Now, in what can only be described as a 'blind-side' run of a win, it has won one of Australia's leading book awards the $10,000 New South Wales Premier's Book of the Year Award. Tragic uses the term 'blind-side' as the book was nowhere to be seen on the issued shortlists in the twelve categories on offer this year. It was eligible for the main gong by virtue of winning the UTS Glenda Adams Prize for New Writing - (The Boat being Nam Le's first book). The Glenda Adams worth $5,000 AUD, does not declare a shortlist, only a winner at the last moment. It was a dark horse in every sense of the word as no-one outside of the UTS and Premier's judging panels had a clue it was in the running.
Tragic strongly recommends that if UTS Glenda Adams books are to be eligible in future for the NSW Premier's Book of the Year that it issues a shortlist. Believe it or not some of us do actually read the shortlists and even have an active discussion about potential winners.
In particular this years events diminish the welcome addition of a People's Choice Award from the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction Shortlist. The Boat, apparently not good enough for the Stead (Shortstoryism?), then proceeded to sneak up on the inside run unknown to all observers to take out the biggie - a bit like a mystery runner being introduced at the gate in the Melbourne Cup - just think what that would do to the office sweep stake.
Tragic will ignore implications that Vietnam born, Australian raised, true citizen of the world Nam Le's politically correct work fitted the bill in a political sense. The Boat is a damn fine book in every sense and a good an example of the writer's craft that Tragic has encountered in recent times. The fact is that without a bit more transparency in the process minds will start to ponder......
Tragic also feels a bit sorry in a financial sense for Nam Le as the other major NSW Premier's Literary Prizes on offer carry considerable purses. He received $5,000 AUD for winning the Adams and a bonus $10,000 AUD for winning Book of the Year. Not that Tragic is too worried about the 'Darling Lamb, Nam', as a nameless friend calls him after enjoying his work, he has picked-up a few bob here and there, is in demand, is a very fine writer and by virtue of his training as a Corporate Lawyer is unlikely to get seen off in contract negotiations.
All in all there were 12 prizes given out with the winners and finalists in each category noted below for posterity. For the record Steve Tolz's fine A Fraction of the Whole (previously shortlisted for the Booker and longlisted for the Miles) won the inaugural People's Choice Award chosen from the Stead shortlist (which was pretty tasty it must be said). The judges and the great unwashed disagreed with Joan London's– The Good Parents winning the $40,000 AUD up for grabs.
The morality of parenting must be the topic of the month with Christos Tsiolkas winning the Best Book prize at the prestigious Commonwealth Writers' Awards. Tsiolkas won for his work The Slap, a tale about middle-class suburban Australia and its notions of child-rearing and acceptable. Tragic feels terrible having just yelled at his little darlings to take the cat out of the dryer immediately so that he could finish this blog.
All winners for the NSW Premier's Literary Prizes below. With some $320,000 AUD on offer for the awards, the NSW Gov is to be commended, unlike the neanderthals in WA who have ripped the heart out of the Australia-Asia Literary Prize with a biro.
A bouquet also the web team for the NSW Premier's Awards for a people friendly websites at last.
Winners and finalists all categories below. Tragic maintains a summary page at Literary Awards Australia. Official site link below.
2009 NSW Premier's Book of the Year.. ($10,000)
The Boat by Nam Le
Publisher: Penguin Books Australia ISBN:0143009613 EAN: 9780143009610Nam Le was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia. He has previously received the Pushcart Prize, the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, and fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Phillips Exeter Academy. His fiction has appeared in venues including Zoetrope: All-Story, A Public Space, Conjunctions, One Story, NPR's, Selected Shorts and the Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best New American Voices, Best Australian Stories, and Pushcart Prize anthologies. He is the fiction editor of the Harvard Review.
The Boat is a stunningly inventive, deeply moving fiction debut: stories that take the readers from the slums of Colombia to the streets of Tehran; from New York City to Iowa City; from a tiny fishing village in Australia to a foundering vessel in the South China Sea, in a masterful display of literary virtuosity and feeling. In the opening story, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," a young writer is urged by his friends to mine his father's experiences in Vietnam — and what seems at first a satire on turning one's life into literary commerce becomes a transcendent exploration of homeland, and the ties between father and son.
