A tax free prize of $100 000 will be awarded to the work judged to be of the highest literary merit in each of two categories:
The awards are open to works written by living Australian citizens and permanent residents. Authors, publishers and literary agents were eligible to enter the works, first published in English and first offered for general sale between 1 January and 31 December 2008 for next years award..
Out with the old, and in with the new as all the favourites for the inaugural Prime Minister's Literary Award were left in the dust. James, G
reer, Keneally, Malouf and Porter were bested by a couple of unknown authors as the Rudd Literarti anointed historian Philip Jones, and, the man who turned his Phd into a novel, Steve Conte (left), as the inaugural prize winners.
Both authors are $100,000 better off today- more than enough for typewriter ribbons and a fresh set of pencils each. Spare a thought for Gail Jones whose fine work, Sorry, wins our 'bridesmaid' award having been shortlisted for more prizes this year than we care to recount. The same applies to Thomas Keneally's, The Widow and Her Hero, which seems destined not to pick-up the main prize this year.
Ochre and Rust builds incrementally, resulting in a convincing new insight into our frontier past and the motives of its characters. (Wakefield Press)
Jones’ work attempts to unravel one of the most contentious social issues confronting modern Australia, that is understanding the complexities of first contact. The characteristics of Jones’ book that lifted it above the rest of the short list were: the originality of the concept of using artefacts as the way into discussion of aspects of the Australian frontier; the depth and breadth of the analysis; and the simplicity and elegance of the prose.
Since 1985 he has undertaken fieldwork with Aboriginal communities in southern and central Australia. He is currently involved in a site-recording project with Aboriginal people of the Birdsville region. The contemplative and reflective strain in Ochre and Rust reflect
A story of passion and sacrifice in a city battered by war. It is 1943 and each night in a bomb shelter beneath the Berlin Zoo an Australian woman, Vera, shelters with her German husband, Axel, the zoo’s director. As tensions mount in the closing days of the war, nothing, and no one, it seems, can be trusted.
The Zookeeper’s War is a powerful novel of a marriage, and of a city collapsing. It confronts not only the brutality of war but the possibility of heroism. (Fourth Estate)
While Conte’s research is formidable, it is the breadth of his historical imagination that so enriches the novel. As characters negotiate intricate and destructive moral choices, the narrative drive is sustained to the satisfyingly uncertain ending.
In 2000 Conte began a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne, developing the manuscript that became The Zookeeper’s War. He graduated in 2005 and now works as a student advisor in a university college.
Short list: Fiction
The 91 entries in the fiction category of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards included a wide range of contemporary Australian fiction.
The seven short-listed fiction books include works in prose, a compilation of short stories and one work in verse. Among the short list are writers whose distinguished careers have spanned decades as well as debut authors whose careers are just beginning. Links below to details on individual books on this page.
Short list: Non-fiction
A total of 103 books, traversing topics from politics, art, philosophy and architecture were entered in the 2008 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards non-fiction category.
The judges selected the seven short-listed books because of their originality, rich detail and clarity of writing. Included in the short list are histories born from meticulous research, engaging accounts of survival and moving stories that resonate long after the book has been closed.
Full details of Short listed books>>
Visit Prime Minister's Literary Award Page at Seek Books for book prices etc>>
Burning In
Mireille Juchau (Giramondo)
This is a novel about mothers and daughters, about the way the hidden past plays itself out in the present, and
the conflicts between professional commitment and the responsibilities of family life. The story is told by a young woman, Martine, who translates the emotional distance she senses in her mother, Lotte, a holocaust survivor,
into a passion for photography. Martine leaves Sydney to live in New York, in order to further her career, and has a child of her own. One day, her daughter Ruby goes
missing in Central Park while in the care of a nanny.
