2008 Premier's Literature Awards shortlist announced
This morning the NSW Premier's Literary Awards shortlist was
announced at Gleebooks (link to a PDF of list, including the judges' interesting
remarks). The last two or three years' announcements were made by Frank Sartor
Minister for eh Arts and a few other things including controversial urban
development. Sadly, and happily, he couldn't make it this year and delegated the
task. I say sadly, because the small group at the Gleebooks door protesting the
proposed multi-faceted ruination of Callan Park (promising loss of pubic open space
in our municipality, and loss of psych hospital facilities in the inner west)
were deprived of a photo opportunity; and also because I miss Mr Sartor's
Embarrassing-Uncle-Who-Doesn't-Really-Know-the-Family performances; and happily
because his stand-in was Verity Firth, Minister for Almost Everything
relative newcomer to the NSW government and so partly exempt from its general
malodorousness. The Arts aren't part of her portfolio, but she is the local
member and clearly was delighted to be given this job. She had a great time
reading out the winners, interjecting personal reflections on her lack of time
as a politician to read the kind of non-fiction helps maintain a broad
perspective, or the kind of fiction that gives pleasure after a long day at
work, on leading children to a love for reading as being at least as important
as leading them to competence. She did, probably unintentionally, pay homage to
the Sartor tradition by mispronouncing the name of one Literary Giant
('Christina Steed') and changing the gender of one of the judges ('Marie'
instead of 'Mark'). Altogether, it was a most satisfactory performance, and I
will certainly vote for her again (or at least mark her as number two after the
Greens).
It was, as ever, a pleasant gathering of writers and other, mostly better paid, literary workers. I got to schmooze a little, gossip a little, laugh a fair bit, though I don't remember what about. Verity's announcement began with the scriptwriting award, and I had seen every one of the excellent contenders. However, my sense of being up with things was short lived, as I had read very few of the rest of the titles, and hadn't even heard of most of them. Here's the complete list, in case you don't want to bother with the PDF download; I've asterisked the ones I've read, and added my comments in a different colour
Christina Stead Prize for fiction ($20,000)
J M Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (The Text Publishing Company)
Matthew Condon, The Trout Opera (Random House Australia)
Gregory Day, Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds (Picador)
Michelle de Kretser, The Lost Dog (Allen & Unwin)
Tom Keneally, The Widow and Her Hero (Random House Australia)
Alex Miller, Landscape of Farewell (Allen & Unwin)
(I don't know which shocks me more: that I haven't read any of these, or that I don't much want to, except for Michelle De Kretser's book.)
Douglas Stewart Prize for non-fiction ($20,000)
Tom Griffiths, Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica (University of New South Wales Press)
Philip Jones, Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers (Wakefield Press)
Guy Pearse, High and Dry: John Howard, climate change and the selling of Australia’s future (Penguin Group Australia)
* Jacob G. Rosenberg, Sunrise West (Brandl & Schlesinger)
* Nicolas Rothwell, Another Country (Black Inc.)
Maria Tumarkin, Courage (Melbourne University Press)
(Jacob Rosenberg's book is one to treasure; Nicolas Rothwell's is a bit of a curate's egg.)
Kenneth Slessor Prize for poetry ($15,000)
Joanne Burns, an illustrated history of dairies Giramondo)
Brook Emery, Uncommon Light (Five Islands Press)
Peter Kirkpatrick, Westering (Puncher & Wattmann)
Kathryn Lomer, Two Kinds of Silence (University of Queensland Press)
* David Malouf, Typewriter Music (University of Queensland Press)
Phyllis Perlstone, The Edge of Everything (Puncher & Wattmann)
(Dave Malouf's book is wonderful -- he has broken out of the poet's enclosure and is recognised much more widely than that, but that doesn't necessarily make him th ewinner of this section.)
Ethel Turner Prize for young people’s literature ($15,000)
Lollie Barr, The Mag Hags (Random House Australia)
David Metzenthen, Black Water (Penguin Group Australia)
Robert Newton, The Black Dog Gang (Penguin Group Australia)
James Roy, Town (University of Queensland Press)
David Spillman & Lisa Wilyuka, Us Mob Walawurru (Magabala Books Aboriginal Corporation)
Lizzie Wilcock, GriEVE (Scholastic Australia)
(I was told that I have to read Town; and I met Lizzie Wilcock, who has a very lovely baby.)
