Book Award Tragic

Australian Tale Wins Llewellyn Rhys Literary Prize

2009-12-01T15:24:00.000-08:00

Evie Wyld, 29, has won the 2009 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for her book After the Fire, a Still Small Voice. Wyld, whose family are from Australia, lives in Stockwell in south east London, and helps run a small independent bookshop in Peckham.

The Llewellyn Rhys is the second-oldest literary award in the UK. The first winner, in 1942, was Michael Richey's , Sunk by a Mine .

The award has helped launch the careers of VS Naipaul (1958 - The Mystic Masseur), poet Andrew Motion ( 1984 - Dangerous Play), Margaret Drabble ( 1966 - The Millstone) and David Hare (1975 Knuckle, Sarah Hall 2007 , The Carhullan Army) and Matthew Kneale (1992 - Sweet Thames). And, for those who suspect that Melvyn Bragg has been a literary player for ever, quite right, he won the priize way back in 1969 for Without a City Wall. Jeanette Winterson's classic, The Passion, won in 1987. The 2008 winner was The Secret Life of Words by Henry Hitchings.

After the Fire, a Still Small Voice tells the story of Frank, who is attempting to build a new life for himself away from his violent past in a small coastal community in eastern Australia. Wyld's first novel beat shortlisted works from Booker prize and Orange Prize-winning authors, Aravind Adiga (Between the Assassinations ) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (The Thing Around Your Neck). Other contenders included Waste by Tristram Stuart, Six Months in Sudan by James Maskalyk and The Striped World by Emma Jones.

After the Fire, a Still Small Voice by Evie Wyld - It's not just about generations of men affected by war. It's about men everywhere. For any man who's ever felt like an emotional fence post, this is the book for you. I enjoyed it enormously. - Giles Foden

'Intense. Wyld is an absolutely brilliant prose writer. The first chapter is so acute, poetic but not self-consciously literary and all in service to the characters. A fantastically-written novel. But gripping, it works almost as a mystery. Incredibly realistic about men and the trouble they have expressing themselves. - Boyd Hilton, BBC Radio 5 Live

Splendid. There's a point where you realise if you're confident in a writer. For me it was page five. From that point on, I knew I would go anywhere with this author. The book has an incredible, quiet confidence in its own prose. It never raises its voice. I just ate it up. There were two brilliant Australian novels I read this year by Tim Winton and Steve Toltz, which got a huge amount of attention. This is equally good. A masterful piece of writing.- Joel Morris, BBC Radio 5 live

About the book - After the breakdown of a turbulent relationship, Frank moves from Canberra to a shack on the east coast once owned by his grandparents. He wants to put his violent past and bad memories of his father behind him. In this small coastal community, he tries to reinvent himself as someone capable of regular conversation and cordial relations. He even starts to make friends, including a precocious eight year old named Sal. But it is not that easy for him to let go of the past. Leon is the child of European immigrants to Australia, living in Sydney. His father loves Australia for becoming their home when their own country turned hostile during the Second World War. His mother is not so comforted by suburban life in a cake shop. As Leon grows up in the 50s and 60s, his watches as his parents' lives are broken after his father volunteers to fight in the Korean War. More

About the Author
Evie Wyld grew up in Australia and London. She is a graduate of the creative writing MA at Goldsmiths University. Her stories have been published in Goldfish: An Anthology of Writing from Goldsmiths, the National Maritime Museum anthology Sea Stories and in the 3:AM Magazine anthology, London, New York, Paris. Her debut novel is After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, published in August 2009. She lives in London.

In a rare starred review, US trade mag, Publishers Weekly (29/6/09) had this to say about After the Fire, a Still Small Voice...

"One of Granta’s New Voices of 2008, debut novelist Wyld chronicles the stories of two Australian men and the shards of trauma that have made up both lives. Frank and Leon live parallel lives: the narratives begin with young Leon’s father heading to the Korean War, and, 40 years later, with an adult Frank holing up in a decrepit beachfront shack. Leon’s father returns from Korea badly damaged, having been in a prison camp, and soon runs away, with Leon’s mother giving chase. Later Leon is drafted and faces in Vietnam horrors similar to those that traumatized his father. Meanwhile, in the present day, Frank is starting over after his girlfriend leaves him. Making do in the family shack, he befriends his neighbors and threads together a passable existence in spite of remembered tragedies, anger at his shadowy father and a spate of local children gone missing. The two narrative threads stay separate until the final pages, and, refreshingly, their connection isn’t overplayed. At times startling, Wyld’s book is ruminative and dramatic, with deep reserves of empathy colored by masculine rage and repression. (Aug.)"

2009 Other Shortlisted
Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga - The dazzling new book from the winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize: one of the summer's most eagerly anticipated works of fiction. In "Between the Assassinations", Aravind Adiga brings to life a chorus of distinctive Indian voices, all inhabitants in the fictional town of Kittur...His new book sizzles with the same humor, anger, and humanity that characterized "The White Tiger". On India's south-western coast, between Goa and Calicut, lies Kittur - a small, nondescript every town. Aravind Adiga acts as our guide to the town, mapping overlapping lives of Kittur's residents. Here, an illiterate Muslim boy working at the train station finds himself tempted by an Islamic terrorist; a bookseller is arrested for selling a copy of "The Satanic Verses"; a rich, spoiled, half-caste student decides to explode a bomb in school; a sexologist has to find a cure for a young boy who may have AIDS. More

The Striped World by Emma Jones -With their tidal imagination, the poems in this debut collection sweep between old worlds and new, seeking the lost and recovering the found among shipwrecks, underwater zoos and discovered lands. Emma Jones brings her inventive worlds dramatically to life in a series of vividly distilled meetings: of settlers and indigenous peoples, of seawaters and shore, of humanity and the wilds of nature. Here tigers stalk the captive and the free, while Death encounters his own double and Daphne tells of her new leaves, 'They sing, and make the world.' The same might be said of the poems themselves in this restless and memorable search for belonging. More

The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -From Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Orange Prize-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun, come twelve dazzling stories in which she turns her penetrating eye on the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Nigeria and the West. In 'A Private Experience,' a medical student hides from a violent riot with a poor Muslim woman whose dignity and faith force her to confront the realities and fears she's been pushing away. In 'Tomorrow Is Too Far,' a woman unlocks the devastating secret that surrounds her brother's death. The young mother at the center of 'Imitation' finds her comfortable life threatened when she learns that her husband back in Lagos has moved his mistress into their home. And the title story depicts the choking loneliness of a Nigerian girl who moves to an America that turns out to be nothing like the country she expected; More

Waste by Tristram Stuart - With shortages, volatile prices and nearly one billion people hungry, the world has a food problem – or thinks it does. Farmers, manufacturers, supermarkets and consumers in North America and Europe discard up to half of their food– enough to feed all the world’s hungry at least three times over. Forests are destroyed and nearly one tenth of the West’s greenhouse gas emissions are released growing food that will never be eaten. While affluent nations throw away food through neglect, in the developing world crops rot because farmers lack the means to process, store and transport them to market. But there could be surprisingly painless remedies for what has become one of the world’s most pressing environmental and social problems. Travelling from Yorkshire to China, from Pakistan to Japan, and introducing us to foraging pigs. More

Six Months in Sudan by James Maskalyk - James Maskalyk set out for the contested border town of Abyei, Sudan in 2007 as Medecins Sans Frontieres' newest medical doctor in the field. Equipped with his experience as an emergency physician in a Western hospital and his desire to understand the hardest parts of the world, Maskalyk's days were spent treating malnourished children, fending off a measles epidemic and staying out of the soldiers' way. Worn raw in the struggle to meet overwhelming needs with inadequate resources, he returned home six months later more affected by the experience, the people and the place than he had anticipated. Six Months in Sudan began as a blog that he wrote from his hut in Sudan in an attempt to bring his family and friends closer to his hot, hot days. It is a story about humans: the people of Abyei who suffer its hardship because it is their home, and the doctors, nurses and countless volunteers who leave their homes with the tools to make another's easier to endure. With great hope and insight, Maskalyk illuminates a distant place - its heat, its people, its poverty, its war - to inspire possibilities for action. More

2009 Judges

The judges for the 2009 prize are Louise Doughty (Chair), Joanna Kavenna and Stephen Knight.
Louise Doughty is a novelist, playwright and critic. She is the author of five novels; Crazy Paving, Dance With Me, Honey-Dew, Fires in the Dark and Stone Cradle, and one work of non-fiction A Novel in a Year. She has also written five plays for radio.

She has judged many prizes for emerging authors, including the Orange Award for New Writers, and was a judge for the 2008 Man Booker Prize for fiction. Her new novel, Whatever You Love, will be published in 2010.

Joanna Kavenna grew up in various parts of Britain, and has also lived in the USA, France, Germany, Scandinavia and the Baltic States. Her first book The Ice Museum was about travelling in the far North. Her most recent book, Inglorious, was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 2006/7 and won the 2008 Orange Award for New Writers.
Kavenna’s writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, the Guardian and Observer, the Times Literary Supplement, the International Herald Tribune, the Spectator and the Telegraph, among other publications

Stephen Knight read English at Jesus College, Oxford, after which he studied at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School to become a freelance director with a particular interest in new writing. He is the author of Flowering Limbs, which was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the TS Eliot Prize; Dream City Cinema, also shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize; and, for younger readers, Sardines and Other Poems.

He has also published a novel, Mr Schnitzel, which won the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year in 2001. His fiction and poetry reviews appear in the TLS and the Independent on Sunday.

Historic Winners 2009 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize

Award Tragic Note: The information below is reproduced from th

The winner of the 2008 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize was The Secret Life of Words by Henry Hitchings (John Murray)
Book Award Tragic Blog Boyz Rule BritLit Highbrow Awards 2008. OK?

The 2008 shortlist in full:
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
The Broken Word by Adam Foulds
The Secret Life of Words by Henry Hitchings- Winner
The Bloody White Baron by James Palmer
God's Own Country by Ross Raisin
Selling Your Father's Bones by Brian Schofield
WILD WOMEN OF THE CARHULLAN ARMY SEIZE JOHN
LLEWELLYN RHYS PRIZE 2006/7
Sarah Hall (right) has been awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 2006/7 for her novel The Carhullan Army.

The novel, published by Faber and Faber, is a compelling picture of Britain in the near future. Ravaged by a mysterious war, economically ruined and controlled by the faceless‘Authority,’ Britain has become a forbidding and desolate place. The narrator of the story, known simply as Sister, decides to join the self-sufficient and formidable female-only community on the remote farm of Carhullan as they struggle for survival. Suzi Feay, chair of judges, commented: “Sarah Hall's fierce, uncomfortable story of a radical dissident group holed up in the far
north after the total breakdown of society seemed to all the judges to be the book that
tackled the most urgent and alarming questions of today. The quality of The Carhullan Army was simply unignorable. We need writers with Hall's humanity and insight.”