Burning In is an intensely observed psychological novel, an extended meditation on the sense of grief and
loss which persists as an unspoken legacy across the generations. The author has a compelling eye for detail and an unerring feel for the rhythm of thought and feeling. (Giramondo)
The author
Mireille Juchau’s first novel, Machines for Feeling (2001), was short-listed for the 1999 Australian/Vogel Literary Award. In 2002 her play, White Gifts, won 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. She has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Western Sydney, and her short fiction, essays and art reviews have been published internationally and in Australia, and anthologised in collections
by Pan Macmillan and Random House.
Fiction judging panel comments
A lost child is at the heart of Mireille Juchau’s Burning In. Martine, a Sydney photographer now based in New York, has to surmount personal grief to effect a reconstitution of her own life, and the lives of her family, shadowed as they are by the legacy of the Holocaust. The novel ranges fluently across continents and generations.
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El Dorado
Dorothy Porter (Picador)
There is a serial child killer stalking the streets of Melbourne. He kills his victims gently and places a gold mark on their head. The mark of El Dorado. He doesn’t
kill because he hates children, but because he loves them. He believes in childhood innocence, and he will kill to
entomb them there …
This is a book about a friendship under siege; about how jealousy and betrayal cast very long shadows—which can stalk you to the grave. El Dorado is Dorothy Porter’s finest verse novel to date. Unflinching and morally uncompromising, it is both a complex thriller and a
completely unique and compelling reading experience
from Australia’s most maverick and versatile poet.
(Picador)
The author
Dorothy Porter is an acclaimed poet, lyricist and librettist. She wrote
the lyrics for Before Time Could Change Us, (Katie Noonan sang
on the album), which won an ARIA for Best Jazz Album 2005. Her
second opera, The Eternity Man (2003), for which she wrote the
libretto, is in pre-production with the UK’s Channel Four for a film.
She is the author of the bestselling The Monkey’s Mask (1994), What a Piece of Work (1999), and Wild Surmise (2002), all of which have won numerous literary awards.
Fiction judging panel comments
Dorothy Porter’s fifth verse novel, El Dorado, centres on the fate of lost children, a sadness that has haunted the Australian imagination since the nineteenth century. Now the agent of harm is not the bush, but human predators, in this case a serial killer who murders but does
not molest his victims in order for them to ‘stay children forever’. The poetry is edgy, taut and studded with unsettling images. This bravura performance confidently combines the demands
of fiction with those of verse.
Jamaica: A nove by l
Malcolm Knox (Allen and Unwin)
Welcome to Jamaica, have a nice breakdown! A group of six friends converge on the fabled island of Jamaica to compete in a marathon relay swim across treacherous
water. Most have known each other since school, scions of
wealth, breeding and privilege and members of the upper
echelon of supposedly classless Sydney. The odd man out
is new money Jeremy Hutchison (Hut), who is tolerated by the group because of the fortune he has made, but never really accepted. It is a group of people on the edge
of crisis, none more so than Hut, who is guarding a terrible truth. As the sleazy charms of Jamaica insinuate
themselves onto the group, things fall apart in predictable
and surprising ways, and the secrets of the past must be
addressed. (Allen and Unwin)
The author
Malcolm Knox is the author of three novels, Summerland (2000), A
Private Man (2005), and most recently, Jamaica: A novel. Each has
been published internationally. Knox was formerly literary editor of
The Sydney Morning Herald, where he broke the Norma Khouri hoax
story, for which he won a Walkley Award. He is also the author of
Secrets of the Jury Room (2005), a non-fiction account of his experience
as a juror and a history of the jury system. He lives in Sydney.
Fiction judging panel comments
No recent Australian novelist has probed the nation’s masculinity more acridly, yet
sympathetically, than Malcolm Knox. Nor has any contemporary writer more subtly dissected
the role of sport in male self-definition and self-deception. Jamaica, ‘dedicated to the facts that
got out of the way of a good story’, explores the desires and expectations of rich men whose
excesses find more flagrant and damaging expression when they rampage abroad. Knox is
perhaps the foremost analyst of the nihilism that is disturbingly familiar in Australian life.