Patricia Wrightson Prize ($15,000)
Aaron Blabey, Pearl Barley and Charlie Parsley (Penguin Group Australia)
Martin Chatterton, The Brain Finds a Leg (Little Hare Books)
Li Cunxin & Anne Spudvilas, The Peasant Prince (Penguin Group Australia)
Liz Lofthouse & Robert Ingpen, Ziba Came on a Boat (Penguin Group Australia)
Emily Rodda, The Key to Rondo (Omnibus Books)
Carole Wilkinson, Dragon Moon (Black Dog Books)
(Aaron Blabey now illustrates for The School Magazine, so he must be excellent, and The Peasant Prince looks gorgeous -- it's a telling from Mao's Last Dancer.)
Community Relations Commission Award ($15,000)
John Fitzgerald, Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia (University of New South Wales Press)
David Hill, The Forgotten Children (Random House Australia)
Mark Kurzem, The Mascot (Penguin Group Australia)
Jacob G. Rosenberg, Sunrise West (Brandl & Schlesinger)
Peta Stephenson, The Outsiders Within: Telling Australia’s Indigenous-Asian Story (University of New South Wales Press)
(That's like a guilt list of things I should know about.)
Gleebooks Prize ($10,000)
Kay Anderson, Race and the Crisis of Humanism (Routledge)
Helen Gilbert & Jacqueline Lo, Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia (Palgrave Macmillan, UK)
Niall Lucy & Steve Mickler, The War on Democracy: Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press (University of Western Australia Press)
Glenn Nicholls, Deported: A History of Forced Departures from Australia (University of New South Wales Press)
Peta Stephenson, The Outsiders Within: Telling Australia’s Indigenous-Asian Story (University of New South Wales Press)
Gillian Whitlock, Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (The University of Chicago Press)
Play Award ($15,000)
Nicki Bloom, Tender (Now Yes Now & B Sharp, Company B)
Wesley Enoch, The Story of the Miracles at Cookie’s Table (HotHouse Theatre & Griffin Theatre Company / Currency Press Pty Ltd)
Debra Oswald, Stories in the Dark (Australian Theatre for Young People and Riverside Theatres
* Alana Valentine, Parramatta Girls (Company B, Belvoir Street / Currency Press Pty Ltd)
(I didn't care for Parramatta Girls very much: it seemed too many unintegrated stories, even though the stories themselves were powerful.)
Script Writing Award ($15,000)
Anna Broinowski, Forbidden Lie$ (Liberty Productions)
Elissa Down & Jimmy Jack (a.k.a. Jimmy the Exploder) The Black Balloon (Black Balloon Productions)
Kristen Dunphy, East West 101: episode 1, The Enemy Within (Knapman Wyld Television, SBS)
Alison Nisselle, Curtin (Apollo Films, ABC TV)
Cathy Randall, Hey, Hey, It’s Esther Blueburger (Tama Films)
Michael James Rowland & Helen Barnes, Lucky Miles (Short of Easy)
(I've seen all of these: my vote, probably the kiss of doom, is for Lucky Miles.)
The NSW Premier’s Literary Scholarship Prize ($15,000)
Katherine Barnes, The High Self in Christopher Brennan’s Poems: Esotericism, Romanticism, Symbolism (Brill Academic Publishers)
William Christie, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: a Literary Life (Palgrave Macmillan, UK)
Richard Freadman, This Crazy Thing a Life: Australian Jewish Autobiography (University of Western Australia Press)
Helen Gilbert & Jacqueline Lo, Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia (Palgrave Macmillan, UK)
Anthony Uhlmann, Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image (Cambridge University Press, UK)
Ann Vickery, Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women’s Poetry (Salt Publishing Ltd)
(I happened to be standing next to Katherine Barnes, and when I congratulate her she everyone associated with the book -- Christopher Brennan, the publisher, the publisher's marketing branch and she herself -- had been savaged in at least one influential review. How reassuring it must be, then, to get on this list.)
