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.
The shortlist has been announced for the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction, the UK-based literary prize for the best book for a woman writer, now in its 17th year.
Contenders are:
Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan (Canada)
The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright (Ireland)
Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding (UK)
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (US)
Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick (US)
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett (US)
Ann Patchett won the prize ten years ago, for Bel Canto, while Anne Enright won the Booker Prize for The Gathering in 2007.
Ann Patchett: She won the Orange Prize ten years ago, for Bel Canto
Enright told the Guardian she is proud to be on the Orange shortlist. ‘It is the friendliest and most forward-looking of all the prizes, constantly bringing new names to our attention and casting older ones in a new light. It gives the bag a shake.’
American Cynthia Ozick is another frontrunner; she turned 84 on the day of the shortlist announcement. Asked whether she minded her age being a topic of discussion, she told the Guardian that while she understands journalists need something to talk about, she does found it mystifying. ‘I think that writers are judged on their work and not on their age, and that seems to me a very simple axiom. I suppose if a writer publishes a novel at the age of 10 it is worth mentioning, but if one is mature it seems rather irrelevant.’
Joanna Trollope, chair of the judges, said, ‘I think this is one of the strongest lists I’ve seen for a literary prize and I’m quite an old hand at them now. It is a list of international standing.’
Of course, she would say that, wouldn’t she? But she’s not alone in thinking so.
The decision not to award a fiction prize for the Pulitzer, the US’s most significant national literature prize, was announced just hours before the Orange shortlist.
The Guardian’s Robert McCrum lay the Pulitzer blame with a faulty selection of titles by the fiction jury, who put three titles forward for the Pulitzer board to choose a winner from (Dennis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams, David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King and Karen Russell’s Swamplandia).
‘Respectfully, I suggest that Pulitzer swallows a hefty slice of crow pie and takes home for careful study the Orange prize playbook,’ he said.
‘This UK-based, but globally significant award is not yet as ancient or distinguished as the Pulitzer, but the people who run Orange take a great deal of care – this year’s shortlist is a model – to ensure that their nominations include six new fictions of distinction, by writers who are likely to show form over many years.’
‘Look at the list of Orange winners and you will see that, not only are there no duds, there are, among the runners-up, several writers who have already achieved greatness. Pulitzer, please take note.’
Kate Grenville, the Australian author who won the Orange Prize for The Idea of Perfection in 2001, says that the win changed her life.
’I won it for The Idea of Perfection, a book that wasn’t shortlisted for a single important Australian prize. As a result, sales were dismal. A year later, it won what was then Britain’s richest literary prize. Suddenly everyone was reading it and assuring each other that they’d always known what a great book it was. It was the same book it had always been, but now it had the stamp of approval – a big prize.’
‘Because of the Orange Prize, my next book was taken very seriously by publishers. Instead of trailing cap in hand from publisher to publisher, I had the delightful experience of them courting me. When The Secret River appeared, readers of all sexes read it … It’s sold 200,000 copies in Australia alone. It was what publishers call my ‘breakout’ book. In my case, this meant ‘breaking out’ of the stereotype of ‘women’s books’. Paradoxically, a prize for women has freed my books from the ghetto of ‘women’s writing’.
Grenville is a strong supporter (and official ambassador) of The Stella Prize, an Australian equivalent to the Orange Prize, which will annually reward the best book in any genre by an Australian woman writer each year. Organisers hope to have the prize up and running soon.
You can find out more about The Stella Prize here.
What’s bigger news than the awarding of a major prize? The decision not to award a major prize. The literary world is agog with the news that the Pulitzer prize for fiction will not be awarded in 2012, for the first time in 35 years.
Why? The Pulitzer board couldn’t reach a consensus on the three books nominated by the judges: Karen Russell’s idiosyncratic, wildly imaginative debut Swamplandia, David Foster Wallace’s posthumously completed The Pale King, and Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams (first published, in full, in the Paris Review in 2002, first published in book form in 2011).
‘I don’t think any decision like this is a statement about literature or fiction in general,’ Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzer prizes, told ABC’s PM yesterday. ‘I don’t think you should extrapolate from that some sweeping statement about the nature [or] condition of fiction in America.’
‘Most readers will not assume it was a deadlock. They’ll just figure it was a bum year for fiction,’ writes Ann Patchett in the New York Times today. ‘As a novelist and the author of an eligible book, I do not love this. It’s fine to lose to someone, and galling to lose to no one.’
Ann Patchett: ‘Most readers will not assume it was a deadlock. They’ll just figure it was a bum year for fiction.'
Patchett’s latest novel, State of Wonder, was released in 2011. (She may take some comfort from the fact it was included in this year’s Orange shortlist, announced today.)
Former Pulitzer fiction judge Laura Miller, a senior writer for Salon, believes that the result may say more about the the state of American reading in 2012 than the quality of American fiction published in 2011 (she calls it ‘an exceptional year’).
The Pulitzer is unusual in that there is an extra tier of decision-making above the level of the three judges (usually an academic, a critic and a writer), who come up with three titles to recommend to the Pulitzer Board, who pick the actual winner.
The board consists not of literary insiders, but of working journalists and journalism professors, ‘most with a deep respect for literature but relatively little familiarity with the literary world’.
While this is one of the prize’s strengths, says Miller (including its ‘excellent record at singling out literary works that also appeal to a lot of readers’), it is also a limitation.
Geordie Williamson: ‘‘What’s happened is a disconnect between … reading communities and the people who actually it falls on to decide the award’.
‘Past boards might have been able to settle on a title that most of them had read even if it wasn’t offered as a finalist by the jury; reading at least a few of the ‘big’ novels published during the year was something a lot more people did before the internet and cable TV came along’.
Geordie Williamson, chief literary critic of the Australian, agrees. ‘What’s happened is a disconnect between … reading communities and the people who actually it falls on to decide the award,’ he told PM.
Miller concludes that the fact that the board – representatives of the average educated American reader – don’t read widely enough to agree on an alternate choice when they disagree with the three books put forward, is the really worrying thing about this year’s lack of a Pulitzer winner.
The fiction jury was comprised of Michael Cunningham (who won a Pulitzer for The Hours in 1999), former books editor Susan Larson and critic Maureen Corrigan.
‘When I heard, the first word that went through my head was “inexplicable”. Then the second reaction was just anger on behalf of those three novels,’ Corrigan told the New York Times.
Susan Larson told NPR that all three judges are ‘shocked, angry and very disappointed’. She said, ‘This was a lot of work … I think we all would have been happy if any of [the three] books had been selected’.
