Prime Minister's Literary Awards

The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards celebrate the contribution of Australian literature to the nation’s cultural and intellectual life. The awards recognise literature’s importance to our national identity, community and economy.

A tax free prize of $100 000 will be awarded to the work judged to be of the highest literary merit in each of four categories:* Fiction * Non-Fiction * Young Adult Fiction * Children’s Fiction

The awards are open to works written by living Australian citizens and permanent residents.

2011 Winners

The winners were:

Fiction
Traitor by Stephen Daisley

Non-Fiction
The Hard Light of Day: An Artist's Story of Friendships in Arremte Country by Rod Moss

Young Adult Fiction
Graffiti Moon by Cath Crowley

Children's Fiction
Shake a Leg by Boori Monty Pryor and illustrator Jan Ormerod

The 2011 shortlisted publications and authors:

Fiction shortlist ;	Non-fiction shortlist
Glissando, David Musgrave;	How to Make Gravy, Paul Kelly;
Notorious, Roberta Lowing;	Sydney, Delia Falconer;
That Deadman Dance, Kim Scott;	The Hard Light of Day, Rod Moss;
Traitor, Stephen Daisley and	The Party, Richard McGregor and
When Colts Ran, Roger McDonald.	Claude Levi-Strauss, Patrick Wilcken.
Young adult fiction shortlist	Children's fiction shortlist
About a Girl, Joanne Horniman;	April Underhill, Tooth Fairy, Bob Graham;
Good Oil, Laura Buzo;	Why I Love Australia, Bronwyn Bancroft;
Graffiti Moon, Cath Crowley;	Shake a Leg, Boori Monty Pryor and Jan Ormerod;
The Piper's Son, Melina Marchetta and	Now, Morris Gleitzman and
The Three Loves of Persimmon, Cassandra Golds	Flyaway, Lucy Christopher.

2010 Prime Minister's Literary Award Winners - November

The winner of the Fiction award is Eva Hornung for her outstanding novel Dog Boy. This daring novel with ancient folkloric and literary traditions of children lost, then raised and nurtured in the animal world was chosen for its testing but triumphant feat of the imagination.

The winning entry for Non-fiction is Grace Karskens'The Colony: A History of Early Sydney an intimate account of the transformation of a campsite in a beautiful cove to the town that later became Sydney, was praised by the judges for its high literary quality and originality.

This year the Prime Minister's Literary Awards included two new categories; Children's and Young adult fiction.

The inaugural Young adult fiction winner is Bill Condon's Confessions of a Liar, Thief and Failed Sex God. This poignant, funny and deeply insightful rite of passage novel is about a student who attends a Catholic boys' school in 1967. The pain of first love and the morality attached to individual life choices is made contemporary in a work praised by the judges as one of tremendous honesty and integrity.

The Children's fiction winner is Star Jumps by Lorraine Marwood, a verse novel told through the eyesof a young girl depicting the joys and heartbreaks of a farming family as they struggle to cope with the devastating effects of long-term drought. According to the judges it was the ‘surprise package’ in the list and the voice in which it is written is appealing, authentic and irresistible.

2010 Prime Minister's Literary Awards Shortlists- 16th July

Fiction shortlist

• Summertime, J.M. Coetzee
• The Book of Emmett, Deborah Forster
• The Lakewoman, Alan Gould
• Dog Boy, Eva Hornung - Winner
• Ransom, David Malouf
• Lovesong, Alex Miller
• As the Earth turns Silver, Alison Wong

Non-Fiction shortlist

• The Water Dreamers: The Remarkable History of Our Dry Continent, Michael Cathcart
• Strange Places: A Memoir of Mental Illness, Will Elliott
• The Colony: A History of Early Sydney, Grace Karskens - Winner
• The Life and Death of Democracy, John Keane
• The Blue Plateau: A Landscape Memoir, Mark Tredinnick
• The Ghost at the Wedding, Shirley Walker

Young Adult Fiction shortlist

• Stolen, Lucy Christopher
• The Winds of Heaven, Judith Clarke
• Confessions of a Liar, Thief and Failed Sex God, Bill Condon - Winner
• The Museum of Mary Child, Cassandra Golds
• Swerve, Phillip Gwynne
• Jarvis 24, David Metzenthen
• Beatle meets Destiny, Gabrielle Williams