The judges were Mara Moustafine (chair), Geoffrey Atherden, Georgia Blain, Anne Brewster, Anne Collett, Robyn Ewing, Judi Farr, Tim Gooding, Jean Kent, Joan Kirkby, John Larkin, Stephen Measday, Camilla Nelson, Ken Stewart, Mark Tredinnick, Gerry Turcotte, Murray Waldren and Les Wicks. Now there's just a month or so to read all the contenders before the winners are announced on 19 May.
It was, as ever, a pleasant gathering of writers and other, mostly better paid, literary workers. I got to schmooze a little, gossip a little, laugh a fair bit, though I don't remember what about. Verity's announcement began with the scriptwriting award, and I had seen every one of the excellent contenders. However, my sense of being up with things was short lived, as I had read very few of the rest of the titles, and hadn't even heard of most of them. Here's the complete list, in case you don't want to bother with the PDF download; I've asterisked the ones I've read, and added my comments in a different colour
Christina Stead Prize for fiction ($20,000)
J M Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (The Text Publishing Company)
Matthew Condon, The Trout Opera (Random House Australia)
Gregory Day, Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds (Picador)
Michelle de Kretser, The Lost Dog (Allen & Unwin)
Tom Keneally, The Widow and Her Hero (Random House Australia)
Alex Miller, Landscape of Farewell (Allen & Unwin)
(I don't know which shocks me more: that I haven't read any of these, or that I don't much want to, except for Michelle De Kretser's book.)
Douglas Stewart Prize for non-fiction ($20,000)
Tom Griffiths, Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica (University of New South Wales Press)
Philip Jones, Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers (Wakefield Press)
Guy Pearse, High and Dry: John Howard, climate change and the selling of Australia’s future (Penguin Group Australia)
* Jacob G. Rosenberg, Sunrise West (Brandl & Schlesinger)
* Nicolas Rothwell, Another Country (Black Inc.)
Maria Tumarkin, Courage (Melbourne University Press)
(Jacob Rosenberg's book is one to treasure; Nicolas Rothwell's is a bit of a curate's egg.)
Kenneth Slessor Prize for poetry ($15,000)
Joanne Burns, an illustrated history of dairies Giramondo)
Brook Emery, Uncommon Light (Five Islands Press)
Peter Kirkpatrick, Westering (Puncher & Wattmann)
Kathryn Lomer, Two Kinds of Silence (University of Queensland Press)
* David Malouf, Typewriter Music (University of Queensland Press)
Phyllis Perlstone, The Edge of Everything (Puncher & Wattmann)
(Dave Malouf's book is wonderful -- he has broken out of the poet's enclosure and is recognised much more widely than that, but that doesn't necessarily make him th ewinner of this section.)
Ethel Turner Prize for young people’s literature ($15,000)
Lollie Barr, The Mag Hags (Random House Australia)
David Metzenthen, Black Water (Penguin Group Australia)
Robert Newton, The Black Dog Gang (Penguin Group Australia)
James Roy, Town (University of Queensland Press)
David Spillman & Lisa Wilyuka, Us Mob Walawurru (Magabala Books Aboriginal Corporation)
Lizzie Wilcock, GriEVE (Scholastic Australia)
(I was told that I have to read Town; and I met Lizzie Wilcock, who has a very lovely baby.)
Patricia Wrightson Prize ($15,000)
Aaron Blabey, Pearl Barley and Charlie Parsley (Penguin Group Australia)
Martin Chatterton, The Brain Finds a Leg (Little Hare Books)
Li Cunxin & Anne Spudvilas, The Peasant Prince (Penguin Group Australia)
Liz Lofthouse & Robert Ingpen, Ziba Came on a Boat (Penguin Group Australia)
Emily Rodda, The Key to Rondo (Omnibus Books)
Carole Wilkinson, Dragon Moon (Black Dog Books)
(Aaron Blabey now illustrates for The School Magazine, so he must be excellent, and The Peasant Prince looks gorgeous -- it's a telling from Mao's Last Dancer.)
Community Relations Commission Award ($15,000)
John Fitzgerald, Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia (University of New South Wales Press)
David Hill, The Forgotten Children (Random House Australia)
Mark Kurzem, The Mascot (Penguin Group Australia)
Jacob G. Rosenberg, Sunrise West (Brandl & Schlesinger)
Peta Stephenson, The Outsiders Within: Telling Australia’s Indigenous-Asian Story (University of New South Wales Press)
(That's like a guilt list of things I should know about.)
