Showing all posts about Australian literature
2022 Australian Book Design Awards shortlist
19 April 2022
The 2022 Australian Book Design Awards shortlist, which can be viewed here (PDF), was announced last week. The awards celebrate the best of Australian book design, and the winners will be named at a ceremony taking place at The Craft & Co in Melbourne, on Friday 3 June 2022.
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Australian literature, awards, design
Entries open for 2022 Queensland Literary Awards
12 April 2022
Entries are open for the 2022 Queensland Literary Awards until Friday 29 April 2022. A total of A$125,000 in prize money across eight categories is on offer. In addition, there are four development awards for unpublished manuscripts, and Queensland writers only, valued at A$62,000.
The Queensland Literary Awards showcase outstanding authors from across Australia, celebrating emerging and established authors across a range of genres. State Library of Queensland is proud to manage the awards in collaboration with sponsors, the literary community, and industry partners. On offer are eight national prizes for outstanding published books by Australian writers, illustrators and creators. This includes the $25,000 Queensland Premier’s Award for a work of State Significance which highlights a uniquely Queensland story.
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Government support for Australian writers declines
7 April 2022
The Australian federal budget was handed down last week, but there was little in it for writers. Funding for the arts sector is being reduced by almost twenty-percent, with the RISE Fund, which was established to support the sector during the pandemic, scheduled to be phased out.
Unlike the performing arts, which benefit from a dedicated funding stream inside the Australia Council, literature has enjoys very little federal support. In 2020-21, the Australia Council gave out just $4.7 million in grant funding to literature – 2.4% of the total funding pool last year. In contrast, the major performing arts organisations received $120 million.
The funding situation serves to draw attention to just how little writers earn. Sydney based author Charlotte Wood, speaking at a recent parliamentary hearing, set things out in pretty blunt terms:
Wood told a House of Representatives inquiry into Australia’s cultural sector that “writers themselves are in absolutely dire economic difficulty”. She cited figures that literary writers’ annual income from their books was just $4,000 a year.
Four thousand dollars a year? What is anyone meant to conclude from that? Writing is indeed poorly looked upon in Australia.
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Australian literature, writing
The 2022 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards shortlist
5 April 2022
The 2022 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards shortlist was announced today, and sees fifty-eight works of writing, spread across ten categories, vie for prize money worth $285,000:
- Christina Stead Prize for Fiction ($40,000)
- Douglas Stewart Prize for Nonfiction ($40,000)
- Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry ($30,000)
- Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature ($30,000)
- Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature ($30,000)
- Multicultural NSW Award ($20,000)
- Indigenous Writers’ Prize, presented biennially ($30,000)
- UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing ($5,000)
- Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting ($30,000)
- Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting ($30,000)
The Shut Ins by Katherine Brabon, TAKE CARE by Eunice Andrada, Dropbear by Evelyn Araluen, Coming of Age in the War on Terror by Randa Abdel-Fattah, After Story by Larissa Behrendt, and Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray by Anita Heiss, are among contenders for the prizes.
Winners will be named on Monday 16 May 2022, being the commencement of the Sydney Writers’ Festival.
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Entries for the 2022 Banjo Prize are open
4 April 2022
The Banjo Prize gives Australian writers the opportunity to have their manuscript published, and entries for the 2022 Banjo Prize are open until Friday 27 May 2022.
Past recipients include journalist Tim Slee, winner of the inaugural prize in 2018 with Taking Tom Murray Home, and Sydney based Dinuka McKenzie in 2020 with The Torrent. The shortlist will be announced on Tuesday 6 September 2022.
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Australian literature, awards, Banjo Prize
The 2022 Stella Prize shortlist
3 April 2022
The shortlist for the 2022 Stella Prize was announced on Thursday 31 March 2022. The six titles, the work of Australian women and non-binary writers, along with an excerpt of the judges’ comments for each book are as follows:
Bodies of Light, by Jennifer Down.
This is an ambitious novel, spanning decades and locales, that sees Down demonstrate her imaginative range and take risks following the success of her previous two books. The result is a daring and compelling work, suffused with pathos and an impressive degree of empathic vulnerability.
Dropbear, by Evelyn Araluen.
Dropbear is a breathtaking collection of poetry and short prose which arrests key icons of mainstream Australian culture and turns them inside out, with malice aforethought. Araluen’s brilliance sizzles when she goes on the attack against the kitsch and the cuddly: against Australia’s fantasy of its own racial and environmental innocence.
Homecoming, by Elfie Shiosaki.
Homecoming is both a genre-defying book, and a deeply respectful ode to the persistence of Noongar people in the face of colonisation and its afterlives… Shiosaki has delivered a work of poetic and narrative genius and can be read either as an ensemble of poems or as a single piece that moves seamlessly between the elegiac and the joyful.
No Document, by Anwen Crawford.
No Document is a longform poetic essay that considers the ways we might use an experience of grief to continue living, creating, and reimagining the world we live in with greater compassion and honour… This work is a complex, deeply thought, and deeply felt ode to friendship and collaboration.
Stone Fruit, by Lee Lai.