Children’s Fiction shortlist

| | |

| | |

|

• Cicada Summer, Kate Constable
• The Terrible Plop, Ursula Dubosarsky and illustrated by Andrew Joyner
• Just Macbeth, Andy Griffiths and illustrated by Terry Denton
• Mr Chicken goes to Paris, Leigh Hobbs
• Running with the Horses, Alison Lester
• Star Jumps, Lorraine Marwood - Winner
• Mannie and the Long Brave Day, Martine Murray and illustrated by Sally Rippin
• Tensy Farlow and the Home for Mislaid Children, Jen Storer
• Harry and Hopper, Margaret Wild and illustrated by Freya Blackwood

2009 Fiction | 2009 Non-fiction | 2008 Winners | 2008 Fiction Shorts | 2008 Non-fiction Shorts | Home Page | Fishpond Books Australia | Top

2009 Prime Minster's Literary Award Winners - Nov 2nd

Non-Fiction Winners & Shortlists

• JOINT WINNER - House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann - Evelyn Juers (Giramondo) - In 1933 the author and activist Heinrich Mann and his partner Nelly Kroeger fled Nazi Germany, finding refuge first in France and later, in great despair, in Los Angeles. Born into a wealthy middle class family in Lübeck, Heinrich was one of the leading representatives of Weimar culture; Nelly was twenty-seven years younger and a hostess in a Berlin bar.

  Their story is crossed by others from their circle, including Heinrich's brother Thomas Mann, their friends Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, and Joseph Roth, the writers Egon Kisch, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf and Nettie Palmer. In train compartments, ship's cabins and rented rooms, they called upon what was left to them—their bodies, their minds, their books—and amidst the debris of an era of self-destruction, built their own annexes to the House of Exile. (Giramondo)

  Judges' comments

  An exemplar of the new 'group biography', Juers follows Heinrich, brother of one of the greatest twentieth century writers, to the US where he finds troubled refuge in Los Angeles. This book is remarkable for both its research and its prose. Juers has devoted years to the former and the skills of a novelist to the latter, seeing the horrors of the 1930s, in particular the desperate diaspora of Jews seeking to escape the malignancy of Nazism, through the experiences of one distinguished family.

  2009 Fiction | 2009 Non-fiction | 2008 Winners | 2008 Fiction Shorts | 2008 Non-fiction Shorts | Home Page | Fishpond Books Australia | Top

• JOINT WINNER - Drawing the Global Colour Line - Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds (Melbourne University Publishing) -

  At last a history of Australia in its dynamic global context. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in response to the mobilisation and mobility of colonial and coloured peoples around the world, self-styled 'white men's countries' in South Africa, North America and Australasia worked in solidarity to exclude those peoples they defined as not-white—including Africans, Chinese, Indians, Japanese and Pacific Islanders. Their policies provoked in turn a long international struggle for racial equality.

  Through a rich cast of characters that includes Alfred Deakin, WEB Du Bois, Mahatma Gandhi, Lowe Kong Meng, Tokutomi Soho, Jan Smuts and Theodore Roosevelt, leading Australian historians Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds tell a gripping story about the circulation of emotions and ideas, books and people in which Australia emerged as a pace-setter in the modern global politics of whiteness. The legacy of the White Australia policy still casts a shadow over relations with the peoples of Africa and Asia, but campaigns for racial equality have created new possibilities for a more just future.

  Remarkable for the breadth of its research and its engaging narrative, Drawing the Global Colour Line offers a new perspective on the history of human rights and provides compelling and original insight into the international political movements that shaped the twentieth century. (Melbourne University Publishing)

Other Non-fiction Shortlisted

• Van Diemen's Land (hardback cover left. Paperback right) - James Boyce (Black Inc.) - Almost half of the convicts who came to Australia came to Van Diemen's Land. There they found a land of bounty and a penal society, a kangarooeconomy and a new way of life. In Van Diemen's Land, James Boyce shows how the convicts were changed by the natural world they encountered. Escaping authority, they soon settled away from the towns, dressing in kangaroo-skin and living off the land. Behind the official attempt to create a Little England was another story of adaptation, in which the poor, the exiled and the criminal made a new home in a strange land. This is their story, the story of Van Diemen'sLand. (Black Inc.)