Gleebooks Prize ($10,000)
Kay Anderson, Race and the Crisis of Humanism (Routledge)
Helen Gilbert & Jacqueline Lo, Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia (Palgrave Macmillan, UK)
Niall Lucy & Steve Mickler, The War on Democracy: Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press (University of Western Australia Press)
Glenn Nicholls, Deported: A History of Forced Departures from Australia (University of New South Wales Press)
Peta Stephenson, The Outsiders Within: Telling Australia’s Indigenous-Asian Story (University of New South Wales Press)
Gillian Whitlock, Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (The University of Chicago Press)
Play Award ($15,000)
Nicki Bloom, Tender (Now Yes Now & B Sharp, Company B)
Wesley Enoch, The Story of the Miracles at Cookie’s Table (HotHouse Theatre & Griffin Theatre Company / Currency Press Pty Ltd)
Debra Oswald, Stories in the Dark (Australian Theatre for Young People and Riverside Theatres
* Alana Valentine, Parramatta Girls (Company B, Belvoir Street / Currency Press Pty Ltd)
(I didn't care for Parramatta Girls very much: it seemed too many unintegrated stories, even though the stories themselves were powerful.)
Script Writing Award ($15,000)
Anna Broinowski, Forbidden Lie$ (Liberty Productions)
Elissa Down & Jimmy Jack (a.k.a. Jimmy the Exploder) The Black Balloon (Black Balloon Productions)
Kristen Dunphy, East West 101: episode 1, The Enemy Within (Knapman Wyld Television, SBS)
Alison Nisselle, Curtin (Apollo Films, ABC TV)
Cathy Randall, Hey, Hey, It’s Esther Blueburger (Tama Films)
Michael James Rowland & Helen Barnes, Lucky Miles (Short of Easy)
(I've seen all of these: my vote, probably the kiss of doom, is for Lucky Miles.)
The NSW Premier’s Literary Scholarship Prize ($15,000)
Katherine Barnes, The High Self in Christopher Brennan’s Poems: Esotericism, Romanticism, Symbolism (Brill Academic Publishers)
William Christie, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: a Literary Life (Palgrave Macmillan, UK)
Richard Freadman, This Crazy Thing a Life: Australian Jewish Autobiography (University of Western Australia Press)
Helen Gilbert & Jacqueline Lo, Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia (Palgrave Macmillan, UK)
Anthony Uhlmann, Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image (Cambridge University Press, UK)
Ann Vickery, Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women’s Poetry (Salt Publishing Ltd)
(I happened to be standing next to Katherine Barnes, and when I congratulate her she everyone associated with the book -- Christopher Brennan, the publisher, the publisher's marketing branch and she herself -- had been savaged in at least one influential review. How reassuring it must be, then, to get on this list.)
The judges were Mara Moustafine (chair), Geoffrey Atherden, Georgia Blain, Anne Brewster, Anne Collett, Robyn Ewing, Judi Farr, Tim Gooding, Jean Kent, Joan Kirkby, John Larkin, Stephen Measday, Camilla Nelson, Ken Stewart, Mark Tredinnick, Gerry Turcotte, Murray Waldren and Les Wicks. Now there's just a month or so to read all the contenders before the winners are announced on 19 May.
Posted: Tue - April 15, 2008 at 04:02 PM |
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This started out as a patchy journal about family life with my mother-in-law, Mollie, who has Alzheimers and was then living with us. Mollie has moved, first into a "low-care facility" then, in July 2004, into a nursing home. As these and other events have overtaken us, the blog has moved on ...
A note on comments: You can read comments on the same page as the entry rather than in a pop-up window, by clicking on the category button ("Mollie" etc) at the end of the entry and then on the "Read more" button.
A note on comments: You can read comments on the same page as the entry rather than in a pop-up window, by clicking on the category button ("Mollie" etc) at the end of the entry and then on the "Read more" button.
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Total entries in this category: 336
Published On: Apr 16, 2008 05:05 PM
Total entries in this category: 336
Published On: Apr 16, 2008 05:05 PM