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Sorry- Gail Jones (Vintage
In the remote outback of Western Australia during World
War Two, English anthropologist Nicholas Keene and his
wife, Stella, raise a lonely child, Perdita. Her upbringing is far from ordinary: in a shack in the wilderness, with a distant father burying himself in books and an unstable
mother whose knowledge of Shakespeare forms the
backbone of the girl’s limited education.
Emotionally adrift, Perdita becomes friends with a deaf and mute boy, Billy, and an Aboriginal girl, Mary. Perdita and Mary come to call one another sister and to share
a very special bond. They are content with life in this
remote corner of the globe, until a terrible event lays
waste to their lives. (Vintage)
The author
Gail Jones is the author of two collections of short stories, Fetish Lives (1997) and The House of Breathing (1992). Her first novel, Black Mirror (2002), won the Nita B. Kibble Award and the Fiction Prize in the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards in 2003.
Her second novel, Sixty Lights (2004), was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2004, short-listed for the 2005 Miles Franklin Award, and won the 2005 Age Book of the Year Award for Fiction. It also won the Fiction and Premier’s Prize in both the Western Australian Premier’s Book
Awards 2004 and the South Australian Festival Award for Literature in 2006. Her next novel, Dreams of Speaking (2006), was short-listed in 2007 for the Miles Franklin Award, the NSW Premier’s Award and the Nita B. Kibble Award. Sorry is her latest novel.
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Fiction judging panel comments
Set in outback Western Australia during the Second World War, Gail Jones’ Sorry explores the strange, intense, deadly conformation of ‘a ruined family’. Perdita, whose name indicates that this is the story of a lost child, is forced to deal with loneliness, the obsessions of others and the false consolations of withdrawal from the world. Yet some around her are ‘given to the marvel of things’. There is some prospect of reconciliation between individuals and races in this
unusual, disturbing, highly-wrought fiction.
The Complete Stories David Malouf (Knopf)
David Malouf ’s imagination inhabits shocking violence, quick humour, appealing warmth and harsh cruelty with equal intensity. He shares tales of bookish boys, taciturn
men and intimate stories of men and women looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on.
This is a comprehensive compilation of Malouf ’s shorter work. Stories are set in the stark and challenging
Australian interior and the more lush and mysterious coastal enclaves; others are set in Australia’s past.
The youthful dreams, physical desires and mental despair
of Malouf ’s richly varied characters as they explore their
place in the world are always moving and universal.
Readers won’t want to skim a single page of the 31
stories in this epic collection, a few of which are novella
length. Together, they represent a quarter-century of a
formidable craftsman’s career. (Knopf)
The Author
David Malouf is the author of short story collections Dream Stuff
(2000), Every Move You Make (2006) and of acclaimed novels
including The Great World (1990), winner of the Commonwealth
Writers’ and Miles Franklin Prizes, and Remembering Babylon
(1993), short-listed for the Booker Prize and winner of the
IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Malouf also writes poetry, drama
and libretti for operas. Born and brought up in Brisbane, he lives
in Sydney.
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Fiction judging panel comments
David Malouf ’s The Complete Stories represents one of the finest achievements in short fiction in the national literature; this from a writer who is also a celebrated poet and novelist.
Traversing a quarter-century of his career, the stories insinuate us into the consciousness of individuals at points of crisis—muted or violent. The prose is eloquent, resonant, measured.
The settings transport us across countries, languages and different ways of reckoning the world with a cosmopolitan ease matched by few Australian writers.
The Widow and Her Hero byTom Keneally (Doubleday)
When Grace married the genial and handsome Captain Leo Waterhouse in Australia in 1943, they were young,
in love—and at war. Like many other young men and women, they were ready, willing and able to put the war
effort first. They never seriously doubted that they would
come through unscathed. But Leo never returned from
a commando mission masterminded by his own hero figure, an eccentric and charismatic man who inspired
total loyalty from those under his command.
