Biographies and Synopses

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Michelle de Kretser

Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka and emigrated to Australia when she was 14. She was educated in Melbourne and Paris. Michelle has worked as a university tutor, an editor and a book reviewer. She is the author of two other novels, The Rose Grower and The Hamilton Case.

The Lost Dog, made this years Man Booker Longlist, won the Christina Stead prize for Fiction and the NSW Premier's Book of the Year in 2008. It was also shortlisted for the 2008 Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction (Victorian Premier's Literary Awards)

The Lost Dog is a moving, funny and beautiful contemporary Australian novel filled with luminous writing and startlingly wise observations.

Tom Loxley is holed up in a remote bush shack trying to finish his book on Henry James when his beloved dog goes missing. What follows is a triumph of storytelling, as The Lost Dog loops back and forth in time to take the reader on a spellbinding journey into worlds far removed from the present tragedy.

Set in present-day Australia and mid-twentieth century India, here is a haunting, layered work that brilliantly counterpoints new cityscapes and their inhabitants with the untamed, ancient continent beyond. With its atmosphere of menace and an acute sense of the unexplained in any story, it illuminates the collision of the wild and the civilised, modernity and the past, home and exile. The Lost Dog is a mystery and a love story, an exploration of art and nature, a meditation on ageing and the passage of time.

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Ceridwen Dovey

Ceridwen Dovey grew up between South Africa and Australia, attended Harvard as an undergraduate studying Social Anthropology, and now lives in New York, where she is doing a PhD at New York University. Blood Kin is her first novel.

She has recently won the South African Sunday Times Literary Award (2008) and the University of Johannesburg Prize for Creative Writing (2007) and has been shortlisted for the French Prix Femina (Etranger category - 2008), and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (2007) and Dylan Thomas Prize for Young Writers (2008).

Blood Kin

A chef, a portraitist and a barber are taken hostage in a coup to overthrow their boss, the President of a nameless country. They are held captive in a palatial retreat in the mountains high above the capital city. Meanwhile, the chef’s daughter, the portraitist’s pregnant wife and the barber’s lover watch their men from the shadows – for in such precarious times, intimate relationships are as dangerous as political ones. As the old order falls, so does the veil that hides the truth about the secret passions of these men and women.

Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid grew up in Lahore, attended Princeton University and Harvard Law School and worked for several years as a management consultant in New York. His first novel, Moth Smoke, was published in ten languages, won a Betty Trask award, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award, and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His latest novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2007 and the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2008. Mohsin Hamid currently lives, works and writes in London.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

At a café table in Lahore, a Pakistani man converses with a stranger. As dusk deepens to dark, he begins the tale that has brought him to this fateful meeting...

Among the brightest and best of his graduating class at Princeton, Changez is snapped up by an elite firm,. He thrives on New York and the intensity of his work and his infatuation with fragile Erica promises entry into Manhattan society. But in the wake of September 11, he finds his position in the city he loves suddenly overturned and his identity in seismic shift, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and perhaps even love…

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Janette Turner Hospital

Janette Turner Hospital was born in Melbourne and grew up in Queensland. She is currently Professor of English and Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of South Carolina.

Orpheus Lost was longlisted for the 2008 Miles Franklin

Love can take you to the darkest places …

Leela is a gifted mathematician who has escaped her small Southern town to study in Boston. From the first moment she hears Mishka, a young Australian musician, playing his violin in a subway, his music grips her, and they quickly become lovers.

But Mishka is not all he seems — and the world around them is nothing like Leela thought it was.

In this compelling re-imagining of the Orpheus story, Leela travels to an underworld of kidnapping, torture and despair in search of the truth — and the man she loves.

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Other 2008 Longlisted

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2008 Australia-Asia Literary Award Longlist

Matthew CONDON     The Trout Opera    Publisher: Random House (Vintage)

Rodney HALL  Love without Hope  Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Mireille JUCHAU      Burning in      Giramondo Publishinge

Alex MILLER     Landscape of Farewell    Publisher: Allen & Unwin

Haruki MURAKAMI    After Dark      Translator: Jay Rubin  Publisher: Random House Group

Indra SINHA     Animal's People   Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

J.M. COETZEE       Diary of a Bad Year Publisher: Random House Group Ltd

Michelle DE KRETSER    The Lost Dog    Publisher: Allen & Unwin

Ceridwen DOVEY  Blood Kin Publisher: Atlantic Books

Mohsin HAMID right)    The Reluctant Fundamentalist  Publisher: Penguin

Janette TURNER HOSPITAL   Orpheus Lost    Publisher: HarperCollins

David MALOUF      The Complete Stories  Publisher: Random House

 

 

Blog: FAILED, Four Out of Ten. Dull Inaugural Australia- Asia Award Longlist

 

J.M. Coetzee

J.M. Coetzee's work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, Youth, Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello and, most recently, Slow Man. He was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.