There was speculation that the Pulitzer board might have considered the selected titles to be too unconventional to be worthy of a Pulitzer.
Reacting to this, Corrigan said, ‘If they didn’t think these three nominations were somehow within the regulations that they have set out, then they should have made that clear at the time we nominated them.’
John Mullan, a former Booker prize judge, told the Guardian that withholding the UK’s top literary prize is ‘absolutely never an option’. He said, ‘You go into it with the knowledge that some years are better than others. Some are very good, some are duff, and you just pray you get a good year.’
The Pulitzer for fiction has been withheld ten times since its inception in 1917, and three times during the 1970s.
Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Miles Franklin, has been withheld twice, in 1973 and 1983. There was also controversy over last year’s uncharacteristically short shortlist, of just three novels (out of a longlist of nine.
‘If I feel disappointment as a writer and indignation as a reader, I manage to get all the way to rage as a bookseller,’ said Ann Patchett, who opened a bookshop, Parnassus Books, in Nashville last year.
She pointed out that the Pulitzer sells books like no other literary prize – and that with both the bookselling and publishing businesses increasingly under pressure, it’s particularly bad timing to withhold the prize.
‘I can’t imagine there was ever a year we were so in need of the excitement it creates in readers.’
‘The Pulitzer Prize is our best chance as writers and readers and booksellers to celebrate fiction.’
‘This was the year we all lost.’
In the absence of a Pulitzer-picked fiction winner, many commentators are stepping in to suggest their own picks.
Ann Patchett’s favourites include Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award – and Dennis Johnson’s Train Dreams, one of the three titles nominated by the Pulitzer fiction judges.
Ron Charles, fiction editor of the Washington Post (And Totally Hip Book Reviewer), tweeted, ‘I think it’s an outrageous insult. Only one finished real novel among the finalists, AND they can’t pick a winner. DO YOUR FRAKKIN' JOB.’ He added, ‘Incidentally, I would have been perfectly happy with SWAMPLANDIA! winning. Wasn’t my absolute favorite, but would have been a reasonable choice.’
Ron Charles, pictured as Totally Hip Book Reviewer: ‘I think it’s an outrageous insult.’
His top picks were Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River or Mary Doria Russell’s Doc.
Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot was seen as another worthy alternative by both Patchett and Charles.
Publisher’s Weekly has published a list of ‘the good books the Pulitzer didn’t pick’.
What are your picks? What do you think of the decision to award no prize?
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.
The longlist for Australia’s most prestigious (and controversial) literary award has been announced – and last year’s short (all-male) shortlist has been followed by a long longlist, dominated (just) by female writers.
Tony Birch, Blood
Steven Carroll, The Spirit of Progress
Mark Dapin, Spirit House
Virginia Duigan, The Precipice
Anna Funder, All That I Am
Kate Grenville, Sarah Thornhill
Gail Jones, Five Bells
Gillian Mears, Foal’s Bread
Alex Miller, Autumn Laing
Frank Moorhouse, Cold Light
Favel Parrett, Past The Shallows
Elliot Perlman, The Street Sweeper
Charlotte Wood, Animal People
‘Critics will be hoping some of the longlisted women make it to the next stage – and that one of them wins,’ wrote the Sydney Morning Herald’s literary editor Susan Wyndham yesterday. She reminded readers of a statistic that has been cited often following last year’s ‘sausagefest’: a woman has only won 12 times in the 55 years of the Miles Franklin.
But debut novelist Favel Parrett, one of the seven women on the shortlist, Parrett, 37, told the Australian it was ‘disappointing’ that the sex of winning or shortlisted authors had become an issue. ‘Stella Miles Franklin would not want it to be about gender … It should just be about the best book, and this year there have been an amazing amount of books (by women).’
Chair of the Miles Franklin judging panel Gillian Whitlock commented on another trend in this year’s longlist: the prevalence of historical fiction. ‘The 2012 list reflects the strength of historical fiction in the contemporary novel,’ she said. ‘Entries this year include the third and final novels in the historical trilogies by Frank Moorhouse and Kate Grenville, fictional historical biographies by Steven Carroll, Anna Funder and Alex Miller and fictional narratives of World War II by Mark Dapin and Elliot Perlman.’
John Atkin, CEO of The Trust Company said it had been encouraging to see such a varied collection of books in the longlist and hoped the strength of the list would rouse debate in literary circles.
‘There are virtually no surprises or scandals worth mentioning, other than a few noteworthy absences,’ wrote Big Issue books editor and novelist Chris Flynn on Meanjin’s blog. He said:
it is surprising to see The Precipice chosen ahead of Rohan Wilson’s wonderful gothic nightmare The Roving Party or Wayne Macauley’s cutting satire The Cook. Similarly, some will be disappointed that Craig Sherborne’s The Amateur Science of Love, Geraldine Brooks’ Caleb’s Crossing and Steven Amsterdam’s What the Family Needed have missed out on spots, though those last two may have been discounted for not meeting the condition that books ‘must present Australian life in any of its phases’.
His punt on a winner? Kate Grenville.
John Franklin of Booktopia marked Malcolm Knox’s The Life and Kylie Ladd’s Last Summer as disappointing omissions.
Kylie herself, over on Meanjin, was ‘astonished’ that The Life didn’t make the cut. ‘Knox’s novel is incredibly original, wild, inventive and touching – a real game-changer in many ways, and most definitely Australian (on which criteria I was surprised The Street Sweeper got in).’
‘No matter which of these books make the short list, it will be one of the strongest in many years,’ says the Australian’s literary editor, Stephen Romei.
He declared it ‘perhaps the strongest since 2004, when the books in contention were Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake, J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, Peter Goldsworthy’s Three Dog Night, Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire (the deserved winner), Annamarie Jagose’s Slow Water and Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity.’
Romei’s bet on a winner? Frank Moorhouse’s Cold Light.
This year’s shortlist will be announced of 3 May. The winner will be announced on 20 June.
May the best book win!
Christine Gordon, bookseller and Stella Prize committee member, delivered our Lunchbox/Soapbox on International Women’s Day, to a rousing crowd response.
She talked about why sharing women’s stories is central to the success of feminism, reflected on some of the storytellers who’ve resonated most in her life – and explained why we need to give stories by Australian women their proper due. Here is the edited text of her talk.
There are so many options when talking on International Women’s Day.
