She is the Earth wins NSW Premiers Literary Awards book of year 2024

Showing all posts tagged: literary awards

She is the Earth wins NSW Premiers Literary Awards book of year 2024

22 May 2024

She is the Earth, a work of verse, written by Yankunytjatjara (South Australia) poet Ali Cobby Eckermann, was named the NSW Premiers Literary Awards book of the year, on Monday 20 May 2024.

Award judges were unstinting in their praise of Eckermann’s writing:

She is the Earth is a stunning verse novel that takes the reader on a journey of love and grief, through land, sky and water, and all places in between. This surreal creation story contains many other stories and worlds within the whole. A story of breath and breadth, it is both other-worldly and inner-worldly, with the distinction between the two realms fuzzy and flowing across each other to astonishing effect.

2024 Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIAs) winners

16 May 2024

The 2024 Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIAs) were held last week, on Thursday 9 May. The ABIAs are considered the Australian book publishing industry’s night of nights. A book-ish version of the Oscars, if you will.

Award winners include Pip Williams, with her novel The Bookbinder of Jericho, in the General Fiction Book of the Year category. I’ve read the predecessor title, The Dictionary of Lost Words, a story with the publishing of the first edition of the Oxford Dictionary, as a backdrop.

Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, by Anna Funder, won Biography Book of the Year, while Welcome to Sex, written by Melissa Kang and Yumi Stynes, which garnered some controversy last year, took out Book of the Year for Older Children (ages 13+).

The full list of winners can be seen here.

RELATED CONTENT

Australian literature, literary awards

The 2024 Miles Franklin longlist for Australian novel writing

16 May 2024

Well this is exciting, the longlist for the 2024 Miles Franklin literary award for Australian novel writing, has been published. Not sure how I missed the official announcement, but I went searching for a date the longlist would be unveiled, and instead found the longlist itself:

Only Sound Remains, by Hossein Asgari
Wall, by Jen Craig
Strangers at the Port, by Lauren Aimee Curtis
Anam, by André Dao
The Bell of the World, by Gregory Day
Edenglassie, by Melissa Lucashenko
The Sitter, by Angela O’Keefe
Hospital, by Sanya Rushdi
Stone Yard Devotional, by Charlotte Wood
Praiseworthy, by Alexis Wright

Praiseworthy, which won the 2024 Stella Prize, and Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, are notable inclusions. I loved Wood’s 2019 novel, The Weekend, and I guess a few other people also, as the film option was sold a couple of years ago, and a stage adaptation was also made.

I can’t — as yet — find a date the shortlist will be announced. Come to that, I couldn’t even find a date the longlist would be published, I just seemed to stumble upon it last night. I can’t figure out why they need to be so elusive about these things. The Miles Franklin is after all one of the highlights of the Australian literary calendar.

Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright, wins the 2024 Stella Prize

3 May 2024

Queensland/Waanyi author Alexis Wright, has been named winner of the 2024 Stella Prize for Australian literature, for works by women and non-binary writers, with Praiseworthy, a novel set in the north of Australia.

In a small town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors, a crazed visionary seeks out donkeys as the solution to the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife seeks solace from his madness in following the dance of butterflies and scouring the internet to find out how she can seek repatriation for her Aboriginal/Chinese family to China. One of their sons, called Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide. The other, Tommyhawk, wishes his brother dead so that he can pursue his dream of becoming white and powerful.

Beejay Silcox, chair of the 2024 Stella judges panel, described Wright’s novel, which was published in 2023, as a great Australian novel, and mighty in every regard:

Praiseworthy is mighty in every conceivable way: mighty of scope, mighty of fury, mighty of craft, mighty of humour, mighty of language, mighty of heart.

Praiseworthy is not only a great Australian novel — perhaps the great Australian novel — it is also a great Waanyi novel. And it is written in the wild hope that, one day, all Australian readers might understand just what that means. I do not understand. Not yet. But I can feel history calling to me in these pages. Calling to all of us. Imagine if we listened.

Praiseworthy is an epic novel. Figuratively. And literally. With a page count of over seven-hundred, I’ve so far not been game enough to pick it up. I’m struggling to read novels with less than half as many pages. This is also Wright’s second Stella win, her 2017 novel Tracker, took out the 2018 prize.

The 2024 Stella Prize for Australian literature shortlist

12 April 2024

And talking of Australian fiction, the shortlist for the 2024 Stella Prize, the Australian literary award that recognises the work of Australian women and non-binary writers, was unveiled last week. The following six titles were selected:

Abandon Every Hope: Essays for the Dead, by Hayley Singer
Body Friend, by Katherine Brabon
Feast, by Emily O’Grady
Hospital, by Sanya Rushdi (Translated by Arunava Sinha)
Praiseworthy, by Alexis Wright
The Swift Dark Tide, by Katia Ariel

I’m a big fan of literary prize lists, be they long or short, given they’re always a great source of reading ideas, since I only sometimes have my finger on the pulse of literary happenings. In the same way Triple J’s Hottest 100 is great for new music discovery, for those unable to listen to music 24/7.

