Australian Prime Minster's Literary Award Winners

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.

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• 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

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.

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• 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.

American Writers Not Good Enough to Win Nobel Prize

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.

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

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Wolf Eats Booker Prize as Mantel Wins

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

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

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 .

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

End

2009 Man Booker Prize Short List

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Guardian First Book Longlist- Comparing Beautiful Apples with Beautiful Aardvarks

Tragic has mixed emotions about the Guardian First Book Award. He loves the prospect of discovering a new great talent amongst the debut authors that make the list but still has difficulty with awards that compare poetry along side fiction along side non-fiction.

Despite a slight dis-ease about the format, the quality of judging and contenders is of a standard that we would hope for from one of the world's few remaining 'proper' newspapers. Tragic is prepared to put his discomfort about comparing apples with aardvarks to one side and just enjoy the fact that 10 new authors of talent have been filtered for his consideration.

Last year (2008) the prize was won by the splendid,The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross. An intricate, kaleidoscopic, all-embracing history of 20th-century music from Mahler to La Monte Young. Tragic is still working through the composers discussed in a complete reading and listening immersion experience. Excellent book, as have been many of the previous winners. The 2009 victor will be in very good company indeed.

Imagine how exciting the list would be if they had three dedicated categories. The prize would surely be up there challenging the elite for top spot.

The links below go to Blackwell Books in the UK. Tragic is working on a relationship with Waterstones who co-sponsor the award with Guardian. He offers his respect and apologies that the links are not through to their good selves at this stage whilst technical details are ironed out with their representatives.

2009 Longlist -

Friday 28th August- The longlist for the Guardian First Book Award 2009, in association with Waterstone's, has been confirmed. The longlisted books are:

| | | |

• The Secret Lives of Buildings, by Edward Hollis, Portobello (non-fiction)-Takes us from the colossal achievements of antiquity to the contest for Ground Zero, telling stories about buildings and the ways they change. This book reveals the hidden histories of the Parthenon and the Alhambra, visiting churches that have... More

• Direct Red, by Gabriel Weston, Cape (non-fiction) -How does it feel to hold someone's life in your hands? What is it like to cut into someone else's body? How do you tell a beautiful young man who seems perfectly fit that he has only a few days left to live? What happens when, on a quiet ward late at night, a patient you've grown close to lifts the corner of his blankets and invites you into his bed? More

• The Strangest Man, by Graham Farmelo, Faber (non-fiction)-Paul Dirac was one of the leading pioneers of the greatest revolution in 20th-century science: quantum mechanics. This book celebrates Dirac's massive scientific achievement while drawing a compassionate portrait of his life and work. More

• A Swamp Full of Dollars, by Michael Peel, IB Tauris (non-fiction)- Through a host of characters, from the prostitutes of Port Harcourt to the Area Boys of Lagos, from the militants in their swamp forest hide-outs to the oil company executives in London, this title tells the story of Nigeria, which grows ever more... More

The Rehearsal, by Eleanor Catton, Granta (novel)-A novel about the unsimple mess of human desire, at once a tender evocation of its young protagonists and a shrewd expose of emotional compromise. A high-school sex scandal jolts a group of teenage girls into a new awareness of their own potency... More

| | | |

• The Wilderness, by Samantha Harvey, Cape (novel)-It's Jake's birthday. He is sitting in a 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. More

• The Girl With Glass Feet, by Ali Shaw, Atlantic (novel)-Strange things are happening on the remote and snowbound archipelago of St Hauda's Land. Unusual winged creatures flit around icy bogland; albino animals hide themselves in the snow-glazed woods; jellyfish glow in the ocean's depths... More

• The Selected Works of TS Spivet, by Reif Larsen, Harvill (novel)-T S Spivet is a 12-year-old genius mapmaker who lives on a ranch in Montana. His father is a tight-lipped cowboy and his mother is a scientist who for the last twenty years has been looking for a mythical species of beetle. His brother has gone... More

• An Elegy for Easterly, by Petina Gappah, Faber (short story) - Describes the lives of people in Zimbabwe caught up in a situation over which they have no control, as they deal with spiralling inflation, power cuts and financial hardship, and cope with issues common to all people everywhere; failed promises, disappointments and unfulfilled dreams. more

• The Missing, by Sian Hughes, Salt (poetry)-A collection of poems that is direct and emotional. It deals with the heart of shame, with parenting, illness, loss, regret and falling in love with the wrong people. More

About the Award

Established in 1965 as the Guardian First Book Award by The Guardian newspaper, the prize is worth £10,000 to the winner. In 1965 the prize money was 200 guineas (£210) and was awarded to a work of fiction by British or Commonwealth writer and published in the UK. The shortlist is announced in November each year and the winner in December.