I could talk about the history of this fine day. I could talk about gaining the vote, gaining the right to work, to education, to divorce, to have an abortion, to choose a certain lifestyle. I could talk about my anger – or indeed, the collective anger of women. I could talk about my pride in being a feminist, or the collective pride of feminists, for all that has been achieved and all that will be achieved.
But what I remember after listening to someone talk is not statistics, nor facts: I remember stories. That’s why I work in the book trade, as opposed to nuclear science.
Stories – my stories and other women’s stories – are what bring me here today.
Stories are what The Stella Prize is all about. The Stella Prize, an Australian version of the UK’s Orange Prize, will be an annual prize for the best book by an Australian woman writer published that year. The concept emerged following a panel held at Readings, on the 100th International Women’s Day, on the under-representation of women writers in our reviewing and prize culture. Conversations after the event led us – a group of passionate readers, writers and publishers – to begin the arduous task of setting up a prize to raise awareness of Australian women writers. We have some way to go, but we are determined; excited about both the process and the end result.
It seems right and just to me that such a prize should exist. Feminism – and International Women’s Day – is about sharing stories. Today, I want to reveal the journey of shared stories that led me here.
Growing up, I was one of those kids who read. I lived on the outskirts of Melbourne, on a hobby farm surrounded by paddocks. Some weeks, I would read a book a day. It was my transport. I favoured stories written by women; stories written by Australian women. Some of those books, some of that writing, stays with me now.
Puberty Blues: After reading it, Chris Gordon knew ‘that I certainly would not be jumping into the back of a van at the whim of some bloke who doesn’t even know the meaning of angst’.
Let me paint you a picture.
It’s 1981. I’m a relatively sheltered 13-year-old, catching the bus to my all-girls’ private school. I’m wearing a kilt and a blazer. There is a kerfuffle on the back seat. Sailing over heads, a tattered copy of Puberty Blues lands in my lap. Written by Gabrielle Carey and Kathy Lette, it’s a proto-feminist teen novel about two 13-year-old girls from Sydney who attempt to become popular by integrating themselves with the ‘Greenhill gang’ of surfers. On that bus trip up the Calder Hwy, the back-seat tough girl (you know the one) grabs it from my lap with a snarl. ‘Give it ’ere,’ she says. ‘That’s mine.’
It took me another year to read the book, when a copy (that very same one, I believe) did the rounds of Year Eight. We schoolgirls talked about it endlessly. I had no idea people lived like this. More importantly, I had no idea why they wanted to live like this. I guess that was the whole point of the book.
I knew then that I certainly would not be jumping into the back of a van at the whim of some bloke who doesn’t even know the meaning of angst. Oh no: I was meant for better things. From that moment on, I knew I was a feminist.
It took me another few years to really work out exactly where I positioned myself. I found out mostly by talking too much – but in the end, it was by listening to other women’s stories.
Publisher Louise Swinn says she is ‘in this fortunate position of having people’s stories in my head all the time’. I appreciate what she means. Knowing other people’s stories (fictional or not) is a passport. One of the gifts Lette’s novel gave me back then in the early 80s was a love of the Australian woman’s voice; a voice that doesn’t bullshit. The Australian woman’s voice is the voice of honesty.
Sophie Cunningham’s Melbourne takes in the Melbourne literary scene, with frequent mentions of writers like novelist Helen Garner and historian Robyn Annear. Again, it is a gathering of women’s take on the world, to make sense of your own landscape and your own truth. Looking at a bookshelf is like looking at a person’s diary. There it is: all laid out; harbouring secrets and desires among the words of others.
‘What was impressive about Damned Whores and God’s Police was its call to arms – to join this vast, optimistic political movement.’
Towards the end of my high school years, I was given a copy of Anne Summers’ book, Damned Whores and God’s Police. It is the story of Australia and the women that helped shape it as the nation we know today. A missing chronicle of Australia. It drove me to preach out loud (and often) on my soapbox about the need for women’s rights. It gave me the anecdotes I needed when justifying my position.
What was impressive about Damned Whores and God’s Police was its call to arms – to join this vast, optimistic political movement. Summers taught me that being a feminist wasn’t just about saying no. It means engagement. I wanted that engagement. I wanted choices. And I wanted to be noticed. I wanted to be part of a collective that stood up and transformed the environment we lived in. I learned you do that best by sharing stories and experiences. You can change the world by forming friendships – or indeed, by forming committees. Dare I say, The Stella Prize is a beautiful example of that.
The original cover of Monkey Grip: ‘I read this book because I was working out who I wanted to be.’
My memory of reading Helen Garner’s coming-of-age book Monkey Grip at university was actually all about the mutual analysis of it, the mystery and possibilities of the characters. I read this book because a friend gave it to me. It was the topic of conversation over many long nights. We couldn’t work out if we wanted to be playing starring roles in the novel or to be better, more smug, than those inner-Melbourne urbanites. (I was living in Brunswick at the time.)
I read this book because I was working out who I wanted to be.
The group of women friends I made in that first alcohol-fuelled year at university are the very friends I tried all of my beliefs on before I went public. They were the first to hear me read passages from Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, to dish politics, to wear purple for International Women’s Day. And they were always the first to hear me cry. Now, of course, we continue to swap books, TV shows, quips about our lives – and we do so with the knowledge that all of what we are now, all of our politics and meanings and quirks, can in some way be attributed to one another.
Monica Dux, in an essay for Kill Your Darlings, wrote that the difficulties people have had in judging the legacy of such a book like The Female Eunuch is that the personality of its author tended to get in the way. Does this happen to male authors? Are their personalities ripped apart and displayed with public glee?
‘It’s not easy to talk about so celebrated a publication without lapsing into clichés and banalities, and repeating the things that have already been said, not once but dozens of times.’
Monica knows though, that these accounts need to be told over and over, to all and sundry, because there is always a teenager, just over there, waiting to hear.
Kirsten Tranter is committed to supporting younger writers. In an article for the Wheeler Centre last International Women’s Day, she wrote: ‘I think the future belongs to the young women starting to shape the literary landscape, such as Angela Meyer’s super-sharp Crikey blog Literary Minded and the editors of the new magazine Kill Your Darlings.’ This is true. Different influences, experiences and histories must be recorded, must be reviewed, applauded and built on, for feminism to stay vital and current.
Every ten years or so, a feminist must reinvent, repurpose, or reinvigorate a belief. Being a feminist allows us to continue to be active and to give continual support to those striving for equality and respect.