Sixty years on, Grace is still haunted by the tragedy of
her doomed hero when the real story of his ill-fated
secret mission is at last unearthed. As new fragments of
her hero’s story emerge, Grace is forced to keep revising
her picture of what happened to Leo and his fellow
commandos—until she learns about the final piece in the
jigsaw, and the ultimate betrayal. (Doubleday)
The author
Tom Keneally won the Booker Prize in 1982 with Schindler’s Ark
(1982), later made into Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award-winning
film Schindler’s List (1993). He has written nine works of non-fiction,
including The Commonwealth of Thieves (2005), The Great Shame
(1998) and American Scoundrel (2002), and 27 works of fiction,
including An Angel in Australia (2002) and Bettany’s Book (2000). His
novels The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1972), Gossip From The Forest
(1975), and Confederates (1979) were all short-listed for the Booker Prize, while Bring Larks
and Heroes (1967) and Three Cheers For The Paraclete (1968) both won the Miles Franklin
Award.
Fiction judging panel comments
In the fifth decade of his career, Tom Keneally’s powers of renewal and his unflagging appetite for story-telling distinguish his latest novel, The Widow and Her Hero. He turns to his favoured historical period—the Second World War, where a number of his works are set—and in
particular to the Australian commando raids against Japanese shipping in Singapore in 1943 and 1944. This master-class fiction work is an interrogation of the nature of heroism, perhaps
unproblematic for men in action, but of deep ambivalence for the women left behind.
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2008 NON-FICTION SHORT LIST
PRIME MINISTER’S LITERARY AWARDS
A History of Queensland Raymond Evans (Cambridge University Press)
A
History of Queensland is the first single volume analysis
of Queensland’s past, stretching from the time of earliest human habitation—to the present. It encompasses
pre-contact Aboriginal history, the years of convict settlement, free settlement and subsequent urban and
rural growth. It takes the reader through the tumultuous frontier and Federation years, the World Wars, the Cold War, the controversial Bjelke-Petersen era and on, beyond
the beginning of the new millennium.
It reveals Queensland as a sprawling, harsh, diverse and conflicted place, where the struggles of race, ethnicity, class, generation and gender have been particularly
pronounced, and political and environmental encounters have been intense. It is a colourful, surprising and at times
disturbing saga, a perplexing and diverting mixture of
ferocity, endurance and optimism.
(Cambridge University Press)
The author
Raymond Evans recently received the inaugural John
Douglas Kerr Medal of Distinction for History from the
Royal Historical Society of Queensland.
He has been writing about Queensland and Australian history since 1965. His numerous publications cover social history and popular culture and include Loyalty and Disloyalty: Social Conflict on the Queensland Homefront, 1914–18 (1987), The Red Flag Riots
(1988), Fighting Words: Writing About Race (1999), as well as the co-written Race Relations in Colonial Queensland (1975, 1988, 1993) and 1901—Our Future’s Past (1997); and the co-edited
Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation (1992) and Radical Brisbane: An Unruly History (2004). Dr. Evans retired from the Department of History at the University of Queensland as an Associate Professor in 2002 and is presently a freelance historian attached to the Centre for Public Culture and Ideas, Faculty of Arts, Griffith University.
Non-fiction judging panel comments
This is an ambitious but economical history of Queensland, from the ancient past to 2005. It is an excellent piece of work—history delivered with a broad and confident brush, and beautifully written. The early colonial history is extraordinarily well-documented and will
usefully introduce this era to a wider audience. The author is persuasive in arguing that some of the early colonial brutality in Queensland contributed to the national psyche. The rather prosaic title underplays the liveliness of this outstanding history.
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Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time Clive James (Picador)
A lifetime in the making, Cultural Amnesia is the book Clive James has always wanted to write. Organised from A through to Z, and containing over 100 essays, it’s the
ultimate guide to the twentieth century, illuminatin the careers of many of its greatest thinkers, humanists,
musicians, artists and philosophers.
FromLouis Armstrong to Ludwig Wittgenstein, via Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust, it’s a book for our times—and, indeed, for
all time. (Picador)
The author
Clive James is the author of more than twenty books, including
collections of essays, literary and television criticism, travel writing,
novels and verse, plus his famous Unreliable Memoirs (1980). In 1992
he was made a Member of the Order of Australia and in 2003 he was
awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for Literary Excellence.