The Guardian's first book award was established in 1999 to reward the finest new literary talent with a £10,000 prize for an author's first book. The award is open to writing across all genres. It is unique among book awards as debut works of fiction are judged alongside those of non-fiction.

The £10,000 prize, which covers fiction, non-fiction and poetry published in the UK, was voted for in 2008 by a panel of judges, with input from Waterstone's reading groups. Groups from Cardiff, Edinburgh, Leeds, Bath, Oxford and London, and one based online. Their combined voting power was greater than that of the panel of four judges.

Tragic maintains a summary page at Literary Awards UK

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

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Revolutionary 'Pnale' to Judge 2009 Prime Minister's Literary Awards

In an innovative approach the 2009 PM's Literary Award is being judged for the first time by a pnale.

Tragic is not entirely sure what a pnale is. Possibly, it is a collective noun for a group of distinguished literary types who, despite their best efforts, are unable to quite achieve the coherence of a traditional panel that generally presides over such affairs.

Alternatively, it could be indicative of a new marketing approach where the words in digital copies of the winning books are randomly jumbled-up with the buying public having to unravel them to make a coherent whole. 'Anagram Books for those with nothing better to do with their lives'.

The release below for all the etymologists out there.

Shortlist announcement coming soon

Minister for the Arts Peter Garrett will announce the Fiction and Non-Fiction shortlists for the 2009 Prime Minister's Literary Awards on Friday 18 September 2009 in Melbourne.

The Fiction judging pnale, comprising Professor Peter Pierce (chair), Professor John Hay AC and Dr Lyn Gallacher, have reviewed 93 fiction entries to develop a shortlist of recommended fiction titles.

The Non-Fiction judging panel, comprising Phillip Adams AO (chair), Peter Rose and Professor Joan Beaumont, have reviewed 161 non-fiction entries to determine their shortlist. end

Ahhmm. Still, exciting times ahead for those of us who follow Australian Literary Awards as the Prime Minister's Literary Awards, our second most prestigious award, is laden with promise. Just a hint of excitement in Tragic's tummy. Need to get out a bit more often methinks.

Is it possible that the Fiction shortlist will not contain any of the following? Or will the judging pnale bravely go where many Australian Literary Judges have already gone before?

Wanting by Richard Flanagan

Fugitive Blue by Claire Thomas

The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville

The Boat by Nam Le

Ransom by David Malouf

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas
The Pages, Murray Bail
Dog Boy , Eva Hornung (Text Publishing) -
The Boat, Nam Le, (Penguin)
Breath, Tim Winton, (Penguin)
The Lieutenant, written by Kate Grenville

The Spare Room, written by Helen Garner

Ice , Louis Nowra (Allen & Unwin)

Timely Reprise

Oh the beauty of many eyes. The original notice sent out at 10.13 am had a pnale judging affairs. A second, corrected email, arrived at 12.18pm by which time the pnale had morphed into a fully fledged and no doubt fully functioning panel.

We can only hope that the Ministry of Defence have more alert proof readers than the Environment and Arts mob to wit: "Apologies. Our earlier email stating that "we were feeling war over New Zealand's actions, should have read "we are feeling raw over New Zealand's actions".

Yes yes, those of us who also make frequent typos' shouldn't throw erasers, to save you emailing me again Doris. No, I still do not get apostrophes, it's' congenital. Still, one of those amusing vignettes that lightens the day. At this stage Tragic is not expecting an invitation to the announcement. Shame, Melbourne is so lovely in spring.

Tragic maintains a summary page at Literary Awards Australia and Book Awards New Zealand. He is planning to give it twirl on his Literary Award UK site despite the fact it is open season on all things Australian at the moment. Given the poor quality of many recent UK Literary Awards, a classy slice of OZ Lit is overdue.

About the Award

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

A tax free prize of $100 000 is awarded to the work judged to be of the highest literary merit in each of two categories:

* Fiction
* Non-Fiction

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

Last year the Fiction winner, The Zookeeper's War by Steven Conte, failed to arouse too much passion in the wider public. The fine Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers byPhilip Jones. won the Non-fiction prize.

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

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