There is an inspiring passage in Anne Summers’ introduction of the newly released version of Damned Whores and God’s Police:
‘I don’t want to wait until I am 98 to try and explain to a 25-year-old what moved me and so many of my generation to activism and revolt. I want, while there is still some chance of communicating, to tell you the story of the modern women’s movement. I want you to know how it started, what we did, and what it did to us. In hearing our story, I hope you will also learn something about yourselves, about where you stand in this great movement of change, and that it might just move some of you to reach out for the torch. It is time for it to be passed.’
To finish, I want to tell you another couple of tales about women who write about how it is.
Thea Astley’s Coda: ‘There are four ages of women: bimbo, breeder, babysitter, burden.’
I’m going to start with a quote from one of my all-time favourite books, Thea Astley’s Coda: ‘There are four ages of women: bimbo, breeder, babysitter, burden.’
Coda did not win prizes like Astley’s other work; perhaps because it is about an older woman. But did have an impact on me. Kathleen, the strong and funny heroine of the novel asks herself as she reaches the ‘burden’ stage of life, what am I going to do with myself? She wants to remain independent, but she also needs people to recognise that she now needs support. In her candid prose, Astley is showing us a woman who refuses to be invisible.
Thea Astley published her writing for over 40 years, from 1958. At the time of her death in 2004, Astley had won more Miles Franklin Awards than any other writer. She won the prize four times.
Miles Franklin: Her gender influenced the critical reception of My Brilliant Career.
Let me tell you another story…
It is about a woman called Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin: also known as Miles Franklin. Her best known novel, My Brilliant Career, tells the story of an irrepressible teenage feminist growing to womanhood in rural New South Wales. This heroine, Sybylla, is one of the most endearing characters in Australian literature; she obviously had much in common with Franklin herself, who wrote the novel as a teenager.
It was published in 1901, with the support of Henry Lawson. Remember, International Women’s Day was not even official until 1910. As Franklin had feared, her gender influenced the critical reception of My Brilliant Career. When her identity as a woman was made public, judgements about its literary merit were common.
After its publication, Franklin (who could not survive as a writer) tried a career in nursing, then as a housemaid in Sydney and Melbourne. It’s interesting to note how many Australian women writers have had jobs as teachers, nurses, cleaners to support their art. (Ah, women’s work: never quite done.)
While working in these roles, Franklin contributed pieces to the Daily Telegraph and the Sydney Morning Herald under the pseudonymns ‘An Old Bachelor’ and ‘Vernacular’. During this period, she wrote My Career Goes Bung, in which Sybylla encounters the Sydney literary set. The book, sadly, proved too hot to publish; it did not become available to the public until 1946.
Franklin was committed to the development of a uniquely Australian form of literature. She actively pursued this goal by supporting writers, literary journals, and writers' organisations. She has had a long-lasting impact on Australian literary life through her endowment of the Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s most prestigious literary prize.
Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin is set to have still more of an impact on Australian literary life – Australian women’s literary life – through her actual namesake, The Stella Prize.
Let me finish with the words, the honest, no-bullshit words, of a great Australian author, Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, from My Brilliant Career:
As a tiny child I was filled with dreams of the great things I was to do when grown up. My ambition was as boundless as the mighty bush in which I had always lived. As I grew up it dawned upon me that I was a girl, the makings of a woman, only a girl, merely this and nothing more. It came home to me as a great blow that it was only men who could take the world by its ears and conquer their fate, while women, were forced to sit with tied hands and patiently suffer as the waves of fate tossed them hither and thither, battering and bruising without mercy.
Here, on 8 March, 2012, on the 101st International Women’s Day, let us ensure, together, that this does not happen.
Christine Gordon is events coordinator of Readings and a committee member of The Stella Prize. This is the edited text of the Lunchbox/Soapbox she gave on International Women’s Day 2012.
On International Women’s Day last year, Australian novelist Kirsten Tranter wrote for us about the under-representation of women writers in the literary pages. A month later, the all-male Miles Franklin shortlist was announced – and shortly afterwards, a group of Australian women, including Kirsten, got together to propose a major national prize for women writers: The Stella Prize.
One year on, Kirsten looks back on what’s been happening since her initial report.
March 8 is International Women’s Day, this year celebrating its 101st birthday. So what do we have to celebrate, as women in the world of letters?
This time last year, women in the literary world were busily putting the question of gender inequality on the agenda. A US-based organisation dedicated to women in the literary arts, VIDA, had just published statistics that showed hard proof of gender disparity in literary publications. Displayed with stark graphic precision in the form of colour-coded pie charts, the results were surprising even to those of us who had always suspected that the situation wasn’t exactly equal. I wrote about these statistics last year on IWD, here on the Wheeler Centre’s Dailies.
Weeks later, as public discussion about similar patterns of gender bias in Australian literary pages was just gaining momentum, the Miles Franklin Literary Award published its controversial shortlist. This was not only the shortest shortlist in the award’s history, with just three authors; it was also comprised entirely of men – as it had been two years previously, in a list that inspired the term ‘sausagefest', coined by blogger Angela Meyer.
(My first novel, The Legacy, was one of three books by women included on the longlist and excluded from the shortlist of three.)
If you count the number of women who have won that award, and other literary prizes, you will discover that anyone who believes we are slowly making progress on this issue is sorely mistaken. After the shortlist announcement, author Sophie Cunningham pointed out in an essay in Kill Your Darlings that ‘since the Miles Franklin Award began in 1957, a woman has won 13 times. Four times this woman was Thea Astley, but twice she shared the award. Since 2001 two women have won, from the pool of 10 awards.’
The Miles Franklin Award t-shirt with the slogan ‘Australian authors do it better!’ Only one of the eight winners listed is a woman.
Is the Miles Franklin Award a prize that aspiring women writers can realistically expect to have shot at? Are we raising a generation of girls and young women who could be excused for not knowing that Miles was a woman, since the prize is so consistently won by men? If you’re proud of Australian writing, you might like to purchase a Miles Franklin t-shirt with the slogan ‘Australian authors do it better!’, against a list of eight winners of the award. Only one of them, Ruth Park, is a woman. Miles Franklin’s iconic, jaunty image in the centre of the design seems in this context like an unfunny joke. Five male winners on the list are alive. The only two women celebrated there are dead.
The shirt includes Miles Franklin’s ‘clever quote’: ’Someone to tell it to is one of the fundamental needs of human beings.’ This is true. This shirt inspires a need in me to tell the shirt’s designers that it is insulting.