The 2006/7 shortlisted books were:
Blood Kin – Ceridwen Dovey -left (Atlantic Books)
The Carhullan Army– Sarah Hall (Faber and Faber)
Inglorious – Joanna Kavenna (Faber and Faber)
The Wild Places– Robert Macfarlane (Granta Books)
Joshua Spassky – Gwendoline Riley (Jonathan Cape)
Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing in Iraq – Rory Stewart (Picador)
The short list and eventual winners were selected by Professor Colin Nicholson and Professor Laura Marcus.
The advisory committee for the awards included:

Best-selling crime novelist Ian Rankin
Director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival Catherine Lockerbie
Journalist and broadcaster James Naughtie
Best-selling author Alexander McCall-Smith
2005/6 prize winner
The winner of the 2005 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize was Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala, published by John Murray. Publisher Roland Philips collected the award on behalf of the author, who was unable to attend the ceremony at City Inn, Westminster, on 6 December 2006 (the prize is awarded retrospectively).
2005/6 shortlist

Tokyo Cancelled by Rana Dasgupta (Fourth Estate)
The Short Day Dying by Peter Hobbs (Faber and Faber)
Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala (John Murray)
The State of the Prisons by Sinéad Morrissey (Carcanet Press)
Newfoundland by Rebbecca Ray (Hamish Hamilton)
GEM Squash Tokoloshe by Rachel Zadok (Pan Macmillan)
The judges were Courttia Newland (Chair), Lemn Sissay and Benedicte Page
2004/5 -prize winner Jonathan Trigell (left), Boy A
* Shortlist
* Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus
* Rory Stewart, The Places in Between
* Neil Bennun, The Broken String
* Colin McAdam, Some Great Thing
* Anthony Cartwright, The Afterglow

Historic Winners List 1942- 2003
2003 - Charlotte Mendelson, Daughters of Jerusalem
2002 - Mary Laven, Virgins of Venice: Enclosed Lives and Broken Vows in the Renaissance Convent
* (note: The 2002 prize was initially awarded to Hari Kunzru for his book The Impressionist on 20 November 2003, but the author decided to decline the award due to its sponsorship by the Mail on Sunday)
2001 - Susanna Jones, The Earthquake Bird
2000 - Edward Platt (writer), Leadvill1990 - Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius
1999 - David Mitchell, Ghostwritten
1998 - Peter Ho Davies, The Ugliest House in the World
1997 - Phil Whitaker, Eclipse of the Sun
1996 - Nicola Barker (left), Heading Inland
1995 - Melanie McGrath, Motel Nirvana: Dreaming of the New Age in the American Desert
1994 - Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!
1993 - Jason Goodwin, On Foot to the Golden Horn: A Walk to Istanbul
1992 - Matthew Kneale, Sweet Thames
1991 - A. L. Kennedy, Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains
1989 - Claire Harman, Sylvia Townsend Warner
1988 - Matthew Yorke, The March Fence
1987 - Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
1986 - Tim Parks, Loving Roger
1985 - John Milne, Out of the Blue
1984 - Andrew Motion, Dangerous Play
1983 - Lisa St Aubin de Teran, The Slow Train to Milan
1982 - William Boyd, An Ice-Cream War
1981 - A. N. Wilson, The Laird of Abbotsford
1980 - Desmond Hogan, The Diamonds at the Bottom of the Sea
1979 - Peter Boardman, The Shining Mountain
1978 - A. N. Wilson, The Sweets of Pimlico
1977 - Richard Cork, Vorticism & Abstract Art in the First Machine Age
1976 - No Award
1975 - David Hare, Knuckle, and Tim Jeal, Cushing's Crusade
1974 - Hugh Fleetwood, The Girl Who Passed for Normal
1973 - Peter Smalley, A Warm Gun
1972 - Susan Hill, The Albatross
1971 - Shiva Naipaul, Fireflies

1970 - Angus Calder, The People's War
1969 - Melvyn Bragg, Without a City Wall
1968 - Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop
1967 - Anthony Masters, The Seahorse
1966 - Margaret Drabble, The Millstone
1965 - Julian Mitchell, The White Father
1964 - Nell Dunn, Up the Junction 1963 - Peter Marshall, Two Lives
1962 - Robert Rhodes James, An Introduction to the House of Commons, and Edward Lucie-Smith, A Tropical Childhood and Other Poems
1961 - David Storey, Flight Into Camden
1960 - David Caute, At Fever Pitch
1958 - V. S. Naipaul, The Mystic Masseur
1959 - Dan Jacobson, A Long Way from London
1957 - Ruskin Bond, The Room on the Roof
1956 - John Hearne, Voices Under the Window
1955 - John Wiles, The Moon to Play With
1954 - Tom Stacey, The Hostile Sun
1953 - Rachel Trickett, The Return Home
1952 - No Award

1951 - Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Beautiful Visit
1950 - Kenneth Allsop, Adventure Lit Their Star
1949 - Emma Smith, Maiden's Trip
1948 - Richard Mason, The Wind Cannot Read
1947 - Anne-Marie Walters, Moondrop to Gascony
1946 - Oriel Malet, My Bird Sings

1945 - James Aldridge, The Sea Eagle
1944 - Alun Lewis, The Last Inspection
1943 - Morwenna Donelly, Beauty for Ashes

1942 - Michael Richey, Sunk by a Mine

Award Tragic maintains an information page about the Llwellyn Rhys Literary Prize at Literary Awards UK

Robet Burns and John Muir Books Win Saltire Scottish Literary Prize

2009-11-30T14:45:00.000-08:00

Dec 1 -A biography of Robert Burns, The Bard by Robert Crawford, has won the £10,000 book of the year prize at the 2009 Saltire Society Literary Awards. He was up against stiff competition from authors AL Kennedy and Janice Galloway.

Other awards went to a history of Scottish philosophy, a biography of John Muir and the Historical Thesaurus of the English dictionary.

SCOTTISH BOOK OF THE YEAR

No writer is more charismatic than Robert Burns. Wonderfully readable, The Bard catches Burns's energy, brilliance, and radicalism as never before. To his international admirers he was a genius, a hero, a warm-hearted friend; yet to the mother of one of his lovers he was a wastrel, to a fellow poet he was 'sprung . from raking of dung', and to his political enemies a 'traitor'. Drawing on a surprising variety of untapped sources - from rediscovered poetry by Burns to manuscript journals, correspondence, interviews and oratory by his contemporaries - this new biography presents the remarkable life, loves, and struggles of the great poet. Inspired by the American and French Revolutions and moulded by the Scottish Enlightenment, Burns was in several senses the first of the great Romantics. With a poet's insight and a shrewd sense of human drama, Robert Crawford outlines how Burns combined a childhood steeped in the peasant song-culture of rural Scotland with a consummate linguistic artistry to become not only the world's most popular love poet but also the controversial master poet of modern democracy.Written with accessible 'lan and nuanced attention to Burns's poems and letters, The Bard is the story of an extraordinary man fighting to maintain a sly sense of integrity in the face of overwhelming pressures. This incisive biography startlingly demonstrates why the life and work of Scotland's greatest poet still compel the attention of the world a quarter of a millennium after his birth.

SCOTTISH FIRST BOOK OF THE YEAR
The Tin Kin by Eleanor Thorn

When her aunt Shirley dies, Dawn finds herself back in her claustrophobic home town in Northern Scotland for the first time in years. She spends her days caring for her small daughter, listening to tapes of old country songs and cleaning Shirley s flat, until one day she comes across the key to a cupboard that she was forbidden to open as a child. Inside she finds an album of photographs, curling with age. A young couple pose on a beach, arms wrapped around each other; little girls in hand-me-down kilts reveal toothless smiles; an old woman rests her hands on her hips, her head thrown back in blurry laughter. But why has her aunt treasured these pictures secretly for so long? Dawn's need for answers leads her to a group of Travellers on the outskirts of Elgin. There she learns of a young man left to die on the floor of a cell, and realises that the story of her family is about to be rewritten... Weaving between narratives and decades, 'The Tin Kin' is a beautiful moving novel about love, hardship and the lies and legends that pass between generations. It is a striking, unforgettable debut.

HOMECOMING AWARD

A Passion for Nature by John Muir
"I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer," John Muir wrote. "Civilization and fever and all the morbidness that has been hooted at me has not dimmed my glacial eye, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness. My own special self is nothing." In Donald Worster's magisterial biography, John Muir's "special self" is fully explored as is his extraordinary ability, then and now, to get others to see the sacred beauty of the natural world. A Passion for Nature is the most complete account of the great conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club ever written. It is the first to be based on Muir's full private correspondence and to meet modern scholarly standards. Yet it is also full of rich detail and personal anecdote, uncovering the complex inner life behind the legend of the solitary mountain man. It traces Muir from his boyhood in Scotland and frontier Wisconsin to his adult life in California right after the Civil War up to his death on the eve of World War I. It explores his marriage and family life, his relationship with his abusive father, his many friendships with the humble and famous (including Theodore Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson), and his role in founding the modern American conservation movement. Inspired by Muir's passion for the wilderness, Americans created a long and stunning list of national parks and wilderness areas, Yosemite most prominent among them. Yet the book also describes a Muir who was a successful fruit-grower, a talented scientist and world-traveler, a doting father and husband, a self-made man of wealth and political influence. A man for whom mountaineering was "a pathway to revelation and worship." For anyone wishing to more fully understand America's first great environmentalist, and the enormous influence he still exerts today, Donald Worster's biography offers a wealth of insight into the passionate nature of a man whose passion for nature remains unsurpassed.

SHORTLISTS

SCOTTISH BOOK OF THE YEAR

SCOTTISH FIRST BOOK OF THE YEAR

HOMECOMING AWARD

The Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award £5000 and Salitire Society/ Royal Scottish Mail Scottish First Book of the Year Award £1500 (by an author who has not previously published a book) may be given for any book by an author or authors of Scottish descent or living in Scotland, or for any book which deals with the work or life of a Scot or with a Scottish question, event or situation. The book might be poetry, a novel, a play or other work of imaginative literature, or biography, literary criticism or a study of any Scottish issue. Books of multiple authorship would not normally qualify.

Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature Finalists

2009-11-28T18:55:00.000-08:00

November 23. 2009 (New York, NY) – A diverse group of five non-fiction authors have been named as finalists for the 2010 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

The subject matter of the finalists’ work include the role that rabbis and Jewish intellectuals have played in forming American public identity, a candid and quirky spiritual memoir, the Jewish renaissance in Russia at the time of the Russian Revolution, the involvement of Jews in the international feather trade and Yiddish radio in America.