  Judges' comments

  With the arrival of three parties 6f troops and convicts—two from NSW and one from London—white settlement was established in the north and south of Van Diemen's Land in 1803. After a brief period of co-existence between the invaders and the Indigenous people the dynamics changed dramatically as convict stockmen helped create a pastoral industry by following the kangaroo hunters into the landscape of lush grasslands nurtured by thousands of years of land management by Tasmania's Aborigines. James Boyce tells an increasingly tragic story with immense skill, adding considerable depth to our understanding

  2009 Fiction | 2009 Non-fiction | 2008 Winners | 2008 Fiction Shorts | 2008 Non-fiction Shorts | Home Page | Fishpond Books Australia | Top


• Doing Life: A Biography of Elizabeth Jolley - Brian Dibble (UWA Press) -

  Elizabeth Jolley wrote about hope and love in families, schools, hospitals, nursing homes and boarding houses in which unlovely and loveless people survive as best they can. Jolley too was a survivor. Her lovelorn and homeless times in Britain and her life as a migrant in Australia inform her own experiences of 'doing life'. The many prizes, awards and academic and civil honours Jolley received reflect her importance as an author who helped to define Australia's identity during the late part of the twentieth century.

  Brian Dibble was given complete access to the writer's private papers and has spent more than a decade travelling the world to follow leads on the story of Elizabeth Jolley. Through his meticulous research and elegant prose, he details the life of the woman and captures the importance of the writer. This is a lyrical and readable biography, one that presents a world of family and pleasures, but is always infused somewhere with an unexpended sadness. (UWA Press)

  Judges' comments

  After many a lonely year writing at night on her legendary kitchen table, Elizabeth Jolley suddenly found herself famous in her 50s. With readers fascinated by her portraits of people on the margins the prizes piled up—yet the writer remained a mystery. Now, after a decade's international research and access to her papers, Brian Dibble tells us Jolley's story—and reveals the links between her marvellous gallery of misfits and the writer.

  2009 Fiction | 2009 Non-fiction | 2008 Winners | 2008 Fiction Shorts | 2008 Non-fiction Shorts | Home Page | Fishpond Books Australia | Top

• Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History - Jenny Hocking (Melbourne University Publishing) -

  Acclaimed biographer Jenny Hocking's Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History is the first contemporary and definitive biographical study of the former Labor Prime Minister.

  From his childhood in the fledging city of Canberra to his first appearance as Prime Minister (playing Neville Chamberlain), to his extensive war service in the Pacific and marriage to Margaret, the champion swimmer and daughter of Justice Wilfred Dovey, the biography draws on previously unseen archival material, extensive interviews with family and colleagues, and exclusive interviews with Gough Whitlam himself.

  Hocking's narrative skill and scrupulous research reveals an extraordinary and complex man, whose life is, in every way, formed by the remarkable events of previous generations of his family, and who would, in turn, change Australian political and cultural developments in the twentieth century. (Melbourne University Publishing)

  Judges' comments

  No stranger to the political biography, Hocking gives us a portrait of a man who has cast a longer shadow on Australia's history than most of his predecessors or successors as Prime Minister. There have been many books on Whitlam as Prime Minister—yet no detailed biographic account of his long and remarkable life, of his journey to the Lodge. Hocking combines fine writing with exemplary research including extended interviews with Whitlam and his family. A vivid and engaging book.


• The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island - Chloe Hooper (Penguin Books)-

  The Tall Man is the story of Palm Island, the tropical paradise where one morning Cameron Doomadgee swore at a policeman and forty minutes later lay dead in a watch-house cell. It is the story of that policeman, the tall, enigmatic Christopher Hurley who chose to work in some of the toughest and wildest places in Australia, and of the struggle to bring him to trial.