We will not stop complaining as long as the Miles Franklin judges and other major awards continue to treat women’s writing as less worthy, of less value, and less literary merit than men’s. But we are tired of waiting. We all know how much excellent writing there is out there by Australian women, and we want to celebrate it, to reward those writers, and to bring more readers to their work.
We need a prize of our own. Along with Sophie Cunningham, I am one of a group of women in the world of publishing and books who are now trying to get The Stella Prize off the ground: an award for an Australian woman writer, open to all genres (including fiction and non-fiction), which takes its name from Stella Miles Franklin. The Stella Prize is not a solution to the problems of gender disparity in the literary world, but it is one place to start.
The new VIDA statistics for the year just passed are out, and the results are enough to make you cry into your small blue slice of pie. Or throw your pie against the wall, if you’re inclined to anger rather than despair. One publication seems to have shown signs of real improvement: Granta, the UK-based fiction quarterly. But the spike in the number of women authors in their pages appears to be based on just one issue, on feminism, that they published partly in response to the original VIDA numbers. Making this the most depressing form of tokenism, subsequent issues were a return to form: in their issue (on horror), three out of fourteen written contributors were women. The horror, the horror, indeed.
Some women writers, notably Emily Gould, have responded to the VIDA stats by arguing that women are not in these pages because perhaps they don’t want to be there; and that if we care so much about being published, we should start our own publications. It’s also possible that women are writing – and reviewing, and reviewing books by women – in places other than the top-tier publications surveyed by VIDA, such as the blogosphere, and that we should take this alternative world of letters more seriously. Blogger Elizabeth Lhuede started the Australian Women Writers blog in 2011 in response to the gender disparity in our books pages: there, you can join the Australian Women Writers Reading Challenge, and pledge to read and review a certain number of books by Australian women.
The numbers for Australian literary pages do not seem to be showing much sign of improvement in these terms either, even those edited by men and women who support the idea of gender equality and have been trying to actively recruit women reviewers. Journalist Stephen Murray has conducted his own comprehensive count of gender representation in Australian books pages, which he’ll publish soon. Particularly notable is the disparity in non-fiction, both in terms of the gender of reviewers and the authors reviewed.
My own experience of talking with editors has shown me how vital it is for women writers to pitch their ideas. Editors are inundated with calls and messages from writers with their eye on the lists of what’s coming out next month, pushing to review the things that interest them. This is the only way to get the number of women contributors up, I believe. Even editors who want to achieve a better balance will not change their ways unless we hassle them. If you’re looking for a way to celebrate International Women’s Day, pitching your idea for a review is one way that might really make a difference to the count for next year.
And join us at one of the many discussions sponsored by The Stella Prize around the country today, considering the question of whether women write differently than men.
In case you’re still sceptical about the level of full-on sexism out there in the literary world, read this 2011 interview with author V.S. Naipaul, who believes that they are ‘quite different’. He says, ‘I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.’ We’ll be figuring out our own answers to that question.
And discussing ways of getting our pie-throwing skills up to scratch as well.
Today, the Wheeler Centre will be marking International Women’s Day with two free events.
At 12.45pm, The Stella Prize’s Christine Gordon will deliver this week’s Lunchbox/Soapbox on the topic Feminism is Personal.
And at 7.15pm, conflict reporter Eliza Griswold will talk about her journeys through some of the world’s most fascinating and divided societies in The Tenth Parallel.
The award-winning book, Cement Garden
Eminent British novelist Ian McEwan has been awarded Israel’s prestigious Jerusalem Prize. It’s the latest of a long list of accolades awarded to McEwan, hailed by the jury as “one of the most important novelists of our time”.
Although it carries a modest cash purse, the Jerusalem Prize – awarded on odd-numbered years since 1963 – brings with it the prestige of its list of laureates. In 2009 the prize went to Haruki Murakami.
Coming from his final 7:30 Report, Kerry O'Brien has been honoured at last night’s Walkley Awards. O'Brien was awarded the Walkley for journalistic leadership as well as the prize for best interview for confrontations with Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott.
The ABC reported O'Brien appeared to lose his characteristic cool during his acceptance speech: “I’m stunned. I did not expect this. Tonight was my last show for 7:30, as you know, and I was determined to play a straight bat and I managed to, and now you’ve got me, you bastards,” O'Brien said.
Also honoured was Channel 9’s Laurie Oakes, who used his acceptance speech for the Gold Walkley to nudge Julia Gillard for her stance on Wikileaks. The Sydney Morning Herald quotes Oakes on Julia Gillard’s response to Wikileaks as “ridiculous”. Oakes went on to tell the crowd of media professionals, “To brand what the WikiLeaks site has done as illegal when there’s no evidence of any breach of the law, I think is demeaning… I think as journalists we should make that our view.”
UK cover for The Shape of Her
Earlier we reported that Christos Tsiolkas was in the running for the the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award for the worst piece of raunchy writing in a book in 2010. Sadly Melbourne’s own Tsiolkas was beaten out by second-time novelist Rowan Somerville for his book The Shape of Her according to the BBC.
In a ceremony at the appropriately named In & Out Club in London, Somerville expressed great gratitude for receiving the prize. “There is nothing more English than bad sex, so on behalf of the entire nation, I thank you,” Somerville said.
But was it worthy of the award? A Guardian review called it “a novel halfway through becoming aware of its own deficiencies, frustrated by its early overdecoration”. The review highlights a passage “Max’s lovemaking is ‘like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin’” noting that “the absurdity does not appear to be intended”.
But perhaps they were being a little harsh at the Guardian? Decide for yourself with this passage that judges singled out: “She released his hair from her fingers and twisted onto her belly like a fish flipping itself.”
Not sexy writing from Tsiolkas
Christos Tsiolkas joins the ranks of great novelists with his addition to the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award 2010.
The prize celebrates the worst depictions of intercourse in a novel that’s been written in the last year and Tsiolkas is apparently among the world’s worst writers of the hardest scene. Judges focussed on a particular passage in which the characters ‘'f—-ed for ages’‘, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
Assistant editor of the Literary Review Jonathan Beckman said ‘'It’s very repetitive. The sheer laziness of saying 'they f—-ed for ages’ is just one example of slack writing.‘’
But Tsiolkas is keeping excellent company on the shortlist with Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom making the list for a bad phone sex scene and, what Time magazine called his “propensity for innuendo which comes over a bit Benny Hill.”
The award’s aim is to “draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it”. It has, however, become something of an hounour in itself with a roster of previous winners that include Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe and John Updike.
The winners of the US National Book Awards were announced yesterday with several upsets and controversial decisions.