Diary of a Bad Year

Diary of a Bad Year is an utterly contemporary work of fiction from one of our greatest writers and deepest thinkers. It addresses the profound unease of countless people in democracies across the world.

 An eminent, seventy-two-year-old Australian writer is invited to contribute to a book entitled Strong Opinions. It is a chance to air some urgent concerns. He writes short essays on Machiavelli, on anarchism, on Al Qaida, on intelligent design, on music. What, he asks, is the origin of the state and the nature of the relationship between citizen and state? How should the citizen of a modern democracy react to the state’s willingness to set aside moral considerations and civil liberties in its war on terror, a war that includes the use of torture? He is troubled by Australia’s complicity with America and Britain in their wars in the Middle East; an obscure sense of dishonour clings to him.

 In the laundry-room of his apartment block he encounters an alluring young woman. When he discovers she is ‘between jobs’ he offers her work typing up his manuscript. Anya has no interest in politics but the job provides a distraction, as does the writer’s evident and not unwelcome attraction towards her.

 Her boyfriend, Alan, an investment consultant who understands the world in harsh neo-liberal economic terms, has reservations about his trophy girlfriend spending time with this 1960s throwback. Taking a lively interest in his affairs, Alan begins to formulate a plan.

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Matthew Condon

Matthew Condon was born in Brisbane in 1962 and has lived in the UK, Germany and France. His first book, The Motorcycle Cafe, was widely reviewed and praised, and was shortlisted for the 1989 NSW State Literary Award for Fiction. Usher (1991) and The Ancient Guild of Tycoons (1994) were both shortlisted for the NBC Banjo Award for Fiction (1992 and 1995). A Night at the Pink Poodle (1995) and The Lulu Magnet (1996) won back-to-back Steele Rudd Awards for Short Fiction. The Trout Opera was shortlisted for the Qld Premier’s Prize for Fiction.

The Trout Opera

This dazzling story - marvelously broad in its telling and superbly crafted - is about the changing nature of the Australian character, finding the source of human decency in a mad world, history, war, romance, murder, bushfires, drugs, the fragile and resilient nature of the environment and the art of fly fishing. It's the story of a man who has experienced the tumultuous reverberations of Australian history while never moving from his birthplace on the Snowy, and it asks, what constitutes a meaningful life?

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Rodney Hall

Rodney Hall is the author of seven novels. He has twice won the Miles Franklin Award and The Day We Had Hitler Home (2000) was shortlisted. His other novels include Just Relations, Kisses of the Enemy and The Island in the Mind. His latest novel is Love Without Hope, which was also shortlisted for the 2008 Miles Franklin Award. His books are available in half a dozen translations as well as English editions in the UK and US. Rodney lives in Melbourne.

Love Without Hope

The elderly Mrs Shoddy suffers acute depression as a result of a bushfire that kills her beloved horses. A capable countrywoman, she loses her grip and is living in squalor when the district nurse finds her and has her committed to an insane asylum. The time is 1982; the place, a country town in NSW. The NSW Department of Lunacy is still in operation, headed by an official with the title The Master in Lunacy.

In this powerful novel, finding herself pitted against the power of the state, Mrs Shoddy calls on her memories of her missing husband, on the spirit of her horses and on the recovery of her self-respect and resilience to create a world in which she can remain sane, even against the institutional brutality she is subjected to. And the characters in her mind become as palpable as the real people she is surrounded by.

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Mireille Juchau

Mireille Juchau’s first novel, Machines for Feeling (University of Queensland Press, 2001), was shortlisted for the 1999 Vogel/Australian Literary Award. In 2002 her play, White Gifts, was joint winner of the Perishable Theatre International Women’s Playwriting Competition and was performed and published in the US. Juchau has received grants from the Ian Potter Foundation, the NSW Ministry for the Arts and the Australia Council, and was awarded the 2004-5 Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship. Her short fiction, essays and art reviews have been published internationally and in Australia, and anthologised in collections by Pan Macmillan and Random House.

note: Burning In has previuosly been shortlisted for The Prime Ministers Literary Award, the Nita Kibble and was highly commended in the inaugural Barbara Jefferis Prize for Literature

 

Burning In

Martine Hartmann, a young photographer, moves from Sydney to New York, leaving behind her mother Lotte, a holocaust survivor. Nine years later, Martine’s daughter Ruby vanishes.