Lee Lai’s Stone Fruit is a moving graphic novel in which queer couple, Bron and Ray, find themselves at a tense crossroads in their relationship. Throughout scenes rendered in Lai’s signature art style – simple lines and a muted blue and grey colour palette – and featuring spare, perfectly articulated dialogue… Stone Fruit beautifully reflects a tender domesticity that is affecting and atmospheric.
Andrada’s collection adroitly combines the personal, the political, and the geopolitical, narrated by a voice that is at once hip, witty, and deeply serious. Andrada has the imaginative ability to move between the memories of poet-narrators, historical asides, reflections on the nature of race and feminism in Australia, and questions of colonisation both locally and in the Philippines. Formally remarkable, stylistically impressive, and often surprising, TAKE CARE is a collection that understands the ways in which ‘There are things we must kill / so we can live to celebrate.’
If the Stellas are about finding writing that mixes it up and shakes it around a bit, then the contest for this year’s Prize is going to be fascinating.
In the past novels, non-fiction, biographies, and memoirs have won, but in 2022 works of poetry have a better than average chance of prevailing, with the work of three poets in the shortlist.
Then of course there is Stone Fruit, Lee Lai’s graphic novel. Bring on Thursday 28 April, the day the winner is announced I say.
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Australian literature, literary awards, Stella Prize
Self-portrait by Andrew Pippos, for Openbook magazine
30 March 2022
Sydney based Australian author Andrew Pippos, whose debut 2020 novel Lucky’s was shortlisted for the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award, writing for the State Library of NSW’s Openbook magazine, an excerpt from an upcoming new book of his, I believe.
My father enjoyed telling people he’d never read a book in his life, as if this were a detail you might remember about him, as if it were some great stroke of luck, like never being issued with a speeding ticket.
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Andrew Pippos, Australian literature
The Best Australian Yarn Short Story Competition 2022
30 March 2022
The Best Australian Yarn is another generous local literary award currently accepting submissions for short stories of between 1500 – 2500 words.
Short stories have the power to transport us to another world, they educate and entertain us, and can make the everyday seem extraordinary.
A collaboration between The West Australian and the Minderoo Foundation, entries for The Best Australian Yarn are open until Tuesday 31 May 2022, to Australians everywhere aged twelve or over.
A total of A$50,000 in prize money is on offer. The overall winner will be awarded A$30,000, the West Australian winner A$4,000, Regional Australia winner $3,000, the Youth winner will received $2,000 and mentoring opportunities, while the nine shortlisted entrants will received A$1,000 each.
In addition, the winner of the Readers’ Choice award, as determined by a public vote, will receive A$2,000. The longlist, consisting of fifty works, will be announced in August 2022.
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Australian literature, literary awards
The Stella Prize and the difference it has made
21 March 2022
The winners of Australian literary award, the Stella Prize, which recognises the work of Australian women and non-binary writers, talk about how the now decade old prize transformed their writing careers, and Australian literature.
Clare Wright is an academic at La Trobe University, and she says winning the Stella was invaluable to her burgeoning career as an author. “Stella really gave me a platform, and it gave me a microphone, and people wanted to hear the things that I had to say – about not only the subject of that book, but also about women in history, about history writing, about gender relations more broadly,” she says.
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Australian literature, literary awards, Stella Prize
Do large book reviews result in more book sales?
4 March 2022
Since 2012 the Stella Count has been analysing the number, and length, of book reviews published across twelve Australian publications. These periodicals include regional and national newspapers, magazines, and journals.
Reporting of the counts for the two most recent years — being 2019 and 2020 — has been delayed by COVID imposed restrictions, but they have shown for the first time that reviews of books written by women, has exceeded the fifty percent mark for the first time since the Stella Count commenced.
While on the surface it appears there is finally some parity in book reviews between the genders, being published in the twelve surveyed publications, there is a significant caveat. This comes down to the length of the reviews. While more than half of small and medium sized reviews critiqued the work of women in the 2019 and 2020 period, when it came to large reviews, books by men remained in the majority.
As far as I can tell, the Stella Count only looks at print publications, though I assume these reviews are cross-posted to their online counterparts. While using established periodicals makes for a consistent benchmark to measure comparisons over time, I’m guessing these numbers would be quite different if social media reviews were — somehow — to be included.
The value — and prestige even — of large reviews cannot, and should not, be dismissed, but I wonder what the conversion rate, if you like, of large reviews to book purchases is, compared to small and medium reviews. Research tell us people take more time to assimilate longer articles (consisting of a thousand words or more), than they do shorter, or small and medium, sized write-ups.
This is possibly because large reviews contain more information, and readers perhaps feel better informed if they are making a decision to spend money. If I were making a big purchase, such as a car, I would read as many long-form, in depth articles, about the vehicle I was interested in as I could, but buying a novel would be different.
I tend to read several small book reviews published on social media, and possibly a couple of small to medium periodical articles, before deciding what to do. That way I’m able to get a range of opinions, and quickly, rather than relying on the thoughts of a single reviewer.
Might others of the TL;DR generation agree with me?
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