Peter Carey was again pipped at the post for the fiction award by Jaimy Gordon for Lord of Misrule. The Wall Street Journal’s headline notes that the win “Scores Big For Small Publisher” as Bruce McPherson of McPherson publishing has suddenly found himself needing to fill “thousands of orders” for the winning novel. The author herself was “completely unprepared and… totally surprised” in her acceptance speech according to New York Times coverage.
Non-fiction winner Patti Smith had more to say on accepting the prize for non-fiction for her book Just Kids and made a plea for the future of the book. “I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf. Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.”
Other winners included young people’s literature to Kathryn Erskine for Mockingbird, the series that’s already being called “the next Twilight”, and poetry to Terrance Hayes for her collection Lighthead.
IMPAC nominee Craig Silvey
Several Australian writers are on the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Longlist including newer names such as MJ Hyland for This Is How, Kalinda Ashton for The Danger Game and Craig Silvey for Jasper Jones alongside Alex Miller, David Malouf, Peter Carey and other familiar faces.
The longlist is particularly long with 162 novels from 43 countries because nominations come from libraries around the world including the State Library of Victoria and Australian National Library as well as institutions in Denmark, India and Jamaica. It brings books to international prominence and always features some unconventional selections.
Each library includes comments on the book they’ve nominated. Silvey’s Jasper Jones was called “Brilliant, whimsical and heartbreaking with a ‘mockingbird’ feel” while Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America received a low-key assessment: “An entertaining and somewhat comic romp through Georgian England, revolutionary France and America. A migrant’s tale.”
The award’s shortlist is announced on 12th April 2011.
The winners for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards have been announced:
Dog Boy by Eva Hornung
What the judges said: “Hornung challenges us to believe that an abandoned child in a decaying city in deep winter can sympathetically enter the small, embattled but protective society of a dog pack. The resonances of the novel are bleak and unsettling…”
The Colony: A History of Early Sydney by Grace Karskens
What the judges said: “The Colony deserved this year’s award for its high literary quality and originality. As a fine history, it is a story which also informs the present and gives us signposts for the future. ”
Confessions of a Liar, Thief and Failed Sex God by Bill Condon
What the judges said: “The short, chiselled chapters ensure that not a word is wasted. Condon is a writer of considerable craft who eschews the flamboyant in search of deeper truths. The winner of the 2010 Young Adult Fiction Award is a work of tremendous honesty and integrity…”
Star Jumps by Lorraine Marwood
What the judges said: “This is a moving evocation of home and family bonds, and the rhythms of farm life, and explores the effect of drought on all of these things. Star Jumps speaks with a natural poetry and unfussy richness.”
It’s been a nervous couple of months for authors on the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards shortlist, but on Monday Julia Gillard will announce the winners – after a wait of almost 4 months.
The long wait prompted the Australian’s literary blog, A Pair of Ragged Claws, to ask in a headline “Where The Bloody Hell Is It?” last month. The post points out that by the time the prize is announced, “some of the books on the short list will be almost two years old”, which creates a problem for booksellers who may not be displaying older titles so prominently. The post demanded that “the PM and Minister Crean should get their acts together and announce a date for this prize which has ambitions to being Australia’s most important literary award”.
To be fair, Gillard did have a snap election to win in between the shortlist announcement and the prize decision and a difficult election to win at that. The date Gillard has announced is Monday 8 November, so the wait will be over for authors, publishers and booksellers alike.
This Thursday’s More Than a Game panel looks set to be the grand final of art vs footy as players from both codes pull on their respective guernseys for what promises to be the game of the season.
Wearing the traditional umpire’s white lab coat, chief football writer for the Age Caroline Wilson will be chairing the event. Still crowing from the big win, Dr Chris McAuliffe appears as both director of the Ian Potter Museum of Art at University of Melbourne and mad Collingwood supporter. Pulling on the jumper to represent Richmond and players, Daniel Jackson is running onto the ground in fine form.
Pulling on the boots as the Herald Sun’s Online Sport Editor, Finn Bradshaw brings years of experience to the biggest questions facing the game from racism to homophobia to salary caps. Rounding out the side is Pippa Grange who led the side over at the AFL Players Association’s as general manager of Culture and Leadership.
And when the final siren sounds, the event goes on with the Basil Sellers Art Prize celebrating the art of the game.
Just when you’re recovering from the Booker surprise, the National Book Foundation (NBF) has announced the finalist for the US-based National Book Awards and closer to home Inside a Dog has announced their shortlist for the Inkys.
The Inkys' list has the pick of Australian YA authors including the winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Prize for Young Adult Fiction, Kirsty Eagar’s Raw Blue. The Inkys are based on a popular vote so you can vote for your favourite YA book.
The NBF awards saw another nomination for Peter Carey in the fiction category after missing out at Tuesday night’s Man Booker announcement.
The full NBF list is:
Fiction
Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America; Jaimy Gordon, Lord of Misrule; Nicole Krauss, Great House; Lionel Shriver, So Much for That; and Karen Tei Yamashita, *I Hotel *
Nonfiction
Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea; John W. Dower, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq; Patti Smith, Just Kids; Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War; and Justin Spring, Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward
Poetry
Kathleen Graber, The Eternal City; Terrance Hayes, Lighthead; James Richardson, By the Numbers; CD Wright, One with Others; and Monica Youn, Ignatz
Young People’s Literature
Paolo Bacigalupi, Ship Breaker; Kathryn Erskine, Mockingbird; Laura McNeal, Dark Water; Walter Dean Myers, Lockdown; and Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer
The Man Booker prize has been awarded to Howard Jacobson for The Finkler Question.
Chair of Judges, Andrew Motion praised it as “a marvellous book: very funny, of course, but also very clever, very sad and very subtle. It is all that it seems to be and much more than it seems to be. A completely worthy winner of this great prize.”
Jacobson was certainly the outsider with punters preferring Tom McCarthy’s C. The Australian’s Pair of Ragged Claws was surprised by the decision, tweeting soon after “The Finkler Question would have been my last pick! Not on merit, just on gut feeling”.
Over at the Guardian book blog, Sarah Crown thought it was a worthy winner, calling the book a “mad, sad blend of high-wire comedy and genuine, honest-to-goodness grief – and the questions it asks about both – made it a whip-smart pleasure to read”.
While the bookies reckon the prize will go to Tom McCarthy’s novel C, there’s still plenty of conversation around the world’s most influential prize.