  A unique work of investigation, The Tall Man takes the reader into the courtroom, into the once notorious Queensland police force, and into the Indigenous communities of the Far North—places where people live lives like no others, have a relationship with the land like no others, and a history, culture and catastrophic present like no others. This is Australia, but an Australia that few of us have seen. The Tall Man is a story in luminous detail of two worlds clashing—and a haunting moral puzzle that no reader will forget. (Penguin Books)

  Judges' comments

  After a long history of deaths in custody one more occurs—to become the most notorious and contested of all. Within 40 minutes of swearing at a policeman, Cameron Domadgee is dead in the watch house—and soon Palm Island, somewhere between a tropical paradise and an open prison, is ablaze. The Tall Man is Christopher Hurley, a copper who prided himself on his work with indigenous communities and is now accused by the rioters of murder. Hooper's fine book remains reasoned and reflective amidst the tumult and the tragedy of a legal and racial controversy that continues to this day.

  2009 Fiction | 2009 Non-fiction | 2008 Winners | 2008 Fiction Shorts | 2008 Non-fiction Shorts | Home Page | Fishpond Books Australia | Top



• The Henson Case - David Marr (Text Publishing) -

  On Thursday 22 May 2008, Bill Henson, one of Australia's most significant artists, was preparing his new Sydney exhibition. It featured photographs of naked adolescent models. That afternoon, triggered by a newspaper column and the outrage of talkback radio hosts, a controversy exploded in response to these images.

  David Marr, one of Australia's leading journalists, tells the story of this dramatic public trial. The Henson Case is a remarkable investigative essay which draws on Marr's extensive interviews with Bill Henson and features eight photographs from the Sydney show. (Text Publishing)

  Judges' comments

  The uproar created by the exhibition of one photograph of a pubescent girl in a Sydney art gallery seemed to take Australia back decades into the good old days of moral panics and censorship wrangles. Yet it raised complex issues that divided the art world as deeply as public and political opinion. David Marr tries to reverse the ratio of heat and light with his calm account of a raging controversy.


• American Journeys - Don Watson (Random House) - Only in America—the most powerful democracy on earth, home to the best and worst of everything—are the most extreme contradictions possible. In a series of journeys acclaimed author Don Watson set out to explore the nation that has influenced him more than any other. Travelling by rail gave Watson a unique and seductive means of peering into the United States.

  Through the people he meets, Watson discovers the incomparable genius of America, its optimism, sophistication and riches—and also its darker side, its disavowal of failure and uncertainty. Beautifully written, with gentle power and sly humour, American Journeys investigates the meaning of the United States: its confidence, its religion, its heroes, its violence, and its material obsessions. The things that make America great are also its greatest flaws. (Random House)

  Judges' comments

  Whether it's Australia observed by D.H. Lawrence, England observed by Oscar Wilde (or Barry Humphries) or the United States by Don Watson, much of the most acute analysis comes from the visitor. Watson follows in de Tocqueville's footsteps but provides his own brand of scepticism and wit. Resisting the temptation to dwell on George W. Bush, Watson nonetheless writes a book to cause neo-conservatives acute discomfort. Watson's active role in Australian politics informs his observations—from the New Orleans of Cyclone Katrina to the beltway. What was clearly therapeutic for Watson is a delight to the reader

  2009 Fiction | 2009 Non-fiction | 2008 Winners | 2008 Fiction Shorts | 2008 Non-fiction Shorts | Home Page | Fishpond Books Australia | Top

2009 Fiction Winner & Shortlist

Winner

• The Boat - Nam Le (Penguin Books) - In 1979, Nam Le's family left Vietnam for Australia, an experience that inspires the first and last stories in The Boat. In between, however, Le's imagination lays claim to the world. The Boat takes us from a tourist in Tehran to a teenage hit man in Columbia; from an ageing New York artist to a boy coming of age in a small Victorian fishing town; from the city of Hiroshima just before the bomb is dropped to the haunting waste of the South China Sea in the wake of another war.