Non-fiction judging panel comments
This book presents Clive James’ accounts of the lives, thoughts and legacies of an astonishing, and idiosyncratic cast of characters, including Sir Thomas Browne, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Margaret Thatcher and Beatrix Potter. It is a glorious collision of style and substance.
There is no attempt at objectivity; this is a chronicle of the author’s almost visceral connection with his own adventures in learning. This leads to great clarity of insight in many cases. Many
chapters
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My Life as a Traitor by Zarah Ghahramani with Robert Hillman (Scribe)
M
y Life as a Traitor is a beautifully written memoir of
Zarah’s life in Iran, revealing the human face behind the turmoil of the modern Middle East. Her descriptions of Persian culture, contemporary Iranian society, and radical
Islamist politics are eye-opening, as is her account of the growing voice of dissent in Iran.
But it is the story of Zarah’s struggle to survive the
nightmare world of Iran’s oppressive regime that makes
My Life as a Traitor an unforgettable testimony to the
strength of the human spirit. (Scribe)
The co-authors
Zarah Ghahramani was born in Tehran in 1981, two years after
Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran to establish the Islamic Republic.
Her life changed suddenly in 2001 when, after having taken part in
student demonstrations, she was arrested (literally snatched off the
street by secret police) and charged with ‘inciting crimes against the
people of the Islamic Republic of Iran’.
While imprisoned in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison she faced brutal
interrogation: her head was shaved and she was beaten. After being released, she was forbidden
to return to university and soon realised that she had no future in her native land. Robert
Hillman, an Australian writer, met and befriended Zarah in Iran in 2003 and helped her to
escape to Australia, where she now has permanent residency.
Robert Hillman was born in 1948 and grew up in rural Victoria. His
first novel, A Life of Days, appeared in 1988 and was followed by The
Hour of Disguise (1990), Writing Sparrow Hill (1996), and The Deepest Part of the Lake (2001). His 2004 memoir, The Boy in the Green Suit, won Australia’s National Biography Award. After many years of teaching in high schools and university, Robert Hillman now works as a full-time writer. He has three children and lives in Warburton, in Victoria’s Yarra Valley.
Non-fiction judging panel comments
Gharamani grew up in Iran and this is her account of her life in post-revolutionary Iran. She was arrested and imprisoned when she was 20 for taking part in student demonstrations.
This is a moving and beautifully written book, full of small life-details, that widens out into a shocking story of political oppression. The book contains meditations on Persian culture and accounts of deep and warm family relationships that make it much more than simply a grim account of imprisonment and torture.
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Napoleon: The Path to Power, 1769–1799 Philip Dwyer (Bloomsbury)
Th
e first volume of a groundbreaking and innovative
popular biography of Napoleon Bonaparte, one of
history’s most complex and charismatic leaders.
Napoleon’s rise to power was neither inevitable nor smooth. It was full of mistakes, wrong turns and pitfalls.
His identity during his formative years was shifting, his character ambiguous, and his intentions often ill-defined.
As a young inexperienced general, he covered up his defeats and exaggerated his victories. He never hesitated to blame others for his own failures and failings. He was, however, highly ambitious, and it was this drive that others noticed and that allowed him to advance his career
and his social status.
One of the first truly modern politicians, Napoleon was a peerless manipulator of the media of his time. He was able to build an image of himself that laid the foundation for the legend that was to follow. (Bloomsbury)
The author
Philip Dwyer studied at the Sorbonne under France’s pre-eminent Napoleonic scholar, Jean Tulard, and is now lecturer in Modern
European History at the University of Newcastle. He was the editor of Napoleon and Europe (2001) and author of Talleyrand (2002).