Australian critic and blogger, James Bradley called McCarthy’s novel a “dark horse candidate” but was “pleased” to see Carey on the list. Bradley laments the absence of Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap and David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, but has another punt on a winner: “Emma Donoghue’s fictional reworking of the Natasha Kampusch story, Room, has been attracting a lot of attention.”
Some have panned Carey. Book blogger John Shelf called condemned it as “a fully achieved imagining of something that’s hardly worth doing; full of plot and character, signifying nothing.” McCarthy’s book was pilloried in a New York Times review, which called it “disappointing and highly self-conscious”.
And spare a thought for judge Rosie Blau. She wrote in the Financial Times that reading the shortlist was particularly moving as she gave birth to her first child while “romping through [Roddy Doyle’s] The Dead Republic”. She spent the remainder of the judging “reading 138 books over the head of a suckling child [which] felt, at times, like the worst possible way to enjoy or judge literature.”
The full shortlist is:
Peter Carey Parrot and Olivier in America
Emma Donoghue Room
Damon Galgut In a Strange Room
Howard Jacobson The Finkler Question
Andrea Levy The Long Song
Tom McCarthy C
Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa has won the Nobel Prize for Literature for what judges have called “his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”.
Vargas Llosa wasn’t among the favourites for the prize, but the bookies usually get the winner wrong. The L Magazine could be crowing “I told you so“ as they noted "South Americans and Scandinavians have been underrepresented in the selections of recent years”, but no-one predicted the Peruvian author would score the coveted prize.
Over at Spanish-language paper El Pais they’re keen to claim him as their own (as Australian do with New Zealanders) because he owns a house in Madrid. Vargas Llosa was shy of his chances to the paper back in August when he told them “Thinking about it [the Nobel Prize] is bad for the form…”
If you’re new to the author and need some hints for learned dinner party conversation, the Guardian’s cheatsheet of his five best novels will allow you to say you’ve been a fan since Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.
Ahead of next week’s Booker announcement betting on the prize has been suspended because as the New York Times states “suspicion that [the] award’s winner may be a foregone conclusion”.
The betting agency’s suspicions were raised when they received nearly £15,000 on Tom McCarthy’s novel, C. This is all the more surprising when you consider that bets only totalled £10,000 since July for all front runners. Clearly the crowd have spoken on McCarthy.
Betting against Tom McCarthy will be Laurie Steed, who’s review for Readings shrugged off McCarthy’s book as it “feels more like a literary exercise in bedazzlement than an enjoyable transmission of ideas from author to reader”.
The Booker Prize will be announced on the 12th of October.
Les Murray’s latest, Taller When Prone
Poet Les Murray is favourite Australian in the race for the Nobel Prize according to British bookmakers Ladbrokes.
The bookies put Les Murray at an equal seventh in the running for the prize at 11/1 along with Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. The current frontrunner is Swedish poet and translator Tomas Transtromer at 5/1. Two other Australian authors made the list – David Malouf at 50/1 and Peter Carey, out of favour with the punters at 100/1. But if you’re looking to back an outside chance the longest odds are for Bob Dylan at 150/1.
Before you go blowing your winnings, it’s worth noting that the bookies rarely hit the mark. As Galleycat points out last year’s prize was looking like a cert for Amos Oz at 4/1 odds, but ended up going to Romanian-born German author Herta Müller.
Tonight’s presentation of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards will end a month of speculation for those on the shortlist.
The most talked about prize is the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction with most newspaper pundits backing a favourite. Jason Steger in the Age suggests that Penguin publisher Ben Ball would love to collect the prize tonight for New York-based Peter Carey. Though if Carey doesn’t win Ball “will be at the Booker dinner in London with Peter Carey, which is conveniently just after the Frankfurt Book Fair.” Blanche Clark at the Herald Sun doesn’t back a clear favourite, but also mentions Carey’s record breaking nomination for the Man Booker along with other prize winners including JM Coetzee’s Summertime, which won the 2010 Christina Stead Prize for fiction.
Rosemary Sorenson at the Australian focuses on the Prize for a First Book of History, which has an all-female shortlist. Sorenson talks to nominee Natasha Campo who says that the all-female list is “the result of a fundamental change in what is considered good history”. Perhaps Sorenson is backing Natasha Campo’s book, From Superwomen to Domestic Goddesses: The Rise and Fall of Feminism for the prize.
Winners in all categories will be announced tonight.
It begins with Phillip Pullman raging at the Man Booker shortlist in the UK’s Telegraph for over-using present tense which he sees as a “wretched fad [that]… drastically narrows the options available to the writer”. The author of the His Dark Material triology thumbs his nose at present tense conclusively, saying “I just don’t read present-tense novels any more. It’s a silly affectation, in my view, and it does nothing but annoy.”
The Guardian follows up on the weekend by tracing:
“the recent upsurge in present-tense narration to the beginning of the 1960s – the moment that [British Prime Minister] Harold Wilson proclaimed a new Britain forged in the white heat of technological revolution. As the pace of modern life accelerates, the present that we’re all living in seems much more immediate, much more fragmentary. In a world of Watergate and Wikileaks we’re much less prepared to accept a final version, an official story.”
Then Pullman himself gets the right of reply in the Guardian, pleading “I want all the young present-tense storytellers (the old ones have won prizes and are incorrigible) to allow themselves to stand back and show me a wider temporal perspective.” He is appealing for the “full range of English tenses” and likens the current trend to that of hand-held camera technique that gives the impression of involvement and urgency.
With such scrutiny on tenses we can only hope that other areas of grammar don’t come under fire. We believe the first person plural could be next in line.
Mantel winning the Man Booker
Last year’s winner of the Man Booker has written a great piece on her difficult relationship with prizes for Intelligent Life.
Though Mantel’s Wolf Hall won the prize and has gone on to be a bestseller, the author remembers several less successful nominations. At one prize ceremony she recalls Anthony Burgess beating her for a prize. He “looked down at me from his great height, a cheque between thumb and finger, and said, ‘I expect you need this more than me,’ and there again I experienced a wicked but ungratified impulse, to snatch the cheque away and stuff it into my bra.”
Not all losing experiences are hard. One of Mantel’s most comforting losses came with the welcome distraction of a young friend who had a different response to not winning. “‘Never mind,’ he said, just like everyone else. And then, quite unlike everyone else: ‘If you like, you can come up and play with my guinea pig.’”
But after years of doing critically well (read: borderline poverty), Mantel felt the sales bump of winning the prize. She recalls, “Moments after I took my cheque from the hands of the Man Booker judges, an ally approached me, stabbing at an electronic device in her hand: ‘I’ve just checked Amazon—you’re number one—you’re outselling Dan Brown.’”