The Sami Rohr alternates between Fiction and Non-fiction from one year to the next. Award Tragic's view is that it would receive wider coverage if the $100,000 US prize was split between both categories and two prizes awarded each year.

Particularly intriguing amongst this years contenders is Sarah Abrevaya Stein's, Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce which documents the bursting of the Ostrich Feather boom of the 1930's -very salient in these times of toxic debt and market illusions.

Danya Ruttenberg's, Surprised by God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion , is described as "an unflinchingly honest guide to the kind of work that goes into developing a spiritual practice". Got to be attracted to that subject matter if only to be able to say that "I considered a deep and profound spiritual path but after reading Ruttenberg I decided to stick to being a stockbroker".......

The winners will be announced at the end of January. The 2010 award ceremony will be held in Jerusalem on March 31st.

This year’s finalists for the fourth annual Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature are:

Lila Corwin Berman – Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity (University of California Press) - This study examines the culture of Yiddish radio in the United States during radio's golden age. Ari Y. Kelman explores the dynamic relationships between an immigrant population and a mass medium and between audience and community. By focusing on voices previously excluded from radio histories, this treatment of non-English-language radio breaks new ground in the study of both American mass media and immigrant culture. Yiddish radio directly addressed the everyday lives of Jewish immigrants, while providing them with invaluable guidance as they struggled to become American. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, radio created a virtual place where Jewish immigrants could listen to voices like theirs and affirm the sound of their community as it evolved, particularly in light of World War II and the years that followed. More

Ari Y. Kelman – Station Identification: A Cultural History of Yiddish Radio in the United States (University of California Press) - Lila Corwin Berman asks why, over the course of the twentieth century, American Jews became increasingly fascinated, even obsessed, with explaining themselves to their non-Jewish neighbors. What she discovers is that language itself became a crucial tool for Jewish group survival and integration into American life. Berman investigates a wide range of sources--radio and television broadcasts, bestselling books, sociological studies, debates about Jewish marriage and intermarriage, Jewish missionary work, and more--to reveal how rabbis, intellectuals, and others created a seemingly endless array of explanations about why Jews were indispensable to American life. Even as the content of these explanations developed and shifted over time, the very project of self-explanation would become a core element of Jewishness in the twentieth century. More

Kenneth B. Moss – Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Harvard University Press) - Between 1917 and 1921, as revolution convulsed Russia, Jewish intellectuals and writers across the crumbling empire threw themselves into the pursuit of a “Jewish renaissance.” At the heart of their program lay a radically new vision of Jewish culture predicated not on religion but on art and secular individuality, national in scope yet cosmopolitan in content, framed by a fierce devotion to Hebrew or Yiddish yet obsessed with importing and participating in the shared culture of Europe and the world. These cultural warriors sought to recast themselves and other Jews not only as a modern nation but as a nation of moderns. More

Danya Ruttenberg – Surprised by God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion (Beacon Press) - At thirteen, Danya Ruttenberg decided she was an atheist. As a young adult, she immersed herself in the rhinestone-bedazzled wonderland of late 1990s San Francisco—drinking smuggled absinthe with wealthy geeks and plotting the revolution with feminist zinemakers. But she found herself yearning for something she would eventually call God. Surprised by God isa memoir of a young woman’s spiritual awakening and eventual path to the rabbinate, a story of integrating life on the edge of the twenty-first century into the discipline of traditional Judaism, without sacrificing either. It’s also an unflinchingly honest guide to the kind of work that goes into developing a spiritual practice—and it shows why, perhaps, doing this in today’s world requires more effort than ever. More

Sarah Abrevaya Stein – Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (Yale University Press) -The thirst for exotic ornament among fashionable women in the metropoles of Europe and America prompted a bustling global trade in ostrich feathers that flourished from the 1880s until the First World War. When feathers fell out of fashion with consumers, the result was an economic catastrophe for many, a worldwide feather bust. In this remarkable book, Sarah Stein draws on rich archival materials to bring to light the prominent and varied roles of Jews in the feather trade. She discovers that Jews fostered and nurtured the trade across the global commodity chain and throughout the far-flung territories where ostriches were reared and plucked, and their feathers were sorted, exported, imported, auctioned, wholesaled, and finally manufactured for sale. More

Tragic maintains a summary page about the Sami Rohr at Book Awards Online

About the Prize

In 2006, in celebration of Sami Rohr's 80th birthday, his children and grandchildren inaugarated the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature to honor his lifelong love of Jewish writing.

The annual award recognizes the unique role of contemporary writers in the transmission and examination of Jewish values, and is intended to encourage and promote outstanding writing of Jewish interest. Each year, the prize of $100,000 will aim to reward an emerging writer whose work has demonstrated a fresh vision and evidence of future potential. Recipients must have written a book of exceptional literary merit that stimulates an interest in themes of Jewish concern. Fiction and non-fiction books will be considered in alternate years.
In conjunction with this award, the Rohr family has established the Sami Rohr Jewish Literary Institute, a forum devoted to the continuity of Jewish literature. The Prize and Institute will be coordinated and administered under the exclusive auspices of the Jewish Book Council. Winners will be selected by an independent panel of judges.

Costa Book Award Shorts- Flogging Coffee and Good (ish) Books

2009-11-24T20:51:00.000-08:00

The UK's Costa Book Awards seems to tread a fine line between literary excellence, populism and the art of flogging a cup of coffee. The standard has been wobbly over the years but often surprises on the upside. This year looks particularly intriguing.

The Awards started life in 1971 as the Whitbread Literary Awards (Whitbread was a brewing company until 2001 when they became a hospitality company). From 1985 the awards were known as the Whitbread Book Awards until 2006, when Costa Coffee took over ownership.

Awards are given across five categories. Each category wins £5,000 with the Book of the Year winning an additional £25,000.

Tragic has consumed vast quantities of alcohol, literature and coffee during his adult life, so, sponsors who trigger off a Pavlov's Dog reaction in him every time the award has come around has not been a problem. Of course, discerning whether he is shaking with excitement over the shortlist or the fact he has just consumed his fourth Costa Massimo (560ml -20 fluid oz) of the day, is a different matter altogether.

2009 Shortlist

A couple of heavy hitters are contesting the Novel Award Category. They include Booker winner Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, Family Album , by the popular Penelope Lively, and Colm Toibin's Brooklyn . The fourth contender is The Elephant Keeper by Christopher Nicholson.

The illustrious Clive James, one of Australia's cultural refugees, is one of four listed for the Poetry Prize with Angels Over Elsinore. Other in the running, One Eye'd Leigh by Katharine Kilalea, Darwin: A Life in Poems by Ruth Padel , and A Scattering by Christopher Reid.

The up and coming author,William Fiennes has his powerful memoir, The Music Room listed in Biography Category thoughTragic rather likes the sound of The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius by Graham Farmel; just a Chaos Theory phase he is passing through.

One extraordinary multi-award winning author, who has now sadly departed this life far to early, Siobhan Dowd, has Solace of the Road listed in the Children's Category. An author of the most sublime ability who has left us with some brilliant work. God rest her soul. The book is up against the excellent Patrick Ness with The Ask and the Answer, the potent Guantanamo Boy by Anna Perera and Troubadour by Mary Hoffman.

The First Novel Category is always worth a squizz and the authors are generally a complete mystery to Tragic, this year no exception. The Finest Type of English Womanhood by Rachel Heath sounds potent described as "... a chilling portrait of racial tension, social immorality, betrayal and love, and an assured and atmospheric examination of the end of innocence". Got to like that. Others in the mix, John the Revelator by Peter Murphy, Beauty by Raphael Selbourne The Girl with Glass Feet by Ali Shaw.

One of the things that Tragic really likes about the Costa is that it gives those who are interested a bit of time to mull over the shortlist unlike those literary prizes that declare the winner before news of the shortlist has been digested, Now, that's worth a Irish Coffee or three between now and Costa winners on 25th January, 2010.

A stanza from the aforementioned Clive Jame's delicious "The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered,” from Opal Sunset: Selected Poems, 1958-2008 (published in the USA) just sprang to Tragic's mind as he considered this years shortlist.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered.
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy’s much-praised effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life’s vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one’s enemy’s book —
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

Award Tragic hopes that this years author enjoy better luck.

2009 Shortlists -

Costa First Novel Award
| | |
* The Finest Type of English Womanhood by Rachel Heath (more...)
* John the Revelator by Peter Murphy (more...)
* Beauty by Raphael Selbourne (more...)
* The Girl with Glass Feet by Ali Shaw (more...)
Costa Novel Award
| | |
* Family Album by Penelope Lively (more...)
* Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (more...)
* The Elephant Keeper by Christopher Nicholson (more...)
* Brooklyn by Colm Toibin (more...)
Costa Biography Award
| | |
* The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius by Graham Farmelo (more...)
* The Music Room by William Fiennes (more...)
* Coda by Simon Gray (more...)
* Dancing to the Precipice by Caroline Moorehead (more...)
Costa Poetry Award
| | |
* Angels Over Elsinore by Clive James (more...)
* One Eye'd Leigh by Katharine Kilalea (more...)
* Darwin: A Life in Poems by Ruth Padel (more...)
* A Scattering by Christopher Reid (more...)
Costa Children's Award
| | |
* Solace of the Road by Siobhan Dowd (more...)
* Troubadour by Mary Hoffman (more...)
* The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness (more...)
* Guantanamo Boy by Anna Perera (more...)

Tragic maintains a Costa summary page at Literary Awards UK

Aussie Poet Robert Gray Wins $20,000 'The Nib'

2009-11-24T16:44:00.000-08:00

Winner $20,000 CAL Waverley Library Award for Literature

Regrettably, despite a kind invitation from the organisers, Tragic was unable to attend the Shortlist announcement due to a sudden death in the family (RIP Grandad Merv). However, the quality and breadth of the shortlists each year makes them required summer reading and this years winner, Robert Gray's lyrical family memoir, The Land I Came Through Last, announced this morning (25th Nov in Australia) , is top of the list.

One of Australia's best-known poets, Robert Gray's award-winning book is his first substantial work of prose. Tragic suspects that if more poets could discipline themselves to write prose, rather than short burst of creative outpourings, then we would experience some remarkable work. They may be slightly put off by Mr.Gray's description the process involved in producing his winning book 'as the most onerous project since the Sistine Chapel ceiling'. Beauty and pain have always been bedfellows dear man.

A distinguished Australia poet, Robert Gray was born in 1945; he grew up and was educated in a country town on the north coast of New South Wales (Coffs Harbour?) . He trained there as a journalist, and since then has worked in Sydney as an editor, advertising copywriter, reviewer and buyer for bookshops.