  Each story uncovers a raw human truth. Each story is absorbing and fully realised as a novel. Together, they make up a collection of astonishing diversity and achievement. (Penguin Books)

  Judges' comments

  Nam Le's collection of fiction, The Boat, which comprises short and long stories, artfully arrayed, is one of the most impressive debuts of recent years. The range of subjects and settings astonishes, as does the assurance and control with which the author immerses us in the stories that he makes from them. While the span of the fiction is cosmopolitan, each story is intensely attuned to the local circumstances that deform and enable the lives of these varied characters, animated as they are by love and despair. As shown especially in the final and title story, Nam Le combines almost reckless artistic boldness with highly disciplined craft.

Other Shortlisted

• The Pages - Murray Bail (Text Publishing)- At dawn, two women leave Sydney to drive over the Blue Mountains, into the dry outback landscape and the home of the late philosopher Wesley Antill.

  Erica, a philosopher herself, has been asked by her university to review Wesley's work, to read his notes—the pages. They are as Wesley left them, unread, untouched, at the rural property run by Wesley's sister Lindsey and brother Roger. Sophie, a psychoanalyst whose professional skills in listening seem to be confined to her patients, accompanies her friend, painting her toenails in the passenger seat and reeling off her opinions of the various qualities of her current man.

  In this wry literary novel ideas intersect with experience, city sophistication with rural landscape, philosophy with psychology, as each woman searches for her own truth, and the life, and philosophy, of Wesley Antill unfolds. (Text Publishing)

  Judges' comments

  In Murray Bail's latest novel, The Pages, a work of masterly compression, the death of a reclusive philosopher on a sheep station in western New South Wales leads his surviving brother and sister to call for an expert appraisal of his work. Thus amateur and professional, rural and urban, private and public realms are juxtaposed. An intense, but quiet drama develops in a series of sharply etched scenes, as secrecy and solitude, betrayal and faith are revealed in their tenacious power over individuals. Once again, Bail has made a fresh, unpredictable departure in, and renewal of his fiction.

  2009 Fiction | 2009 Non-fiction | 2008 Winners | 2008 Fiction Shorts | 2008 Non-fiction Shorts | Home Page | Fishpond Books Australia | Top


• People of the Book - Geraldine Brooks (Harper Collins) - People of the Book crosses continents and centuries to bring stories of hope amidst darkness, compassion amidst cruelty, all bound together by the discoveries made by a young Australian woman restoring an ancient Hebrew book.

  When Hanna Heath gets a call in the middle of the night in her Sydney home about a precious medieval manuscript that has been recovered from the smouldering ruins of war-torn Sarajevo, she knows she is on the brink of the experience of a lifetime. A renowned book conservator, she must now make her way to Bosnia to start work on restoring the Sarajevo Haggadah—a Jewish prayer book—to discover its secrets and piece together the story of its miraculous survival. But the trip will also set in motion a series of events that threaten to rock Hanna's orderly life, including her encounter with Ozren Karamen, the young librarian who risked his life to save the book.

  As meticulously researched as all of Brooks's previous work, People of the Book is a gripping and moving novel about war, art, love and survival. (Harper Collins)

  Judges' comments

  Based on the true story of the improbable survival of an ancient Jewish manuscript, the Sarajevo Haggadah, Geraldine Brooks's People of the Book, moves deftly from Australia to Bosnia, from the troubled present back to an equally violent and unstable past. This is a thriller that lightly wears its considerable scholarship at the same time as it takes us into the terrors of imperilled lives. The heroine—an Australian, if not an innocent abroad—is confronted in violent practice with cultural differences that she had only known in theory. Brooks writes eloquently of fortitude, devotion and acts of redeeming heroism.

  2009 Fiction | 2009 Non-fiction | 2008 Winners | 2008 Fiction Shorts | 2008 Non-fiction Shorts | Home Page | Fishpond Books Australia | Top


• Wanting - Richard Flanagan (Random House) - Bass Strait, 1839. A young Aboriginal girl, Mathinna, runs through the wet wallaby grass of a wild island at the edge of the world to get help for her dying father. Eighteen years later in Manchester, the great novelist Charles Dickens stars in a play that more and more resembles the frozen landscape of his own inner life. The most celebrated explorer of the age, Sir John Franklin, and his wife, Lady Jane, adopt Mathinna as an experiment to prove that the savage can be civilised—only to discover that within the most civilised can lurk the most savage. When Sir John disappears in the Arctic while searching for the fabled Northwest Passage, Lady Jane turns to Dickens for help.