Ruby’s disappearance throws Martine into an overwhelming emotional struggle, which brings her, in time, to understand Lotte’s anxieties and inhibitions.

Burning In is a psychological novel with an extraordinary eye for detail, and an unerring instinct for the rhythms of thought and feeling. Structured around two mysteries and three generations, it is a meditation on loss and guilt, exploring the long shadows cast by the past, and the relationship between parental love and survival.

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Alex Miller

Alex Miller is one of Australia's best loved writers. He is twice winner of the prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award, the first occasion in 1993 for The Ancestor Game, and again in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country. Conditions of Faith, his fifth novel, was published in 2000 and won the Christina Stead Prize for fiction in the 2001 NSW Premiers Literary Awards. It was also nominated for the Dublin IMPAC International Literature Award, shortlisted for the Colin Roderick Award in 2000, the Age Book of the Year Award and the Miles Franklin Award in 2001. He is also an overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, for The Ancestor Game, in 1993. Miller's seventh novel, Prochownik's Dream, was published in 2005.

Landscape of Farewell was shortlisted for the 2008 Miles Franklin Award.

A hauntingly beautiful meditation on the land, the past, exile and friendship, Landscape of Farewell is the powerful new novel from acclaimed Australian author, Alex Miller.

It is the story of Max Otto, an elderly German academic. After the death of his much-loved wife and his recognition that he will never write the great study of history that was to be his life's crowning work, Max believes his life is all but over. Everything changes, though, when his valedictory lecture is challenged by Professor Vita McLelland, a feisty young Australian Aboriginal academic visiting Germany. Their meeting and growing friendship sets Max on a journey that would have seemed unthinkable just a few short weeks earlier.

When, at Vita's invitation, Max travels to Australia, he forms a deep friendship with her uncle, Aboriginal elder Dougald Gnapun. It is a friendship that not only gives new meaning and purpose to Max, but which teaches him the profound importance of truth-telling in reconciliation with his own and his country's past.

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Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949. Following the publication of his first novel in Japanese in 1979, he sold the jazz bar he ran with his wife and became a full-time writer. It was with the publication of Norwegian Wood - which has to date sold more than 4 million copies in Japan alone - that the author was truly catapulted into the limelight. Known for his surrealistic world of mysterious (and often disappearing) women, cats, earlobes, wells, Western culture, music and quirky first-person narratives, he is now Japan’s best-known novelist abroad. Eight novels, two short story collections and one work of non-fiction are currently available in English translation.

After Dark

The midnight hour approaches in an almost empty all-night diner. Mari sips her coffee and glances up from a book as a young man, a musician, intrudes on her solitude. Both have missed the last train home. The musician has plans to rehearse with his jazz band all night, Mari is equally unconcerned and content to read, smoke and drink coffee until dawn. They realise they’ve been acquainted through Eri, Mari’s beautiful sister.

The musician soon leaves with a promise to return before dawn. Shortly afterwards Mari will be interrupted a second time by a girl from the Alphaville Hotel; a Chinese prostitute has been hurt by a client, the girl has heard Mari speaks fluent Chinese and requests her help.

Meanwhile Eri is at home and sleeps a deep, heavy sleep that is 'too perfect, too pure' to be normal; pulse and respiration at the lowest required level. She has been in this soporific state for two months; Eri has become the classic myth – a sleeping beauty. But tonight as the digital clock displays 00:00 a faint electrical crackle is perceptible, a hint of life flickers across the TV screen, though the television’s plug has been pulled.

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Indra Sinha

Indra Sinha was born in India and now lives in France. His work of non-fiction, The Cybergypsies, and his first novel, The Death of Mr Love, met with widespread critical acclaim. Animal’s People, his second novel, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2007 and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book in the Europe and South Asia region.

Animal’s People

'I used to be human once. So I'm told. I don't remember it myself, but people who knew me when I was small say I walked on two feet just like a human being . . .'

Ever since he can remember, Animal has gone on all fours, the catastrophic result of what happened on That Night when, thanks to an American chemical company, the Apocalypse visited his slum. Now, not yet twenty, he leads a hand-to-mouth existence with his dog Jara and a crazy old nun called Ma Franci, and spends his nights wondering what it must be like to get laid.

When a young American doctor, Elli Barber, comes to town to open up a free clinic, Animal plunges into a web of intrigues, scams and plots with the unabashed aim of turning events to his own advantage. Compellingly honest and entirely without self-pity, Animal lights up our journey into his dark world with flashes of pure joy.

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