The judges had this to say about the winner:

Robert Gray set out to write a book about his family entirely from memory, but found, as we all do, that it is “impossible to be accurate about another’s past or even one’s own”. Thus he was driven to taken him more years than anyone expected to complete one of the most research the family background that led to his own experiences, and it has beautifully written works of autobiography ever to appear in this country. memorable characters who take a less central role in the story, among them.

At  the  centre  of  the  book  is the author’s father, a feckless, gifted, irritable,  occasionally  charming  drunkard,  but  there  are  many  other writers  such  as  Bruce  Chatwin and Patrick White. Gray’s portrait of the latter brings an entirely new perspective to our understanding of the Nobel Prize winner’s personality.

Winners Details

Winner -



Robert Gray The Land I Came Through Last - [Giramondo Publishing] -The title of Robert Gray’s memoir is from a poem by Christopher Brennan, ‘The land I came thro’ last was dumb with night / a limbo of defeated glory, a ghost.’ There is more of glory than defeat, however, in this work of memory by a writer who is himself one of Australia’s best-known poets. The unrivalled ability with imagery and the expression of emotion characteristic of Gray’s poetry, also distinguish his prose, in his account of his parents’ painful marriage, and his own childhood, growing up on the north coast of New South Wales. The family’s resilience, and the beauty of the coastal landscape, are evoked with striking economy and awareness. Beyond, the book offers the portrait of a period, told through the characters of the ‘extreme people’ that have influenced Gray – including his grandparents, aunts and lovers, and artists and writers such as Patrick White, Bruce Chatwin and Les Murray.
Commentary Award Tragic Blog



2009  Other Shortlist





















Greg de Moore Tom Wills [Allen &Unwin] - This is the story of Tom Wills ? flawed genius, sporting libertine, fearless leader and agitator, and the man most often credited with creating the game we now know as Australian Rules football. 










Sent to the strict British Rugby School in 1850 at fourteen, Tom returned as a worldly young man whose cricket prowess quickly captured the hearts of Melburnians. But away from the adoring crowds, in the desolation of the Queensland outback, he experienced first-hand the devastating effects of racial tension when his father was murdered in the biggest massacre of Europeans by Aboriginal people. Yet five years later, Tom coached the first Aboriginal cricket team. 

Tom Wills lived hard and fast, challenging authority on and off the field. But when his physical talents began to fade, the psychological demons that alcohol and adrenaline had kept at bay surged to the fore, driving him to commit the most brutal of suicides. He was forty-four and destitute.

Greg de Moore has carefully pieced together Tom's life, giving us an extraordinary portrait of the life and times of one of our first sporting heroes, a man who lived by his own rules and whose contribution to Australian history has endured for more than 150 years.
































David Kilcullen The Accidental Guerrilla [Scribe Publications] -David Kilcullen is the world's foremost expert on this way of war, and in The Accidental Guerrilla, the senior counterinsurgency advisor to the Pentagon and architect of 'the Surge', surveys war as it is actually fought in the contemporary world. Colouring his account with gripping battlefield experiences that range from the jungles and highlands of South and Southeast Asia to the mountains of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to the dusty towns of the Middle East and the horn of Africa, this book will change the way we think about war. It is based on extensive fieldwork in the world's most dangerous places and examines how terrorists exploit traditional societies and explores the backlash created by external military intervention.














Marina Larsson Shattered Anzacs [UNSW Press] - There is no book about disabled soldiers in Australia after the First World War, much less the impact of war disability upon their family members. A fresh perspective on the First World War, this book moves beyond standard repatriation histories to explore the personal dimensions of war disability within families. The book offers an alternative story of Anzac; and presents a 'hidden history' that will resonate with many ordinary Australian families whose lives have been affected by war. "Shattered Anzacs" tells the untold story of thousands of Australian families who welcomed home disabled soldiers after the First World War. It offers a poignant account of the impact of physical injury and shell shock upon returned soldiers, and explores the profound and lasting consequences of disablement for their kin in the 1920s and 1930s. Drawing the reader into the emotional interior of family life, it evocatively brings to light the daily struggles
 of Australia's 90,000 'changed men', and reveals the significant burdens carried by their family members. 







David Levell Tour to Hell [University of Queensland Press] - Tour to Hell tells the riveting and often tragic stories of the convicts who escaped, or tried to escape, Australia's early penal settlements. With the continent a blank slate to the newcomers, a 'convict escape mythology' developed, suggesting sanctuaries in the bush and short overland journeys to other countries. History at its rollicking best.












































John McDonald Art of Australia [Pan Macmillan] - In this first volume of a brilliant new history of Australian art, John McDonald, the highly-regarded art critic of the Sydney Morning Herald, takes us from the times of pre-history, settlement and exploration, to the end of the colonial era. In the first comprehensive overview of the field since the 1960s, McDonald reassesses the reputations of many leading artists, and links their achievements with the broader patterns of social history and ideas.









Along with in-depth discussions of major works, the narrative teems with characters and anecdotes from the era of the First Fleet to that of the Australian Impressionists. The story of Australian art is told in an more vivid and engaging style.

Robert Grays Bibliography

* The Land I Came Through Last (Giramond, 2008)

 Collections

    * Nameless Earth (Carcanet, 2006)
    * Afterimages (Duffy & Snellgrove, 2002)
    * New Selected Poems (Duffy & Snellgrove, 1998)
    * Lineations (Duffy & Snellgrove , 1996)
    * Certain Things (William Heinemann Australia, 1993)
    * Selected Poems (Angus & Robertson, 1990)
    * Piano (Angus & Robertson, 1988)
    * Selected Poems 1963-1983 (Angus & Robertson, 1985)
    * The Skylight (Angus & Robertson, 1984)
    * Grass Script (Angus & Robertson, 1979)
    * Creekwater Journal (University of Queensland Press, 1974)
    * Introspect, Retrospect : Poems (Lyre-Bird Writers, c.1970)

 Edited

    * A Spill of Light, A Thrust of Shadow (Youngstreet Poets, 1999)
    * Australian Poetry in the Twentieth Century (William Heinemann Australia, 1991) edited with Geoffrey Lehmann
    * Sydney's Poems : A Selection on the Cccasion of the City's One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary 1842-1992 (Primavera Press, 1992) edited with Vivian Smith
    * Selected Poems / Roland Robinson (Angus & Robertson, 1989)
    * The Younger Australian poets (Hale & Iremonger, c1983) edited with Geoffrey Lehmann
Biography

    * The King's Wife : Five Queen Consorts (Secker & Warburg, 1990)









About the Award



Tragic has a bit of a soft spot for Sydney's Waverley Council having found them a generally enlightened mob in his encounters with them in various guises over the years. Their involvement, alongside Australia's Copyright Agency Limited (CAL), in promoting the 'The Nib'-  AUD$20,000 CAL Waverley Library Award for Literature is evidence of a highly evolved local council interacting with the community in a meaningful way.








The Award is open to all kinds of fiction and non-fiction by authors who are citizens or permanent residents of Australia. It recognises excellence in research in the creation of a literary work of merit, published during the 12 months prior to 30 June.








It was launched at the 2002 Sydney Writers Festival. Other factors considered by the judges include readability, innovation, knowledge and literary merit, and value to the community. A near record 160 works were nominated for the prize this year.








Previous winners of the award are Tim Low (2002), Barry Hill (2003),Geoffrey Blainey (2004), Helen Garner (2005),Gideon Haigh (2006),John Bailey (2007) and Christopher Koch (2008).




Tragic maintains a summary page of "The Nib" at Literary Awards Australia and at Literary Awards UK.

2009 American National Book Award Winners

2009-11-19T02:56:00.000-08:00

Got to love the USA's National Book Awards, high brow in every sense. This years winners in four categories have been announced just in time for all who would like to impress the in-laws with a weighty Christmas Holiday gift. Tragic must confess that he has yet to finish last years fiction winner, Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen, whoops.

Anyhow, this years winners and finalists below. Tragic publishes a site focused on American Book Awards and also posts results on Literary Awards Australia.

2009 National Book Award Winners
A novel about life in New York City in the 1970s and a biography of U.S. tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt were among the winners at the United States 60th annualNational Book.

Colum McCann (left) won the fiction award with Let the Great World Spin published by Random House, while The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, by T.J. Stiles and published by Alfred A. Knopf, won the nonfiction award.

"From 10 ordinary lives he crafts an indelibly hallucinatory portrait of a decaying New York City," the judges said of Irish-born McCann.

Stiles traced Vanderbilt's life from his birth in New York to the creation of his transport empire and family dynasty.

Phillip Hoose won the Young People's Literature award for Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
The book tells the true story of Colvin, who was a teenager in 1955 when she refused to give up her seat to white woman on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama -- nine months before Rosa Parks took the same stand. But instead of being celebrated as Parks was, Colvin was jailed.
"Because of this woman, our lives have changed," said Hoose, as he accepted his award with Colvin by his side.

The National Book Award for Poetry was awarded to Keith Waldrop for Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy, published by University of California Press.

Past National Book Award winners include John Updike, Philip Roth and Ralph Ellison. In 2009, 193 publishers submitted 1,129 books for prizes.

2009 National Book Award Winners & Finalists

Fiction:

Winner - Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann -
American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips
Far North by Marcel Theroux

Nonfiction:

Winner - The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles
Following the Water: A Hydromancer's Notebook by David M. Carroll
Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species by Sean B. Carroll
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin
The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy by Adrienne Mayor

Poetry:

Winner - Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy by Keith Waldrop
Versed by Rae Armantrout
Or to Begin Again by Ann Lauterbach
Speak Low by Carl Phillips
Open Interval by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

Young People's Literature:

Winner - Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose
Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith by Deborah Heiligman
Stitches by David Small
Lips Touch: Three Times by Laini Taylor
Jumped by Rita Williams-Garcia

Canadian Literary Award Round-up

2009-11-18T20:39:00.000-08:00

Tragic is a great fan of CanLit and always enjoys this time of year when the Canadian Literary Award scene reaches fever pitch. Some super books are in the winners circle this year and our family always looks forward to our annual package arriving from Canada with a selection of fine books. Hope the budget will stretch there this year!

A definite purchase will be the winner of two Quebec Writers' Federation awards, Eric Siblin (pictured), for his non-fiction Bach book, The Cello Suites. Just love JS.

A round-up of the majors below. The Canadian Writers Trust prize winners are due to be announced on the 24th. Book links to amazon.ca. Tragic publishes a website covering Canadian Awards at www.canlitawards.com.