  Inspired by historical events, Wanting is a haunting meditation about love, loss and the way life is finally determined never by reason, but only ever by wanting. (Random House)

  Judges' comments

  Richard Flanagan's historical novel, Wanting, maps two psychologically damaged societies, geographically distant, but intimately connected. They are colonial Van Diemen's Land under the governorship of Sir John Franklin and the London of Charles Dickens, who will be enlisted in strange circumstances to protect Franklin's reputation. This is also the story of the lamentable fate of the Aboriginal girl Mathinna, adopted by Franklin's wife, only to be cast into a cultural chasm. The historical backgrounds of the novel are sketched with exemplary imaginative daring: the idioms and mental landscapes of a lost world are strikingly brought back to us.


• Everything I Knew - Peter Goldsworthy (Penguin Books) - Peter Goldsworthy's high-octane, fourteen-year-old narrator Robbie Burns has creative energy to burn— physical and mental, sexual and literary, constructive and destructive. Coming of age in a small town peopled with big characters, he finds his new teacher Miss Peach the most unforgettable of all—his memories of her will haunt him for the rest of his life.

  Everything I Knew is at once laugh-out-loud funny and cry-out-loud tragic—farcical, horrifying, confronting— and bursting with originality. It challenges our determination to believe in the innocence of childhood and adolescence, and yet again shows Peter Goldsworthy to be a master of shifting tone. There is no novel quite like it in Australian literature. (Penguin Books)

  Judges' comments

  The conventional rite of passage story tracing the progress from adolescence to young adult becomes altogether bleaker and more engrossing than usual in Peter Goldsworthy's Everything I Knew. Besides skilfully depicting the society of a small Australian town—its communal life, its solitaries, the web of gossip, remembrance and speculation in which all are enmeshed— the novel also deals with a teenager's struggle for both sexual and intellectual awareness. The consequences of his dreams and desires will sadly and indelibly mark his future. The novel is a triumphant rendering of provincial life and the costs of escape from it.

  2009 Fiction | 2009 Non-fiction | 2008 Winners | 2008 Fiction Shorts | 2008 Non-fiction Shorts | Home Page | Fishpond Books Australia | Top


• One Foot Wrong - Sofie Laguna (Allen and Unwin) - A child is imprisoned in a house by her reclusive religious parents. Hester has never seen the outside world; her companions are Cat, Spoon, Door, Handle, Broom, and they all speak to her. Her imagination is informed by one book, an illustrated child's bible, and its imagery forms the sole basis for her capacity to make poetic connection.

  One day Hester takes a brave Alice in Wonderland trip into the forbidden outside (at the behest of Handle—‘turn me turn me’), and this overwhelming encounter with light and sky and sunshine is a marvel to her. From this moment on, Hester learns the concept of the secret, and not telling, and the world becomes something that fills her with feeling as if she is a vessel, empty and bottomless for need of it.

  The story told by Hester in One Foot Wrong is often dark and terrible, but the sheer blazing brilliance of her language and the imagery that illuminates the pages make this novel an exhilarating, enlightening and joyous act of faith. The stars shine brightest out of the deepest dark. (Allen and Unwin)

  Judges' comments

  Sofie Laguna's first novel for adults, One Foot Wrong, is one of the most starkly disturbing and original treatments of the lost child motif in Australian literature. This devastating tale of the harm done by parents to their daughter maintains an eerie equilibrium despite the cruelties that are related. The tormented but vivid imagination of the victim is registered in writing that is remarkable for its experimental daring. In a world of predators, innocence is terribly beset. It is the distinction of Laguna's novel that this is related without sensationalism, the better to harrow us.

