel Mercy blurs a realistic world with a story of angels and romance. Marianne de Pierre’s novel Burn Bright also tells a dark, dramatic story with arresting literary skill.
“Final decisions were not in any way easy, however, the panel agreed warmly on three shortlisted three novels. Each of these novels takes risks with the form of storytelling, show exceptional control of the material, and in doing so challenge notions of what fiction for young people can be.”
The judges for the Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-Fiction were Robyn Annear (convenor), Damien Carrick, Monica Dux, Toni Jordan and Stuart Macintyre.
The judges for the CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry were Paul Kooperman (convenor), Bel Schenk and Alicia Sometimes.
The judges in these categories did not provide a summary of their observations, but did provide comments for each of the shortlisted titles.
The Age reports today on Anh Do’s awards win at last night’s Australian Booksellers' Association awards night. The report notes Do was named newcomer of the year, his memoir The Happiest Refugee (for which a Russell Crowe-backed movie has been mooted) was the industry’s book of the year. Do shared the biography of the year gong with Paul Kelly’s How to Make Gravy.
The ABA has two awards for novels, dividing them in idiosyncratic fashion between ‘literary fiction’ and ‘general fiction’. Chris Womersley’s Miles Franklin-shortlisted novel Bereft won the literary novel of the year award while with Kate Morton’s The Distant Hour won the general fiction award.
The Lloyd O'Neil award for outstanding service to the industry was won by pioneering food writer Margaret Fulton. Publishers Allen & Unwin and Scribe won the publisher of the year and small publisher of the year awards respectively.
Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu announced the long shortlist for the 2011 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, which make up the first Premier’s 21. The premier noted the work of the judges, who had the unenviable task of whittling 308 entries down into the final 21. Congratulations to all 308 authors, and especially to the 21 shortlisted writers.
(Click to watch video.)
Have you read Rohan Wilson’s bloodthirsty account of the ‘black wars’ in Tasmania, The Roving Party? Do you agree with Cordelia Fine’s take on the science of the sexes in Delusions of Gender? Are you still dreaming of Ireland after reading Libby Hart’s This Floating World? This year, as part of the Premier’s 21 campaign being held in conjunction with the 2011 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, we’re inviting you to vote on the book you think best deserves to win – and to tell us why.
Visit the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards page and check out the list of books shortlisted to win the five category prizes and the overall prize. If you’ve read some of them, vote for your favourite title, and better still you can let us know what you thought of the books you’ve read. The title receiving the most votes will win the People’s Choice award. The winners will be revealed at the awards dinner on Tuesday, 6 September, which members of the public are welcome to attend (click here for information and tickets).
Or else you might just find yourself inspired to head down to your local library, or your nearest bookstore, to procure yourself one or more of the shortlisted titles. We’re hoping you’ll read a one or more and leave a comment about what you thought. If you’re up for a real challenge, why not read every book in a single category, and making your own recommendation as to who should win the category prize? (Needless to say, it won’t sway the judges one little bit.)
So get reading – you’ve got six weeks!
The Victorian premier Ted Baillieu announced the shortlists for the 2011 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards this morning at the Wheeler Centre. In all, 21 books have been shortlisted across five categories. The winners of each category will receive $25,000 each, and the overall winner, chosen from among the five category winners, will win the Victorian Prize for Literature, which carries a purse of $100,000, making the overall prize Australia’s richest single literary prize. The winners will be announced at a ceremony on Tuesday, 6 September.
The $15,000 award for an Unpublished Manuscript will be presented to coincide with the Emerging Writers’ Festival in May 2012. The $20,000 biennial award for Indigenous Writing will be presented in September 2012 to coincide with Indigenous Literacy Day.
The shortlisted nominees are:
Hearty congratulations to the winners of this year’s Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, announced this morning. The winners in their respective categories are for fiction: Stephen Daisley, Traitor; non-fiction: Rod Moss, The Hard Light of Day; young adult fiction: Cath Crowley, Graffiti Moon; and for children’s fiction: Boori Monty Pryor and Jan Ormerod, Shake a Leg.
The prize in each category carries a tax-free purse of $80,000. Shortlisted authors receive $5000 each. Congratulations too to the shortlisted authors.
The Public Record Office of Victoria is administering this year’s Community History Awards, which previously were hosted by Information Victoria. Presented by the Royal Historical Society of Victoria, the awards “recognise the contributions made by Victorians to the preservation of Victoria’s heritage”.
Although books dominate the award winners' lists, winners also include CDs, museum exhibitions and, among last year’s winners, a local history tour and a tour of the Yarra river. Award categories (most of which have a cash prize of $2000) include best collaborative community work; best publication (commercial and community-based); best exhibition; best community research, registers and records; best walk or tour; and a judges’ discretionary prize (if appropriate). Last year’s overall winner was Jenny Davies' book on Flinders Street station, Beyond the Facade.
Western Australian novelist Kim Scott was named the winner of the 2011 Miles Franklin Award for his novel, That Deadman Dance. The award ceremony was hosted last night by the State Library of Victoria, the first time it has been held outside Sydney. Next year’s prize will be awarded in Brisbane.