Winners of 2009 Governor General’s Literary Awards announced by the Canada CounPublish Postcil for the Arts

Nov 18 - For the first time in the history of the Awards one book has won in both categories of children’s literature (text and illustration): Harvey by author Hervé Bouchard and illustrator Janice Nadeau.
Children’s literature was also the focus in the English-language translation category, with Susan Ouriou winning for hertranslation of a young adult novel, Pieces of Me, a translation of La liberté? Connais pas… by Charlotte Gingras. Paule Noyart, winner in French-language translation, takes home her second Award this year for Le miel d’Harar, her translation of Camilla Gibb’s Sweetness in the Belly.
M.G. Vassanji, a past finalist in fiction, wins this year in the non-fiction category for his account of his travel in India, A Place Within: Rediscovering India. This year, 12 of the 14 winners receive this award for the very first time.
Winners Fiction
Kate Pullinger, London (UK) [originally from Cranbrook,
British Columbia], The Mistress of Nothing.
(McArthur & Company; distributed by the publisher)
In The Mistress of Nothing, Kate Pullinger creates the fascinating character of Sally, maid to Lady Duff Gordon in Victorian times. Over the course of a memorable journey down the Nile with her Lady, Sally comes to realizations about the nature of power – its seductiveness, its elusiveness and its ability to alter the soul in manifold ways.
Julie Mazzieri, Velone-Orneto (France) [originally from
Saint-Paul-de-Chester, Quebec], Le discours sur la tombe de l’idiot.
(Éditions José Corti; distributed by Diffusion Dimédia)
An exceptionally polished novel, the result of an exemplary mastery of narrative. The text is deep, dark and implacable, and the tight, suspenseful writing stays with us long after the book is finished. The author sets herself the challenge of making the story believable, and she has succeeded brilliantly.
Poetry
David Zieroth, North Vancouver, The Fly in Autumn.
(Harbour Publishing; distributed by the publisher)
In The Fly in Autumn, David Zieroth addresses our common and defining human fate – the loneliness that is a rehearsal for death – with a tenderness and buoyancy that shows the reader “how to walk in the dark with flowers.” The intricacy and exuberance of rhyme and the breadth of vision are stunning.
Hélène Monette, Montreal, Thérèse pour joie et orchestre.
(Les Éditions du Boréal; distributed by Diffusion Dimédia)
In Thérèse pour joie et orchestre, the poet transforms the sister she lost to illness into a happy spirit floating over people and places. This elegy orchestrated by Hélène Monette is astonishing in its ability to touch the reader. A magnificent ode in a voice that is generous and powerful.
Drama
Kevin Loring, Vancouver, Where the Blood Mixes.
(Talonbooks; distributed by Publishers Group Canada)
An abducted daughter returns to her wounded community after many years away. Kevin Loring illuminates the complex aftermath of the residential school system and the circumstances of contemporary Aboriginal history through compelling, sympathetic and humorous characters who live as best they can, with courage and strength.
Suzanne Lebeau, Montreal, Le bruit des os qui craquent.
(Leméac Éditeur; distributed by Socadis)
Le bruit des os qui craquent is a rare, courageous and beautiful work. Suzanne Lebeau conveys the devastating effects of war on children with sensitivity and uncompromising rigour. Directly and with heartbreaking lucidity, she broaches the question of individual and collective responsibility, and proposes empathy as the road toward hope and ultimately, redemption.
Non-fiction
M.G. Vassanji, Toronto, A Place Within: Rediscovering India.
(Doubleday Canada; distributed by Random House of Canada)
An utterly brilliant, evocative memoir that ranges across the landscapes of culture, memory, identity and history. M.G. Vassanji’s style – diverse and playful – brings the reader along effortlessly, illuminating the ramshackle roots of self, family, and culture. An outstanding book of self-reflection and persistent insight, A Place Within is the resonant chronicle of a sage, a traveler, a pilgrim.
Nicole V. Champeau, Ottawa, Pointe Maligne : l’infiniment oubliée.
(Les Éditions du Vermillon; distributed by Prologue)
Like a requiem, this book sings of the destruction of the territories of the Upper Saint Lawrence, drowned by dams and depopulated by expropriation. These places have even disappeared from the memories of maps. Around Cornwall, originally called Pointe Maligne, the memory of the founding peoples, Amerindian and French, has been obliterated.
Children’s Literature - Text
Caroline Pignat, Ottawa, Greener Grass: The Famine Years.
(Red Deer Press, a division of Fitzhenry & Whiteside; distributed by the publisher)
Caroline Pignat’s Greener Grass: The Famine Years follows the disintegration of the Byrne family during Ireland’s Great Famine of 1847, when landlords ruled without mercy, children could be taken away to prison, and thousands were left to starve. A timeless story of courage, family loyalty and the resilience of the human spirit.
Hervé Bouchard, Saguenay (Quebec), Harvey.
(Les Éditions de la Pastèque; distributed by Socadis)
Hervé Bouchard makes us feel the confusion and helplessness of a little boy faced with the death of his father. His surprising and extremely sensitive writing is deeply moving. Through a series of poetically powerful metaphors, he allows us the freedom to explore the multiple layers of his story.
Children’s Literature – Illustration
Jirina Marton, Colborne (Ontario), Bella’s Tree, text by Janet Russell.
(Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press; distributed by HarperCollins Canada)
Jirina Marton’s illustrations invite the reader to a winter landscape full of textures and subtle, earthy colour palettes. The Van Gogh-like interior and its warm tones create a holiday season mood that evokes an emotional response. The illustrations are well crafted and capture the imagination and humanity of the everyday lives they portray.
Janice Nadeau, Montreal, Harvey, text by Hervé Bouchard.
(Les Éditions de la Pastèque; distributed by Socadis)
In illustrating a book that stands out for the originality of its language, Janice Nadeau has come up with wonderful ways of depicting the sadness of spring and the melancholy of loss. The subtle drawings dance with the text and give rhythm to the reading. Hervé Bouchard’s Quebec comes alive under the brush strokes of the illustrator.
Translation
Susan Ouriou, Calgary, Pieces of Me.
(Kids Can Press; distributed by University of Toronto Press)
English translation of La liberté? Connais pas… by Charlotte Gingras (Les éditions de la courte échelle)
With Pieces of Me, Susan Ouriou has created a magical rendering of the exquisite original. Tenderly redrawing the portrait of a troubled teenage girl struggling to come into her own, Ouriou has sensitively captured all that is moving, poetic and funny about the novel’s main character in a truly accomplished translation.
Paule Noyart, Bromont (Quebec), Le miel d’Harar.
(Leméac Éditeur / Actes Sud; distributed by Socadis)
French translation of Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb
(Anchor Canada)
Paule Noyart shows a keen sensitivity to the poetry of the original. In a true act of literary creation, the expressive liberties the translator has taken serve this culturally-rich novel well. The remarkable quality of her work manages to transcend the limits of the translator’s art – a rare accomplishment indeed.

Winners 2009 QWF Literary Awards- The same day he was passed over for a Governor General's award, Eric Siblin won two Quebec Writers' Federation prizes for his non-fiction Bach book, The Cello Suites.
He won the McAuslan First Book Prize and the Mavis Gallant Prize for non-fiction, and the jury said The Cello Suites was "an almost pitch-perfect story of the making of one of the great pieces of music in Western civilization." Each QWF Literary Award is worth $2,000.
In his book, Siblin intersects the life of Johann Sebastian Bach with the story of 20th century cellist Pablo Casals and his love of Bach's Cello Suites. Siblin's own quest to discover the music, and perhaps even the missing manuscript for the original composition, is woven into those narratives.
Siblin's book was also nominated for a Governor General's Literary Award, but the non-fiction prize went to Toronto novelist M.G. Vassanji for A Place Within: Rediscovering India.
Other QWF Literary Award winners:

Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction: Colin McAdam, Fall.
A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry: Carmine Starnino,This Way Out.
Translation Prize, French to English: Lazer Lederhendler, Nikolski.
Children's and Young Adult Literature: Monique Polak, What World Is Left.
Giller Prize Winner-
Nov 10 - Linden MacIntyre, a veteran broadcast journalist best known for his investigative reporting, won the 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize Tuesday evening for his novel The Bishop’s Man.
“I had a speech prepared but it wasn’t a speech that I wasn’t prepared to give here,” he said upon taking the stage. “It was a speech that I planned to give at home.”
In the book, MacIntyre revisits his Cape Breton roots for the story of a middle-aged priest, Father Duncan MacAskill, who is also known by such nicknames as the Exorcist or the Purificator for his habit of making problematic priests disappear, a skill which makes him invaluable to the bishop. When he’s assigned to the small parish of Creignish, not far from where he grew up, Father Duncan must confront his own role in a young man’s suicide.
MacIntyre earns $50,000 for winning the Giller Prize.
Other Giller Shortlisted
The Disappeared by Kim Echlin The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon Fall by Colin McAdam The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels
Sunburst Award - Toronto, September 28, 2009: winner, The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson (Random House Canada, ISBN 0307356779) and the winner of its 2009 young adult award is Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (Tor, ISBN 0765319853). More
2009- Amazon.ca First Novel Award Winner: Joan Thomas for Reading by Lightning- The winner of the 33rd annual Amazon.ca First Novel Award is Reading by Lightning by Joan Thomas. Head judge Aritha van Herk called the book "a fabulous novel, full of grace and delicious discovery, haunted by the flavour of memory and the prairies inWorld War II. Readmore about Reading by Lightning, and browse all the finalists below.
The City of Vancouver Book Award Winner - A$2,000 prize that has been presented annually since 1989 to authors of books in any genre that demonstrate excellence and contribute to the appreciation and understanding of Vancouver’s history, unique character or the achievements of its residents. Shortlist:
Winner - Lee Henderson, The Man Game, (Penguin Canada) Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, (Vintage Canada) Meredith Quartermain, Nightmarker, (NeWest Press)

Writer's Trust Finalists- Winners Nov 24
2009 Finalists Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize Finalists
Nicole Brossard, Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood (translator) Fences in Breathing, Coach House Books
Douglas Coupland, Generation A, Random House Canada
Annabel Lyon, The Golden Mean, Random House Canada
Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness, McClelland & Stewart: A Douglas Gibson Book
Andrew Steinmetz, Eva’s Threepenny Theatre, Gaspereau Press
Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-fiction ($2000) 2009 Jurors: David Leahy, Susan Olding, Makeda Silvera
Yves Engler, The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy, Fernwood Publishing Patrick McDonagh, Idiocy: A Cultural History, Liverpool University Press Eric Siblin, The Cello Suites, House of Anansi Press
A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry ($2000) 2009 Jurors: Jeramy Dodds, Yedda Morrison, Fraser Sutherland
Norm Sibum, The Pangborn Defence, Biblioasis Mike Spry, Jack, Snare Books Carmine Starnino, This Way Out, Gaspereau Press
McAuslan First Book Prize ($2,000) 2009 Jurors: Wayne Johnston, Stan Persky, Fred Wah
Eric Siblin, The Cello Suites, House of Anansi Press Gillian Sze, Fish Bones, DC Books Alice Zorn, Ruins and Relics, NeWest Press