2009 People's Choice Award for Fiction
Residents of New South Wales cast their vote for the People's Choice Award from among the works shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize for fiction. Voting ran from Tuesday 24 March to midnight Monday 11 May.
Winner - Steve Toltz – A Fraction of the Whole
An uproarious indictment of the ridiculousness of the modern world and it's mores, this novel also tells the moving, memorable story of a father and son whose spiritual symmetry transcends all their many shortcomings.
2009 NSW Premiers Literary Award Winners and Shortlisted Titles
Christina Stead Prize for fiction ($40,000)
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Winner- Joan London (Fremantle, WA) – The Good Parents
Helen Garner (Flemington, VIC) – The Spare Room
Kate Grenville (Lyneham, ACT) – The Lieutenant
Julia Leigh (Bondi Beach, NSW) –Disquiet
Steve Toltz (North Bondi, NSW) – A Fraction of the Whole
Tim Winton (Fremantle, WA) – Breath
Douglas Stewart Prize for non-fiction ($40,000)
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Winner- Chloe Hooper The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island
James Boyce Van Diemen's Land: A History
Robert Gray The Land I Came Through Last
Dmetri Kakmi Mother Land
Jacqueline Kent An Exacting Heart: The Story of Hephzibah Menuhin
Christina Thompson Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story
Kenneth Slessor Prize for poetry ($30,000)
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Winner - L K Holt Man Wolf Man (currently unavailable through Fishpond)
- Michael Brennan Unanimous Night (Salt Modern Poets S.)
- David Brooks The Balcony
- Sarah Holland-Batt Aria
- Kerry Leves A Shrine to Lata Mangeshkar
- Alan Wearne The Australian Popular Songbook
Ethel Turner Prize for young people’s literature ($30,000)
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Winner - Michelle Cooper A Brief History of Montmaray
- Dianne Bates Crossing the Line
- D. M. Cornish Monster Blood Tattoo Book Two: Omnibus Books Lamplighter
- Alison Goodman The Two Pearls of Wisdom
- Nette Hilton Sprite Downberry
- Joanne Horniman My Candlelight Novel
Patricia Wrightson Prize for children’s literature ($30,000)
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Winner -Ursula Dubosarsky & Tohby Riddle (illus) The Word Spy
- Bob Graham How to Heal a Broken Wing
- Sonya Hartnett & Ann James (illus) (Australia) - Sadie and Ratz (Aussie Nibbles)
- Glenda Millard & Stephen Michael King (illus) Perry Angel's Suitcase (Kingdom of Silk)
- Tohby Riddle Nobody Owns the Moon
- Shaun Tan Tales from Outer Suburbia
Community Relations Commission Award ($15,000)
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Winner - Eric Richards Destination Australia: Migration to Australia Since 1901
- Anna Haebich- Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950-1970
- Philip Jones and Anna Kenny Australia's Muslim Cameleers: Pioneers of the Inland 1860s-1930s
- Jacqueline Kent An Exacting Heart: The Story of Hephzibah Menuhin
- Michelle Offen East West 101: Chapter Five – Haunted by the Past
- Malcolm Prentis The Scots in Australia
Gleebooks Prize ($10,000)
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Winner - David Love - Unfinished Business: Paul Keating’s interrupted revolution
- James Boyce Van Diemen's Land: A History
- Tim Flannery Quarterly Essay 31: Now or Never, a sustainable future for Australia?
- Gideon Haigh - The Racket: How Abortion Became Legal in Australia
- Chloe HooperThe Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island
Jonathan Richards The Secret War: a true history of Queensland’s Native Police
UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing ($5,000)
Winner - The Boat by Nam Le
Script Writing Award ($30,000)
Louis Nowra, Rachel Perkins & Beck Cole, First Australians, Blackfella Films, SBS
Play Award ($30,000)
Daniel Keene, The Serpent’s Teeth, Sydney Theatre Company, Currency Press Pty Ltd
The Biennial NSW Premier’s Translation Prize and PEN Trophy ($30,000)
David Colmer for his translations from the Dutch.
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