  2009 Fiction | 2009 Non-fiction | 2008 Winners | 2008 Fiction Shorts | 2008 Non-fiction Shorts | Home Page | Fishpond Books Australia | Top


• 2009 Fiction | 2009 Non-fiction | 2008 Winners | 2008 Fiction Shorts | 2008 Non-fiction Shorts | Home Page | Fishpond Books Australia | Top


• The Good Parents - Joan London (Random House) - Maya de Jong, an eighteen-year-old country girl from the West, comes to live in Melbourne and starts an affair with her enigmatic boss, whose wife is dying of cancer. When Maya's parents, Toni and Jacob, arrive to stay with her, they are told by her housemate that Maya has gone away and no one knows where she is.

  With Maya's disappearance, the lives of all those close to her come into focus, to reveal the complexity of the ties that bind us to one another, to parents, children, siblings, friends and lovers.

  Pacy and enthralling, The Good Parents is at once a vision of contemporary Australia and a story as old as fairytales: that of a runaway girl. (Random House)

  Judges' comments

  In The Good Parents, Joan London examines with even-handed compassion the consequences for both parents and children when members of the older generation must face the constriction of an earlier, heedless freedom, and the younger must seek to find a way of their own. This is a novel of manifold abandonments, and of a compensating search for connection and expiation. London's stylistic clarity allows shocks and blessings to be more sharply illuminated. This both a caustic and consoling anatomy of modern Australian life, shadowed at once by myths of a carefree past and anxiety about where a future might be.

  2009 Fiction | 2009 Non-fiction | 2008 Winners | 2008 Fiction Shorts | 2008 Non-fiction Shorts | Home Page | Fishpond Books Australia | Top

2008 PM's Literary Award Winners

Non-fiction: Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers Philip Jones Fiction winner: The Zookeeper's War Steven Conte 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, Greer, 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 ), as the inaugural prize winners. The author
Steven Conte was born in Sydney in 1966 and raised in Guyra in rural New South Wales. After six years in a country boarding school, he worked for a year as a bank teller in Sydney before hitchhiking 3000 kilometres around Europe. He was a cleaner in Brussels and a waiter in Cornwall. He also lived for several months in Berlin, which later provided the initial inspiration for The Zookeeper’s War. Conte studied professional writing at the University of Canberra, as well as Australian literature (as a civilian) at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra. He has supported his writing by working as a barman, life model, taxi driver, public servant and book reviewer. 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. 2009 Fiction | 2009 Non-fiction | 2008 Winners | 2008 Fiction Shorts | 2008 Non-fiction Shorts | Home Page | Fishpond Books Australia | Top Non-Fiction Winner Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers Philip Jones Ochre and Rust takes Aboriginal artefacts from their museum shelves and traces their stories, revealing charged and nuanced moments of encounter in Australia’s frontier history. Philip Jones positions them at the centre of these gripping, poignant tales, transporting the reader into the heart of Australia's frontier zone. Ochre and Rust builds incrementally, resulting in a convincing new insight into our frontier past and the motives of its characters. (Wakefield Press) Non-fiction judging panel comments The book is written with elegance, simplicity and outstanding clarity. The insights drawn are through a true historian’s eye and the work illuminates larger debates about encounters between the first Australians and European settlers. 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. The author
Philip Jones is an historian interested in the Australian frontier and in the artistic and cultural activity engendered by it. Before writing his doctorate on the history of ethnographic collecting, he completed a law degree and majored in French history at the University of Adelaide. Appointed curator in the Anthropology Department at the South Australian Museum in 1984, he was a contributor to Peter Sutton’s seminal Dreamings: the Art of Aboriginal Australia (1988). Philip has curated a number of ethnographic and historical exhibitions, and designed the concept for the South Australian Museum’s Aboriginal Cultures Gallery. 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 Fiction winner:
The Zookeeper's War Steven Conte 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) Fiction judging panel comments
For its command of engrossing plot and vivid historical setting, for the ethical seriousness that informs its every incident and entanglement, for the freshness and vivacity of a new voice in Australian fiction, the judges recommend as the winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction a first novel: Stephen Conte’s The Zookeeper’s War.
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. 2009 Fiction | 2009 Non-fiction | 2008 Winners | 2008 Fiction Shorts | 2008 Non-fiction Shorts | Home Page | Fishpond Books Australia | Top

2008 Shortlist : Fiction