Australian Prime Minster's Literary Award Winners

2009-11-01T23:14:00.000-08:00

The Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Awards are awarded for Fiction and Non-Fiction.The awards are open to works written by living Australian citizens and permanent residents. The winners receive AUD$100,000.
Whilst a mere ankle biter in Literary Award terms, the prize has shown a bit more savvy in it's second year in the arena with excellent shortlist choices. This years winners below.
For Tragic followers, you might like to skip the fiction section as you may well have a sense of deja vu........
Nam Le and his Boat Come into Literary Award Harbour - Again Already

The winner of the 2009 Fiction award is Nam Le for his book of short stories The Boat. The judging panel was 'impressed by the daring scope and excellence of its execution, the generous breadth of its emotional and social traverse and the excitement generated by every story'. Quite, so, quite, many other Literary Award judges before them have expressed the same sentiments.
Nam Le 's fine collection of short stories first crossed Tragic's desk about 18 months ago when it was honoured as one of America's National Book Award "5 Under 35" choices. It then won the prestigious UK £60,000 Dylan Thomas Prize for Young Writers in a very strong field on of America's weighty politically asute prizes the Ainsfield-Wolf Award.
It then picked-up one of Australia's leading book awards, the AUD $10,000 New South Wales Premier's Book of the Year Award via a category win in the UTS Glenda Adams Prize for New Writing but wait, there's more.
Being Nam Le's first work, The Boat was also eligible for, and subsequently won, the Australian Book industry Newcomer of the Year. Plus, to the best of memory, shortlisted for both the Victorian and Queensland Premier' s literary Awards and the Commonwealth Writers Prize Best First Book in the SE Asia & Pacific category.
May have missed a few but the work has certainly been widely read by the lit panel judging fraternity at least.For the record, Tragic throughly enjoyed it to and passed his original copy on and has since bought several copies for, some for friends and one for a profoundly ignorant person whose horizons needed broadening.
The Boat was certainly in strong company with a stellar shortlist for this years prize , but, given it's scope and narrative depth, and downright enjoyability, it probably deserved the win. Tragic is, it appears, alone in this world believing that if a book has won a major literary prize that it should not be eligible for subsequent awards so that the prestige is spread around a bit................................
Non-fiction

In 2009, two books and three authors share the Non-Fiction award. The winners are Evelyn Juers for House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann; and Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds for Drawing the Global Colour Line.

Both books explore important racial, moral and political issues of Australia's past. The Non-Fiction judging panel said "With great intellectual authority and international research Evelyn Juers, Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds tell their stories magnificently."

Tragic has only read the shortlisted, Van Diemen's Land , winner of the Tasmanian Book of the Year Award and Jenny Hocking's, Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History . However, House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann , appeals immensely to him as he was profoundly touched by the tragedy of the Weimar Republic and it's initial promise then ultimate failure to prevent the rise one of the world's most obnoxious regimes when studying politics.

Both Henry Reynolds and Marilyn Lake are first-class researchers but with his University employed days in the distant past Tragic is unlikely to get to Drawing the Global Colour Line , despite its worthy subject matter, unless someone slips it in his Xmas stocking that is.

Observations regarding the non-fiction category?

First, it is a little sad when judges are unable to pick a clear winner in what is after all a literary competition.

Second, Tragic feels a bit sorry for that Jenny Hocking's, Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History did not win the prize. He imagines that the political collateral damage for the incumbents may have been too much to bear - some hollow men hovering around in the background perchance?

Third, given three authors shared the $100,0000 prize we assume that means they take home $33,333.333333333 recurring each.

That said, The Prime Minister's Literary Prize team can hold their heads up high as this years prize has delivered quality literature and it was well publicised at a grass roots level. Even a librarian in Tragic's small country town handed him a shortlist flyer not knowing T's obsession with literary awards. Lovely.

Book links to Australia's Fishpond Books data-base. Tragic maintains an award page for the PM's Literary at Literary Awards Australia, Literary Awards UK and Book Awards NZ.

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.
.

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

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.

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.
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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Herta Muller Wins Noble Prize for Literature - What do you mean Herta Who?

2009-10-14T16:54:00.000-07:00

OMG! Tragic took a wee holiday away from Book Award World and was deluged with major literary award news upon his return. The nerve of US National Book Awards, the Noble Prize for Literature and the American Before Columbus Book Awards going public with results while the Big T. was out of town defies belief.

Herta Muller, (right) a German writer born in 1953 in a village in Western Romania, won the Nobel Prize for Literature. and a tidy little US $1.4 million. The jury liked the ""concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose" in Muller's work, which "depicts the landscape of the dispossessed". Muller, a representative of the German ethnic minority in Romania who migrated to Germany in 1987, is currently living in Berlin.

Her works have been translated in over 20 languages and she has received many international awards including the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Kleist, Franz Kafka and the Literary Award of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation..

Her name has been figuring among the potential winners of the Nobel Prize almost yearly since 1999. Tragic has read her 99 Dublin Literary winner, The Land of Green Plums, not bad though in truth he had to think for a moment or two before he could place her, hardly a household name.

There has been the usual amount of pathetic bleating in America with yet another European winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. US A-team, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy and Joyce Carol Oates were in the mix for the US$1.4 Million Nobel prestige and piggy bank, but, lets face up to it, American writers are just not good enough.

The myopic nature of white litterarti dominated American high-brow fiction , it's obsession with middle-class morality tales, endless banal analysis of the American psyche or recently lost or stuffed-up wars, means that it does not travel well. European writers are just more grown-up than anally retentive American writers who are mostly still in the teenage phase of the literary art.

Rather than leveling the usual accusations that Noble judges are Eurocentric, US commentators should focus on the fact than less than 3% of fiction purchased in the States has been translated from another language. Outside of the recently inaugurated Best Translated Book Award , the Anisfield-Wolf, and from time to time the National Book Circle Critics, there is hardly a US-based literary award that appears to be even aware that Foriegn Literature exists.

Until the day that leading US awards start demonstrating that they are able to stretch their imagination beyond local shores, commentators should stop whimpering about the Noble ignoring American writers. The judges read the books guys- US authors are still B-grade on the world stage. Get over it.

Before you write again mid-west person who defends all things US, Tragic is not anti-American literature. He religiously reads the winners of all of the major US book awards, plus a few of the not so well know prizes. He also maintains lists of US National & State Book Award winners at BookAwardsOnline and Literary Awards Australia in an attempt to spread the word, but, he still agrees with the Nobel judges (please forgive me Cormac McCarthy, you might just be the exception).

Moving Right Along

Whilst a body of work from lead US authors can't seem to match it with the deep felt suffering and angst of European writers, there are are still some stellar individual works on offer from year to year. The National and the American Book Awards provide a platform for some of the best.

Perhaps there is some movement in the right direction regarding a more international perspective............

The N.Y.Times reports that "International roots characterized the fiction finalists for the National Book Awards, which were announced on Wednesday. Among the five finalists were Colum McCann, the Irish-born author of “Let the Great World Spin,” a novel about a sprawling cast of characters in 1970s New York City, Daniyal Mueenuddin, who was raised partly in Lahore, Pakistan, and currently lives on a farm in the Punjab region of Pakistan, for “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders,” and Marcel Theroux, who was born in Uganda and lives in London, for “Far North.”"

Interesting Grassopper.

National Book Award Finalists

Yikes! It is alarming how quickly the 2009 US National awards have come around again having barely finished last years winners.

Last years winner fiction winner, Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen, was very enjoyable and Tragic will now be using it as a heavy door stop such is it's bulk. The 2009 finalists.

2009 National Book Award Finalists

Fiction:

American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips
Far North by Marcel Theroux

Nonfiction:

Following the Water: A Hydromancer's Notebook by David M. Carroll
Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species by Sean B. Carroll
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin
The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy by Adrienne Mayor
The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles

Poetry:

Versed by Rae Armantrout
Or to Begin Again by Ann Lauterbach
Speak Low by Carl Phillips
Open Interval by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy by Keith Waldrop

Young People's Literature:

Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith by Deborah Heiligman
Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose
Stitches by David Small
Lips Touch: Three Times by Laini Taylor
Jumped by Rita Williams-Garcia

The American Book Awards / Before Columbus Foundation Book Awards 2009

The American Book Awards, established in 1978 by the Before Columbus Foundation, recognize outstanding literary achievement by contemporary American authors, without restriction to race, sex, ethnic background, or genre. The purpose of the awards is to acknowledge the excellence and multicultural diversity of American writing. The American Book Aw ards werecreated to provide recognition for outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America's diverse literary community. The purpose of the awards is to recognize literary excellence without limitations or restrictions. There are no categories, no nominees, and therefore no losers. The award winners range from well-known and established writers to under-recognized authors and first works.
2009
Houston A. Baker, Jr., Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Right Era (Columbia University Press)
Danit Brown, Ask for a Convertible (Pantheon)
Jericho Brown, Please (New Issues Poetry & Prose)
José Antonio Burciaga, The Last Supper of Chicano Heroes: Selected Works of José Antonio Burciaga, edited by Mimi R. Gladstein and Daniel Chacón (University of Arizona Press)
Claire Hope Cummings, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds (Beacon Press)
Stella Pope Duarte, If I Die in Juarez (The University of Arizona Press)
Linda Gregg, All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press)
Suheir Hammad, Breaking Poems (Cypher Books)
Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder (Pantheon Books)
George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger than Itself: The A.A.C.M. and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press)
Patricia Santana, Ghosts of El Grullo (University of New Mexico Press)
Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian (Wesleyan University Press)
Lifetime Achievement Award: Miguel Algarin

Book Award Tragic is one of the alter-egos of Kevin Parker Publisher of| Australian Book Awards | New Zealand Book Awards| Australian Literary Festivals | Best Selling Books Australia | Best Selling Books NZ | UK Literary Festivals | UK Book Awards | USA Book Awards | Canadian Book Awards | Biodiversity Data Base | Green Living Books Australia | Green Living Books NZ | Australian Festivals

Wolf Eats Booker Prize as Mantel Wins

2009-10-06T14:43:00.000-07:00

With that strange British fetish for betting on Book Award outcomes favorite backers will no doubt be delighted with the win of Hilary Mantel's (right) Wolf Hall, for the 2009, £50,000 Booker Prize.

Mantel, 57, is an experienced novelist much championed by literary editors. She has previously been shortlisted for the Orange prize and the Commonwealth prize for fiction. Her book was the hottest favorite in the 40-year history of the Man Booker Prize and edged out a strong field winning the secret ballot by three votes to two.