Congratulations to Kim, and also to the other shortlisted nominees Chris Womersley and Roger McDonald, and for that matter to the writers on the longlist too. According to the judges, the novel is “[s]upple and accessible in style, generous in spirit and outlook, [and] a fascinating, powerful portrait of Australia’s earliest days.” Here is a quiver of reviews.
Some 50 to 70 books are submitted for consideration by the award’s panel of five judges every year just before Christmas. The five judges have three to four months to read the novels before they return to those “that have some aspect of them that just really sticks in your mind”, in the words of Mitchell Librarian Richard Neville. The judges whittle the entries to a longlist, then to a shortlist. And then, some years at least, they batten down the hatches.
Judging a major national literary prize is no easy task – just ask Carmen Callil, who recently quit the judging panel of the prestigious Man Booker International Prize after it was awarded to Philip Roth, a decision she disagreed with. Judges of the Booker Prize must read some 100 books between April and August – a mind-numbing five books a week, or a book every weekday. It raises the question, does this style of reading lend itself to discernment? In a 1998 essay on the delicacies of judging the Booker in Times Higher Education, Valentine Cunningham wrote, “Committees thrive, of course, on compromise, and some Booker winners can only have made it as every judge’s second choice. And every judge has some regrets.”
Dublin-born author Colum McCann has won the €100,000 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his sixth novel, Let the Great World Spin. According to the judges' citation, the novel, set in Manhattan (where the author now lives) in 1974, “explores the lives of its multiple participants, from the grieving housewife to the addicted artist, the unconventional cleric to the prostitute brought low by the law, through different and challenging forms of language, bringing each one to life in sometimes broken, sometimes elegant dialect.”
The win further entrenches the rise and rise of the multiple-point-of-view narrative mode. In recent years, accomplished novels such as Roberto Bolano’s Savage Detectives, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, among others, seem to have burst the potential of the novel wide open. It’s not a new form: James Joyce’s Ulysses does it to some degree, and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is a polished diamond of the form. It remains to be seen whether the multiple-point-of-view novel is a passing trend or whether it signals a fundamental change in a literary form that for half a millennium has been individualism’s most powerful voice. If so, it would beg an even more intriguing – and perhaps unanswerable – question: is the age of individualised subjectivity coming to an end?
The Lord Mayor’s Creative Writing Awards are being hosted by the Melbourne Library Service. There’s $1000 to be won in five categories, and an overall prize of $5000. Applications are due on Wednesday August 31.
This week has been a veritable hotbed of controversy. Here’s our wrap.
Amina Arraf, a lesbian Syrian blogger, was abducted by Syrian authorities during the week, prompting howls of protest around the world – at least until it emerged that she may be the figment of someone’s imagination. If that’s the case, it would be a distasteful distraction from the life-and-death struggle many Syrians are engaged in – even 13-year-old boys.
Linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky has won this year’s Sydney Peace Prize amid controversy surrounding his reaction to the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Less controversially, Canadian troubadour Leonard Cohen has been awarded a major Spanish literary prize for “a literary work which has influenced three generations around the world by creating a sentimental imagery in which poetry and music are melded into an unchanging worth.” Cohen’s lyrics are deeply influenced by Andalucian poet Federico García Lorca.
But many bookish Spaniards have been outraged by a controversy of their own, concerning the historical legacy of General Francisco Franco, the country’s far-right dictator from 1936 to 1975. A new state-subsidised national dictionary of biography has portrayed Franco’s reign as “authoritarian, but not totalitarian”. The Franco entry was penned by Professor Luis Suárez, an 86-year-old medieval historian known to be a Franco apologist.
There seems to be something inherently dark about the human appetite for storytelling – even among children. After all, Jack and Jill might well have gone up the hill, but Jack broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after. But when is the darkness too dark? An article in the Wall Street Journal last weekend about the darkness of much young adult fiction has sparked a fascinating debate. Here’s an overview of the reaction.
Even the Smurfs have weighed in with a controversy of their own. They have, according to one French academic, done the impossible and merged Stalinism and Nazism. Antoine Bueno created headlines this week when he labelled the cartoon characters, created by Peyo in 1958, as deeply racist, thus deeply offending all across the world lovers of the blue characters known variously as Schtroumpfs in France, Pitufos in Spain, Torpikek in Hungary, Sumafu in Japan and, in China, lan jing ling.
And finally David Nichols has just published The Bogan Delusion through Affirm Press. In this essay in The Conversation, he asks, do bogans actually exist?
Arts minister Simon Crean has announced the 2011 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards shortlists. Congratulations to all shortlisted authors.
The shortlists of 20 books were compiled from 379 entries. The winner of each category receives $80,000, with $5,000 each going to the other shortlisted authors. Previous delays in the announcement of the awards will henceforth no longer occur as a timetable has been announced for future awards. Entries will open in January each year, with shortlists revealed in May and winners announced in early July.
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