Non-fiction judging panel comments
This is a wonderfully engaging history of Napoleon’s first 30 years. It gives fascinating accounts of the murky world of Corsican politics, and also of Napoleon’s complex relationship with his wife Josephine. The modern resonances of this book are remarkable. The challenges facing Napoleon in the Middle East echo through to today. Also, given Dwyer’s view, Napoleon may well have been the first of the modern politicians to use the media consciously to create an
heroic image. The book is meticulously researched, well-written and is a work of significant
merit.
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Shakespeare’s Wife Germaine Greer (Bloomsbury)
ISBN: 9780747591702
Little is known of the wife of England’s greatest playwright; a great deal, none of it complimentary, has been assumed. The omission of her name from Shakespeare’s will has been interpreted as evidence that she was nothing more than an unfortunate mistake from which Shakespeare did well to distance himself.
Yet Shakespeare is above all the poet of marriage. Before Shakespeare there were few comedies or tragedies of wooing and wedding. Tragedies were not about loving ‘not wisely but too well’ but about the fall of illustrious
men. Comedies were not about the pitfalls that lay in wait along the path of true love but about getting away with
adultery.
Shakespeare’s Wife is fascinating in its reconstruction of
Ann Hathaway’s life, and the daily lives of Elizabethan
women. It offers an illuminating portrait of their working
routines, the rituals of their courtship and the minutiae of
married life. (Bloomsbury)
The author
Germaine Greer gained her PhD from the University of Cambridge
in 1967 with a thesis on Shakespeare’s early comedies and she has
taught Shakespeare at universities in Australia, Britain and the US.
In 1986 Greer was invited to contribute the volume of Shakespeare
to the prestigious Past Masters series. In 1989 she set up her own
publishing imprint, Stump Cross Books, and went on to publish
scholarly editions of Katherine Philips (1993), Anne Wharton (1997)
and Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea. She currently lives in
the UK.
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Non-fiction judging panel comments
This book sets out to rehabilitate Ann Hathaway’s history, long dismissed as a minor detail in Shakespeare’s life. As an examination of life in Stratford in the 16th century it is superb, the detail extraordinary and the style engrossing. It is a work of considerable scholarship—the amount of detail the author has recovered from tomb stones and forgotten records is impressive—as well as displaying great mastery of prose. Shakespeare’s plays are brilliantly used to shed light on his domestic relationships. The argument is lively and engaging.
Vietnam: The Australian War Paul Ham (HarperCollins)
‘Surely God weeps’, an Australian soldier wrote in despair of the conflict in Vietnam. But no God intervened to shorten the years of carnage and devastation in this most
controversial of wars.
Drawing on hundreds of accounts by soldiers, politicians,aid workers, entertainers and the Vietnamese people,Paul Ham reconstructs for the first time the full history of our longest military campaign. From the commitment to engage, through the fight over conscription and the rise of the anti-war movement, to the tactics and horror of the battlefield, Ham exhumes the truth about this politicians’ war—which affected so deeply the lives of 50,000 Australian servicemen and women.
More than 500 soldiers were killed and thousands wounded. Those who made it home returned to a hostile and ignorant country and a reception that scarred them forever. This is their story. (HarperCollins)
The author
Paul Ham is the author of Vietnam: The Australian War and Kokoda
(2004). He is the Australia correspondent for The Sunday Times
of London, and has written regularly for The Financial Times, The
Bulletin, The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald. He has a
Masters Degree in Economic History from the London School of
Economics and studied journalism and English literature at Charles
Sturt and Sydney Universities. Born and educated in Sydney, he lived
in London for many years, where he worked for the Financial Times
Group and The Sunday Times. In 1990 he established a publishing
company which specialised in financial newsletters. On his return to Australia in 1998, he set his mind to pursuing a lifelong interest in 20th century history—particularly Australia’s
involvement in military conflict.
Fiction judging panel comments
This history of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War is an extraordinary piece of work.
It uncovers the often disturbing story of the political context of Australia’s participation in Vietnam. The book is both an articulate and objective account of the Australian experience, but has a power that is much more than the sum of its parts. It presents a meticulous history
and also resonates on an emotional level through its depth and searing honesty.
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The author
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