James Naughtie, the broadcaster who chaired the judges, said that Mantel’s book was the most towering achievement in a shortlist that resembled an alpine landscape of accomplishment. An alpine landscape of achievement? Ouch. Perhaps that phrase is evidence as to why so few literary judges have had a bestselling book.

It would be purely speculative to suggest that Wolf Hall's massive popularity with the British public tipped the balance at the end of the day, as, despite it's sheen of 'highbrowosity', the Booker is, and has always been, about selling books, it just lost it's way in recent years.

A book about Oliver Cromwell has got the cash registers ringing in the UK with a populace that devours historical 'faction'. It will possibly resonate amongst anglo-centric communities in Australia and New Zealand. Whether bookshops in Ohio and and Texas will be featuring it in a forward display is a slightly more dubious proposition.

The book goes on release in the USA on October 13th and is available for pre-order from Amazon. Australians can obtain it from Fishpond Books as can New Zealanders from Fishpond NZ here.

Links below to Borders UK.

2009 Booker Prize Winner -

Mantel, Hilary, Wolf Hall, HarperCollins - Fourth Estate - Lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning,' says Thomas More, 'and when you come back that night he'll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks' tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money.' England, the 1520s. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor, charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant. Into this atmosphere of distrust and need comes Thomas Cromwell, first as Wolsey's clerk, and later his successor. Cromwell is a wholly original man: the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with a delicate and deadly expertise in manipulating people and events. More

Other Shortlisted

Byatt, AS, The Children's Book, Random House - Chatto and Windus -ISBN: 9780701183899 - Olive Wellwood is a famous writer. For each of them she writes a separate private book, bound in different colours and placed on a shelf. In their house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world - but their lives, and those of their cousins, children of a city stockbroker, are already inscribed with mystery. More

Coetzee, J M, Summertime, Random House ISBN: 9781846553189 - Harvill Secker - A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972-1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was 'finding his feet as a writer'. Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him - a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. More

Foulds, Adam, The Quickening Maze, Random House - Jonathan Cape - ISBN: 9780224087469 - Based on real events in Epping Forest on the edge of London around 1840, "The Quickening Maze" centres on the first incarceration of the great nature poet John Clare. After years struggling with alcohol, critical neglect and depression, Clare finds himself in High Beach Private Asylum - an institution run on reformist principles which would later become known as occupational therapy. At the same time another poet, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and becomes entangled in the life and catastrophic schemes of the asylum's owner, the peculiar, charismatic Dr Matthew Allen. For John Clare,more

Waters, Sarah, The Little Stranger, Little, Brown - Virago -ISBN: 9781844086023 - After her award-winning trilogy of Victorian novels, Sarah Waters turned to the 1940s and wrote THE NIGHT WATCH, a tender and tragic novel set against the backdrop of wartime Britain. Shortlisted for both the Orange and the Man Booker, it went straight to number one in the bestseller chart. In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. More

Mawer, Simon, The Glass Room, Little, Brown -Cool. Balanced. Modern. The precisions of science, the wild variance of lust, the catharsis of confession and the fear of failure - these are things that happen in the Glass Room. High on a Czechoslovak hill, the Landauer House shines as a wonder of steel and glass and onyx built specially for newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer, a Jew married to a gentile. But the radiant honesty of 1930 that the house, with its unique Glass Room, seems to engender quickly tarnishes as the storm clouds of WW2 gather, and eventually the family must flee, accompanied by Viktor's lover and her child. More

2009 Other Longlisted

Hall, Sarah, How to paint a dead man, Faber and Faber -ISBN: 9780571224890- Italy in the early 1960s: a dying painter considers the sacrifices and losses that have made him an enigma, both to strangers and those closest to him. He begins his last life painting, using the same objects he has painted obsessively for his entire career - a small group of bottles. In Cumbria 30 years later, a landscape artist - and admirer of the Italian recluse - finds himself trapped in the extreme terrain that has made him famous. More

Harvey, Samantha, The Wilderness, Random House - Jonathan Cape - It's Jake's birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life - his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now he is in his early sixties, and he isn't quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison, and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer's. As the disease takes hold of him, Jake struggles to hold on to his personal story, to his memories and identity, but they become increasingly elusive and unreliable. What happened to his daughter? Is she alive, or long dead? More

Lever, James, Me Cheeta, HarperCollins - Fourth Estate -ISBN: 9780007280162 - The incredible, moving and hilarious story of Cheeta the Chimp, simian star of the big screen, on a behind-the-scenes romp through the golden years of Hollywood. The greatest Hollywood Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller, died in 1984. Maureen O'Sullivan, his Jane, died in 1998. Weissmuller's son, who first played Boy in the 1939 film 'Tarzan Finds a Mate', has gone too. But Cheeta the Chimp, who starred with them all, is alive and well, retired in Palm Springs as an abstract painter. At the incredible age of seventy-six, he is by far the oldest living chimpanzee ever recorded. More

O'Loughlin, Ed, Not Untrue & Not Unkind, Penguin - Ireland - In Dublin, a newspaper editor called Cartwright is found dead. One of his colleagues, Owen Simmons, discovers a dossier on Cartwright's desk. And in the dossier Owen finds a photograph, which brings him back to a dusty road in Africa and to the woman he once loved! "Not Untrue and Not Unkind" is Owen's story - a gripping story of friendship, rivalry and betrayal amongst a group of journalists and photographers covering Africa's wars. It is an astonishingly powerful and accomplished debut that immediately establishes Ed O'Loughlin as a mature master of the novel form. More

Scudamore, James, Heliopolis, Random House - ISBN: 9781846551888 - Harvill Secker - Born in a Sao Paulo shantytown, Ludo undergoes a remarkable transformation. Directed by forces beyond his control, he first leaves, then returns to the vast city of his birth - but on the opposite side of its social divide. Now twenty-seven, he works for a vacuous 'communications company', marketing unwanted, unaffordable products aimed at the very underclass into which he was born. He has developed an obsessive, adulterous love for his adoptive sister, whose husband is his only friend. And he has an appetite that can never be satisfied. More

Toibin, Colm, Brooklyn, Penguin -ISBN: 9780670918126- Viking In a small town in the south-east of Ireland in the 1950s, Eilis Lacey is one among many of her generation who cannot find work at home. So when a job is offered in America, it is clear that she must go. Leaving her family and home, Eilis sets off to forge a new life for herself in Brooklyn. Young, homesick and alone, she gradually buries the pain of parting beneath the rhythms of a new life - days at the till in a large department store, night classes in Brooklyn College and Friday evenings on the dance floor of the parish hall - until she realizes that she has found a sort of happiness. More

Trevor, William, Love and Summer, Penguin - Viking -ISBN: 9780670918249 - It's summer and nothing much is happening in Rathmoye. So it doesn't go unnoticed when a dark-haired stranger appears on his bicycle and begins photographing the mourners at Mrs Connulty's funeral. Florian Kilderry couldn't know that the Connultys were said to own half the town; and, in any case, he had come to Rathmoye only to see the scorched remains of the cinema. But Mrs Connulty's daughter, liberated at last by the death of her imperious mother, resolves to keep an eye on Florian Kilderry, and it's she who comes to witness the events that follow. More

Sensational Australian Prime Minister's Literary Award 2009 Shortlists

2009-09-18T00:32:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to all involved. World class. Go you good thing! Those judges are worth bottling! Yes, Tragic is very excited. Proud to be an Aussie/Anglo/Irishman with a dash of Viking, Pict, Bog Irish Peasant addicted supporter of Australian Literary Awards? Bet ya bottom dollar. Yahooo!

After a solid debut year in 2008, the $100,000 (aud) Australian PM's Literary Award has produced a truly outstanding selection with seven fiction and eight non-fiction works making the 2009 shortlists. There were some 250 entries, underlining the richness of Australian literary talent.

The depth and variety of titles in contention represents the cream of Australian creative ability. Admittedly, a couple of the books have been around in Book Award World for while, but those titles are super books that deserve recognition.

On this showing the Prime Minister's Literary Award can take it's place at the top of the podium alongside the evergreen Miles Franklin.

Wish there was some money in the kitty to buy the titles not already read. Will have to put one of the children in hock again............. (that's a joke Aunty).

Tragic maintains a Prime Minister's Literary Award page at Literary Awards Australia but the official site is well worth a visit as the team there have done a great job in showcasing both the books and authors. Happy moment as the shoddy days of Australian Book Award presentation finally slip into the past, even Queensland has produced a first-class State award site after all these years. Possibly time for Tragic to move on to other areas of interest........

Non- Fiction Shortlist

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

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.

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.

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.|

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)

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.

Fiction

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.
Fishpond Books Australia

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.
Fishpond Books Australia

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.
Fishpond Books Australia

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.

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.

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.

Man Booker Prize is Back In Form With A Satisfying Shortlist

2009-09-08T13:17:00.000-07:00

The Booker is back in form after a couple of dodgy years. Tragic picked four out of six from thirteen of this years Booker - not bad. Rather sorry that Sarah Hall's, How to paint a dead man missed out, but a satisfying list anyhow.

Booksellers in the UK must be slightly heartened as the shortlist is replete with commercially viable books - sorry literary fiction that will resonate with the wider public. That Colm Toibin's Brooklyn was cut, will diminish sales possibilities in the US: the list is heavily laden with'Englishosity'. Hopefully Oprah will take to AS Byatt's The Children's Book, or one of the others that made the final!

J.M. Coetzees's, Summertime, (Random House) is a good chance for the £50,000 main bringing a dimly bit of reflected glory for Australia where he now resides. Small compensation for the Ashes lose but still. !

The people's champions will no doubt be Hilary Mantel's skillful re-imagining of Cromwell's life, Wolf Hall and , The Little Stranger by the popular Sarah Waters. Adam Fould's, The Quickening Maze , appears to have a literary prize in-waiting feel about it as well as does Simon Mawer's The Glass Room. All will be revealed on October 8th.

The challenge now, to read six books in one month. It is our collective responsibility to elevate quality literature to the top of the bestsellers list again! Dan Brown and Katie Price have no chance faced with the doubles team of Sarah Waters and Hilary Mantel with JM Coeetze on the subs bench in case of a twisted quill.

Oh dear, Tragic just realised that he has run out of money having lost the lot backing the already cut Sarah Hall to win this years Booker. Would someone send the shortlisted books so he can participate in the debate please?!

2009 Shortlist - Winners October 8 .

Dan Brown Wins Pulitzer for The Lost Symbol and Flying Cows Sighted Over NYC

2009-09-07T02:06:00.000-07:00

A vignette, nothing more.