Despite the sales, Mantel’s parting advice to nervous nominees is that the moment – be it win or lose – passes quickly. “You win by a squeak or you lose. Your life changes or it doesn’t. There is really no cause for self-congratulation: no time, either. You do not know till the moment you know; or at least, no wash of rumour reached me, lapping towards the stage from the back of the hall.”
The Man Booker shortlist was announced last night and includes Peter Carey, but has dropped Christos Tsiolkas.
The shortlist also included Emma Donoghue, Damon Galgut, Howard Jacobson, Andrea Levy and Tom McCarthy, but the exclusion of Tsiolkas is odd given that at last count he was the highest selling nominee on the longlist. But for Carey this represents a step closer to making him a record breaking three-times winner of the £50,000 prize.
This year the Man Booker has gone digital with an iPhone app that gives the history of the award and includes video content about the winners. The big test of the new technology will be how quickly it can tell users about the prize’s winner which will be announced Tuesday 12 October in London.
And the books shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards YA Prize are:
Raw Blue by Kirsty Eagar
Swerve by Phillip Gwynne
Phew. I don’t have to keep my mouth shut any more! Except about the winner, of course, but that’s easier somehow. It’s just a cosy little one-book secret, rather than a big rambling three-book secret. I think my secret limit is two books.
Big congratulations to all the shortlisted authors – I’m extremely proud and excited about our shortlist. And also congrats to the authors we longlisted: Kirsty Murray for Vulture’s Gate, Richard Harland for Worldshaker and Bill Condon for Confessions of a Liar, Thief and Failed Sex God. You can also read the full judges' reports.
Judging this year was a completely different experience to the 2007 VPLA – which makes sense I suppose, given that you have a completely different set of entries for the year, and a completely different set of judges. (Except me. I am not completely different.) One important difference was that we didn’t have to write a judge bio for the website, or provide a photo. Which absolved me from the photo-choosing despair that I encountered last time! I was going to go with this one, in case you’re interested:
Myself and my fellow judges (Pam Macintyre from Viewpoint Magazine and Leesa Lambert from The Little Bookroom) used the same judging process as the last time I was a judge – once the entries were received we all squirrelled ourselves away and read like the blazes, and we each created our own personal longlists for our next meeting. We kept our longlists a secret from each other until the meeting, to see if there would be any overlap.
In 2008, when I judged the award with lovely authors Kirsty Murray and Simmone Howell, our initial personal longlists had very little overlap, which I found fascinating. So there was lots of re-reading and re-evaluating done after our initial read-through. Our final shortlist and winner were arrived at through a lot of analysis, a lot of brain-wracking, a few more meetings, and a bit of voting.
I expected pretty much the same turn of events this year – when you give three different people a pile of 75 different books and ask them to pick the best ones, you’d assume you’d get some different answers.
So Pam and I turned up at the Little Bookroom on Longlist Meeting Day with our little piles of novels hidden in our bags.
I produced my longlist first. Then Pam produced hers. Then Leesa pulled out hers.
Each of our 4-book longlists overlapped by at least 3 books. Wow.
“So,” Pam said, “Which one do we think is the winner?”
And we all held up the same book.
Then we kind of got the giggles, because it was so unexpected, and so exciting! We were unanimous before we’d even opened our mouths!
Narrowing down the rest of the shortlist took a bit longer – a bit of re-reading and discussing and voting, but given that we already had a three-book overlap in our longlists it didn’t take too long.
So: a different year, a different set of entries and judges, a completely different judging experience. Last time I was pregnant, this time I have an 18mth old. Both years it has been exciting, confusing, and brain-tearingly full on. So has the judging.
I can’t imagine what will happen if I judge this award again in the future. Probably I’ll just have given birth to triplets, we judges will have a shortlist of twenty books that we CANNOT cut down any further, our heads will explode and someone else will have to judge the award for us.
Oh, and did I forget to tell you this year’s winner? How terribly remiss of me.
This is a crosspost from Anna Ryan-Punch’s Reading Your Favourites. She is a YA/Children’s lit reviewer, poet, alpha-librarian and mother.
Shortlisted for the Unpublished Manuscript Prize, Michelle Aung Thin
Victoria’s biggest prize for writing – the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards – has announced the shortlist with judges saying “in their different ways, these authors are masters of their craft.”
In fiction, there were established names like Peter Carey and JM Coetzee, but also newcomer Craig Silvey for his second book Jasper Jones and crime writer Peter Temple for his Miles Franklin winning, Truth.
Non-fiction was dominated by female authors with only Rodney Hall’s Popeye Never Told You the only book from a male author. Kirsten McKenzie (A Swindler’s Progress), Maria Nugent (Captain Cook Was Here), Maria Tumarkin (Otherland) and Brenda Walker (Reading by Moonlight) were all part of the all-woman line-up for non-fiction. The prize for a book of first history and indigenous writing were both all female affairs.
One of the most closely watched prizes is the award for an unpublished manuscript. This year three debut authors made the list: Michelle Aung Thin for her novel set in colonial Burma, Age Short Story winner Peggy Frew and Andrew Nette for his Cambodian based crime novel, which judges called “fast-paced, richly atmospheric spin on the Chandler-esque disillusioned gumshoe”. The full judge’s reports are now online.
Australian Booker nominee Christos Tsiolkas is cutting a swathe through Brit lit on his current visit to the UK with appearances at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Not only is The Slap a favourite to win the Booker this year it’s also the bestselling title according to The Bookseller with “sales [that] totalled 5,001 copies during the seven days to 7th August 2010”. Last year’s winner, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, has gone on to sell 485,000 copies to date, so a Tsiolkas win would mean mega-sales.
But it’s not all plain sailing. The Guardian called Tsiolkas' work “the most divisive book to have been chosen for the Man Booker longlist in years”. In the same article, Tsiolkas' defended a bolder approach to fiction: “In the English-language novel there is a fear of writing about the real world. I don’t read a lot of contemporary fiction that’s true to the world. I read to have my assumptions challenged, to be scared, to cry. That novel isn’t being written at the moment.”
The residency in Scotland has mostly been a chance for Tsiolkas to write and the environment has had an impact. The Guardian reports Tsiolkas taking inspiration from Glaswegians swimming in a freezing loch. Tsiolkas said: “My next novel will begin at Luss with an Aussie dipping his toe into the water of the loch and thinking, ‘Man, these people are crazy.’”
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