The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards 2021 shortlist

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The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards 2021 shortlist

25 October 2021

The shortlist for the (Australian) Prime Minister’s Literary Awards was unveiled last week. The awards recognise a broad spectrum of Australian writing, including fiction, non-fiction, poetry, Australian history, young adult, and children’s literature. A generous A$80,000 prize (tax free) is on offer to the overall winner, a nice shot in the arm for someone’s future writing endeavours, while all shortlisted authors receive $5,000 each.

Andrew Pippos, Evie Wyld, and Amanda Lohrey, are among contenders in the fiction category. The winner will be announced in early December, 2021.

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Australian writing, literature

Boundless Indigenous Writer’s Mentorship 2022

22 October 2021

Applications are open for the 2022 Boundless Indigenous Writer’s Mentorship, a partnership between Writing NSW and Text Publishing. Submissions close on Monday 22 November 2021.

The mentorship is awarded annually to an unpublished Indigenous writer who has made substantial progress on a work of fiction or non-fiction. The intention of the program is to support the writer to develop their manuscript and to facilitate a pathway to publication.

From the desk of your favourite author

22 October 2021

Kill Your Darlings asked Australian authors about their writing routines, and to share images of their working spaces.

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Australian writing, literature

Common People, by Tony Birch

13 September 2021

Common People (published by University of Queensland Press, July 2017), is a collection of short stories by award winning Australian author Tony Birch. Other of his works, including Blood was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2012, while The White Girl, was named winner of the 2020 NSW Premier’s Award for Indigenous Writing.

Through this collection of short stories, Birch casts a light on facets of day to day life most of us don’t see, or prefer to ignore. Birch’s characters are mainly Indigenous Australians who may find themselves on society’s fringes because of health, race, unemployment, or addition issues. But their lot is not hopeless, as they strive to persevere and overcome.

The Man From Snowy River was Aboriginal: Anthony Sharwood

8 September 2021

In his new book, The Brumby Wars, Australian journalist and radio and TV presenter Anthony Sharwood contends there is “overwhelming evidence” the subject of Banjo Patterson’s 1890 poem The Man from Snowy River, was Aboriginal.

Patterson’s iconic verse recounts the story of a lone rancher who succeeds in capturing a racehorse who had absconded with a herd of brumbies, or wild horses. Sharwood says only indigenous ranchers worked in the area where the poem is set.

He has studied the topography of the poem: “the pine-covered ridges,” the flint stones, the “ragged and craggy battlements” of Kosciuszko, and says they all point to the location of the poem around Byadbo in the New South. The Welsh side, not the Victorian. Byadbo is the only part of the mountains with “anything remotely resembling pine-covered ridges,” he writes, and the only place with flint rocks and jagged peaks, rather than smooth ones. If the trip happened there, it is an area where all the ranchers were indigenous, he says.

Sharwood believes Patterson presented the rancher as being of European descent to appease the literary tastes of the late nineteenth century.

After Story, by Larissa Behrendt

8 September 2021

In After Story (published by University of Queensland Press, July 2021), the latest novel by Sydney based Australian author Larissa Behrendt, Jasmine, an Indigenous lawyer, is feeling rundown after an intense case. Della, her mother, meanwhile is struggling following the death of her aunt, and a former partner.

Jasmine believes it would do Della – who’s barely ventured beyond the small rural town where she lives – the world of good to go on an overseas holiday. An avid reader, Jasmine has always wanted to see the places where writers such as Jane Austen, and Virginia Woolf lived and worked, so they set off for England.

Jasmine has hopes the holiday will restore the somewhat neglected mother-daughter relationship. However the disappearance of a child in London’s Hampstead Heath, forces Jasmine and Della to relive the trauma the family suffered when Jasmine’s older sister vanished twenty-five years earlier.

I Shot the Devil, by Ruth McIver

7 September 2021

You know what they say about returning to your past, don’t you? Most people think it’s a bad idea. But for Erin Sloane, a crime reporter, the opportunity to write an investigative article about murders committed twenty-years ago, might be the career break she’s looking for. There’s a few problems though.

Erin knew of the two victims, while her father was one of the police officers who originally investigated the crime. Stories of devil worship and satanic killings were rife in the aftermath of the murders, and the case was eventually closed after police laid charges. But was that really the end of the matter?

It seems though Erin doesn’t quite realise how much she’s bitten off, in taking on the story. Dark secrets from the past, including many of hers, stand to be dragged into the light. Such is the premise of I Shot the Devil (published by Hachette Australia, September 2021), by Melbourne based author Ruth McIver.

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