Tragic was approached by two serious looking matronly women in town this morning, one of whom he knows vaguely through literary social circles.

"That's him" said she, pointing with purpose as they closed in with menace , " The one who does literary award reporting and website stuff that I told you about, you know the one with the interesting wife".

The second woman, who looked like she had just eaten a lemon, put her hand on Tragic's arm and squeezed with an East German Shotputter grip, " What are you reading now then, something high n'arty no doubt?"

Somewhat taken aback Tragic was just a tad off-balance, particularly given the slight hint of the personal vindictive in her voice, but found a satisfying retort.

" Ah", he responded nodding wisely, "thank you for asking. Actually through my contacts in America I am privvy to the winner of the next Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and have just pre-ordered a copy. It is out in the next week or so".

" No", they chorused, and then the shotputter a little more hesitantly. " Are you at liberty to tell us? The ladies at the Book Club would be so impressed".

Tragic glanced around conspiratorially before leaning closer right into the rosewater whiff realm.

" Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol - can't say another word. Farewell Ladies. Keep it to yourselves. It is the most dangerous kind of knowledge."

Tragic glanced over his shoulder as he departed just in time to witness the two scurrying into the local book store where Tragic himself had just purchased a copy of Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout.

There will be hell to pay at some stage but it was still a sweet moment.

Galaxy British Book Awards to Introduce Ghost Written Literature Category as Public Love Katie Price aka Jordan's Books so much?

2009-09-06T22:55:00.000-07:00

A week or so back Tragic was approached by London's Evening Standard to comment on a piece by Dave Sexton, 'Katie Price knows how to kiss and sell'. A confession, Tragic had only a dim recollection of the person in question and that was buried in some distant British Galaxy Award controversy. Apparently, Katie Price, is also known as Jordan a model of some repute. Yes, Tragic does lead a sheltered life - not having a telly helps.

Finding himself intrigued Tragic read Mr. Sexton's piece. Mr. S. , a very shrewd journalist, used the dubious device of the upcoming Booker shortlist to discuss Katie Price and her use of ghost writers. Ms. Price seems like a very resourceful woman to Tragic and he wasn't prepared to play the lets 'make fun of a celebrity game' and penned the following response and sent it off as asked.

For some strange reason the Standard never wrote back. Imagine.

Public Love Katie Price aka Jordan's Books- Galaxy British Book Awards to Introduce Ghost Written Literature Category?

Dave Sexton's , 'Katie Price knows how to kiss and sell', uses a clever journalistic device in setting-up a piece about her ghost written books.

He implies that compared to the best selling Price, bad selling Booker Prize books are evidence of a further ".....humiliation of literary fiction". High brow literature once again usurped by popular mass market work. Bring on the guillotine.

Having created a classic high versus low literature stoush, he then mounts a case for 'ghost writing' as a respectable literary medium. The whole thing is possibly just a cloaking device to clear the way for multiple uses of the word 'willy' as he reprises Price's books. Clever.

What should we be discussing here? Is it really about the merit of ghost written books designed for nosey neighbors versus expertly-crafted literary fiction? After all, comparing Katie Price books to Booker contenders is like a uni student being asked to compare and contrast an aardvark and an apple.

A more fruitful discussion concerns the blurring of literary fact and fiction and the rise and rise of Brand as Behemoth. Of course, the chance to have a good 'goss' about Jordan should not be discounted.

High brow American writer Philip Roth's, The Ghost Writer, concerns the 'tensions between literature and life, artistic truthfulness and conventional decency - and about those implacable practitioners who live with the consequences of sacrificing one for the other'.

At the other end of the brow spectrum, the complex relationships between the Katie Price aka Jordan brand, her ghost writer, Rebecca Farnworth, publishers, the media, her public, agents, booksellers, and even Book Award World, illustrate these themes beautifully.

The Price - Farnworth (PF factor) books are sexy, brash and in tune with a plasma - somafied public who have adopted celebrity watching as their religious preference. The works, as far as Tragic can gather, have sold in their millions - more than the combined sales of the last five years of Booker short listed books. Ouch.

That they are transparently 'ghost written' is of little concern to a voyeuristic and sauce-hungry public who have voted "Yes" with their credit cards.

But, the PF sales success does not by any stretch of the imagination sound the death knell of quality literature. A distinct demographic and legitimacy exists for both pulp and principle. That the former outsells the latter by a country mile is perfectly consistent with any educational bell curve.

What is of more immediate concern is the accelerating meld between literary fact and fiction and the dominance of PR machines that could convince us that totally shite literature is the new high culture. A poison polymorphous literary cocktail touted by Arthur Dalys without the charm. As for authenticity of origin, forget it.

Once, we had a clear understanding of how literary genres were defined. Fiction was made-up. Biography, concerned the life of the individual up to the time of writing. Non-fiction concerned researched and verifiable facts etc.

Autobiography was always more complex because it has no set form or structure, there are no boundaries or limits to it as a literary genre. It is paradoxical by definition. It is quite logical that the Brand Jordan and the Ghost Writer should step into this Second Life style space where many of us maintain alter egos.

But, maybe the PF team have already let the genie out of the bottle.

We are certainly witnessing a time of new category creation. Design your own genre. Faction? Fictography? Iphonetry? Cyber Punk Sci -fi Manga Love? Popular coca-culturalism demands that literature constantly morphs to maintain relevance. Postmodernism was always feral. A new space opening for Literary Chaos Theorists.

This is not to say that ghost writing does not have a place - in it's place- if you get my drift. It should be restricted to autobiography, political speeches and advertising copy - in Katie Price's case all pretty much one and the same. Ghost written fiction? Get real.The phrase should go into the Oxford English Dictionary as a working definition of an oxymoron.

Perhaps one way to take the sting out of Ghost Writing controversy is for the populist British Galaxy Book Awards to include it as an award category- sponsored by AMV or similar. That way, when books such as Being Jordan and My Pony Care Book are nominated for 'literary prizes' (lower case intended), it would not only be legitimate but a marketers' dream.

Indeed it doesn't need to stop there.

Kate Price aka Jordan has shrewdly manipulated her brand for years slipping into a different persona according to need. It is time that the Brand in question took the next logical step.

Time for a new persona, a high-brow one this time by readopting her full name, Katrina Amy Alexandria Alexis Infield -Price. Then, employ an accomplished but struggling multi-award winning author (James Kelman was apparently supported by his wife's day job until quite recently) to ghost write a high-brow novel for her. God knows the chosen author would sell more copies with her name attached than their own.

Most people might not understand the content but will buy anyhow, 'cause its Jordan in' it!

Kevin Parker comments incessantly on Book Award World at www.awardtragic.blogspot.com. He is also publishes www.literaryawards.co.uk | www.literaryawards.com.au | www.literaryfestivals.co.uk

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2009 Man Booker Prize Short List

2009-09-03T13:11:00.000-07:00

It is that time of the year when those of us over focused on Book Award World go all trembly as the Man Booker Prize Shortlist Fest looms. The strongest long list for many a long year- the Booker is back after a few dodgy seasons.

As usual Tragic is going to make a complete and utter wally of himself and have a stab a picking the shortlist. Yes, shear folly, but what the hell. Would like to see Sarah Hall do well as love her work, but rather suspect it could be J.M. Coetzee's year with Hilary Mantel a good outside bet.

As per usual the Bookies in the UK are offering odds - such a well read lot. Shorts due September 8th.

Book links to the venerable Blackwell Books in the UK. Tragic maintains a Man Booker award summary page at Literary Awards UK.

Tragic Picks
3/1 - Coetzee, J M, Summertime, Random House ISBN: 9781846553189 -
10/1 - Byatt, AS, The Children's Book, Random House - Chatto and Windus -ISBN: 9780701183899
12/1 - Hall, Sarah, How to paint a dead man, Faber and Faber -ISBN: 9780571224890
16/1 Mantel, Hilary, Wolf Hall, HarperCollins - Fourth Estate -
6/1 - Toibin, Colm, Brooklyn, Penguin -ISBN: 9780670918126-
5/1 Waters, Sarah, The Little Stranger, Little, Brown - Virago -ISBN: 9781844086023

Longlisted titles

Award Tragic is one of the alter egos of Kevin Parker Publisher

UK Literary Festivals | UK Book Awards || Australian Book Awards | New Zealand Book Awards| Australian Literary Festivals | Best Selling Books Australia | Best Selling Books NZ | USA Book Awards | Canadian Book Awards | Biodiversity Data Base | Green Living Books Australia | Green Living Books NZ | Australian Festivals

Book Award Tragic

Australian Tale Wins Llewellyn Rhys Literary Prize

WILD WOMEN OF THE CARHULLAN ARMY SEIZE JOHNLLEWELLYN RHYS PRIZE 2006/7

2005/6 prize winner

Historic Winners List 1942- 2003

Robet Burns and John Muir Books Win Saltire Scottish Literary Prize

Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature Finalists

Costa Book Award Shorts- Flogging Coffee and Good (ish) Books

Aussie Poet Robert Gray Wins $20,000 'The Nib'

2009 American National Book Award Winners

2009 National Book Award Winners & Finalists

Canadian Literary Award Round-up

A definite purchase will be the winner of two Quebec Writers' Federation awards, Eric Siblin (pictured), for his non-fiction Bach book, The Cello Suites. Just love JS.

A round-up of the majors below. The Canadian Writers Trust prize winners are due to be announced on the 24th. Book links to amazon.ca. Tragic publishes a website covering Canadian Awards at www.canlitawards.com.

Winners of 2009 Governor General’s Literary Awards announced by the Canada CounPublish Postcil for the Arts

Winners 2009 QWF Literary Awards- The same day he was passed over for a Governor General's award, Eric Siblin won two Quebec Writers' Federation prizes for his non-fiction Bach book, The Cello Suites.

Writer's Trust Finalists- Winners Nov 24

Australian Prime Minster's Literary Award Winners

Non-Fiction Winners & Shortlists

Judges' comments

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2009 Fiction Winner & Shortlist

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Herta Muller Wins Noble Prize for Literature - What do you mean Herta Who?

2009 National Book Award Finalists

The American Book Awards / Before Columbus Foundation Book Awards 2009

Wolf Eats Booker Prize as Mantel Wins

Sensational Australian Prime Minister's Literary Award 2009 Shortlists

Judges' comments

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Man Booker Prize is Back In Form With A Satisfying Shortlist

Dan Brown Wins Pulitzer for The Lost Symbol and Flying Cows Sighted Over NYC

Galaxy British Book Awards to Introduce Ghost Written Literature Category as Public Love Katie Price aka Jordan's Books so much?

2009 Man Booker Prize Short List

WILD WOMEN OF THE CARHULLAN ARMY SEIZE JOHN
LLEWELLYN RHYS PRIZE 2006/7