Good to see Melbourne based author Katherine Brabon listed with her latest novel. I really enjoyed her 2021 novel, The Shut-ins. I highly recommend adding it your TBR list, if you’ve not yet read it.

And for reference, here is the Stella’s longlist, which was published in early March. The 2024 winner of the Stella Prize will be named on Thursday 2 May 2024.

Jon Fosse wins 2023 Nobel Prize for literature

6 October 2023

Norwegian author and playwright Jon Fosse has been awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize for literature, for what judges describe as “his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable.”

Fosse’s work spans over seventy novels, poems, children’s books, essays and theatre plays, which have been translated to over fifty languages. Fosse is one of the most played contemporary playwrights on earth, having being set up on over a thousand stages worldwide. His minimalist and deeply introspective plays, with language often bordering on lyric prose and poetry, have been noted to represent a modern continuation of the dramatic tradition established by Henrik Ibsen in the 19th century. Fosses work has often been placed within the tradition of post-dramatic theatre.

RELATED CONTENT

Jon Fosse, literary awards, literature

The 2023 ARA Historical Novel Prize shortlists

27 September 2023

The shortlists for the 2023 ARA Historical Novel Prize were announced earlier today. The award is presented in two categories, Adult, and Children and Young Adult. The three finalists in each category are as follows:

Adult

Children and Young Adult

Presented in association with the ARA Group, the ARA Historical Novel Prize, which is awarded annually, recognises excellence in historical fiction writing by Australian and New Zealand authors. The winners of both award categories will be named on Thursday 19 October 2023.

This year’s shortlist also marks the second year in a row that Katrina Nannestad has featured on the shortlists. Nannestad went on to win the Children and Young Adult category in 2022 with her book Rabbit, Soldier, Angel, Thief. Will it be two a row for her this year?

Islands of Secrets by Stefanie Koens wins 2023 Banjo Prize for unpublished Australian fiction

26 September 2023

Stefanie Koens has been named winner of the 2023 Banjo Prize for unpublished Australian fiction, with her manuscript titled Islands of Secrets, a work of historic fiction that spans several decades:

Shortly before Christmas in 2018, schoolteacher Tess McCarthy flies to Western Australia’s remote Abrolhos Islands in search of answers — both to the infamous Batavia shipwreck and her personal family crises. In 1628, Saskia, a young Dutchwoman, boards Batavia with her family, bound for a new life in the East Indies — only for her world to first collide with Aris Jansz, the ship’s reluctant under surgeon. Tess, Saskia and Aris carry the baggage of past losses and the uncertainty of their futures. And, in the most unlikely circumstances, they find qualities that span centuries: faith, acceptance, and love.

As part of the prize, Koens will be awarded a publishing contract from HarperCollins Publishers for Islands of Secrets.

Looking After Country With Fire wins 2023 Karajira Award

8 September 2023

Looking After Country With Fire, book cover

Book cover of Looking After Country With Fire, by Victor Steffensen.

Looking After Country With Fire, published by Hardie Grant in 2022, written by Indigenous Australian writer and filmmaker Victor Steffensen, and illustrated by Far North Queensland based visual arts teacher Sandra Steffensen, has won the 2023 Karajira Award for Children’s Literature.

Presented by the Wilderness Society, the Karajira Award celebrates excellence in children’s literature by Aboriginal or Torres Strait Island authors and/or illustrators, who honour connection to Country and tell stories exploring land, community, culture, and language.

Looking After Country With Fire explores methods and systems of fire management used by Indigenous Australians, over thousands of years, to manage, and regenerate the land:

Mother Nature has a language. If we listen, and read the signs in the land, we can understand it. For thousands of years, First Nations people have listened and responded to the land and made friends with fire, using this knowledge to encourage plants and seeds to flourish, and creating beautiful places for both animals and people to live.

The 2023 Banjo Prize shortlist for unpublished Australian fiction

7 September 2023

The shortlist for the 2023 Banjo Prize, for unpublished Australian fiction, was announced on Tuesday 5 September 2023, and includes the manuscripts of five writers:

Lou and I, by Anna Fursland
Islands of Secrets, by Stefanie Koens
The Shores Between, by A’Mhara McKey
The Sister Tree, by Natasha Neary
Katherine Papadakis is Figuring Things Out, by Christina Pontos

The winner of the prize, which is presented annually by HarperCollins Australia, will have the opportunity to see their work published. The winner will be named on Tuesday 26 September 2023.

« older posts

newer posts »