Winton Wins Miles Franklin

Tim Winton has won Australia's leading book award, the Miles Franklin Literary Prize, for Breath. Mr. W. wasn't at the gala presentation as he doesn't do ceremonies. The cheque for AU$42,000 is in the mail. Should keep him in surfboard wax for a while.

Congrats' to Mr. Winton for whom Tragic has a soft spot given the authors' wonderful contribution to preserving Western Australia's marine environment.

Tragic is so chuffed that he is going to borrow a surf board and go catch a wave. 50 years old is exactly the right time to take-up grommit status.

Breath is narrated from middle age by Bruce "Pikelet" Pike looking back on his adolescence. It's about the risks the young take, the struggle not to be ordinary and how they deal with forces and emotions they can't always identify or understand. Winton propels his characters from river to ocean, from basic surfing to the biggest challenges the sea can offer, and from teen romance to the most confronting sexual experiences.

Other shortlisted

Other Shortlisted

The Slap

By Christos Tsiolkas

At a suburban barbecue, a man slaps a child who is not his own. This event has a shocking ricochet effect on a group of people, mostly friends, who are directly or indirectly influenced by the event. In this remarkable novel, Christos Tsiolkas turns his unflinching and all-seeing eye on to that which connects us all: the modern family and domestic life in the twenty-first century. The Slap is told from the points of view of eight people who were present at the barbecue. The slap and its consequences force them all to question their own families and the way they live, their expectations, beliefs and desires. What unfolds is a powerful, haunting novel about love, sex and marriage, parenting and children, and the fury and intensity - all the passions and conflicting beliefs - that family can arouse.

Ice , Louis Nowra (Allen & Unwin)

Ice is a story within a story, set in two time frames: the nineteenth century and the twenty-first century. It explores the link between obsessive love and irreconcilable loss. The wider canvas is a vision of Australia in the late nineteenth century as a melting pot of people and ideas.

The main story begins in the late 1880’s with one of Nowra’s great descriptive scenes – a battered ship sails into Sydney Harbour towing an iceberg from Antarctica. The shores teem with people who have come to gaze on the dazzling spectacle and the quays are crowded with traders with their horses and carts ready to buy the precious frozen water. One of the leaders of this extraordinary expedition is Malcolm McEacharn, a Scotsman, and it his story that is the core of this engrossing novel. As a young man he was rescued from a bleak and lonely existence by marrying the beautiful Ann. Working for her father in Yorkshire, he learnt about engineering and scientific theories; his fulfillment is complete but short lived – his wife’s sudden death plunges him into inconsolable grief

The Pages by Murray Bail (Text publishing Australia)

Two Sydney women, friends, but oddly matched, set out on an adventure. Erica, who is self contained, academic and undemonstrative, has been commissioned to appraise the philosophical leavings of an Australian autodidact and thinker, Wesley Antill, whose papers are preserved in the woolshed of the family sheep station in western New South Wales. Sophie is opulent, compulsively verbal (a psychologist) and recovering from an affair that didn’t go her way. Both women are of an age to be examining their lives.

Detached from their urban routines, the two women find their diffident but obliging hosts, sister and brother, Lindsey and Roger Antill, disconcerting, and rural life, with its integrity, ritual hospitality and latent threat, unsettling. New alliances form, different affinities develop. The friendship frays

Wanting, Richard Flanagan (Knopf, Random House Australia)

For Richard Flanagan the past is full-bodied, pulsing with irreconcilable facts, desires and intentions – banal, malign, meretricious, occasionally good. Flanagan paves his novel with them. Wanting is not a history. Rather it is, as its writer claims, a meditation on the consequences of human beings’ repressing, denying, failing to understand or subverting the impulses of their hearts.

In Van Dieman’s Land, the protector of Aborigines, Charles Augustus Robinson is cleft by contrary instincts. He loves the people he is charged with protecting, with ‘bringing in’, yet they are dying around him, victims of contact with the colonising society that is supposed to elevate them. When he dances naked with ‘his’ people, he is prey to passions he does not understand and exhilarated in ways that both pleasure and alarm him.

The governor of Van Dieman’s Land and his ambitious wife turn the colony into a scientific experiment. Sir John and Lady Franklin hold improving soirees, institute lectures, and displease their staff and colonial society by not licensing a benign decadence as compensation for dutiful exile at the other end of the earth. The childless Lady Jane adopts a beautiful native child, Mathinna, ostensibly to educate her in white ways. But black ways prove intractable, and the child grows into a fascinating, tragic hybrid, at once a reproach and a temptation. More

Judges Formal Comments and Shortlisted Book Descriptions

Judges for this year’s Award are Professor Robert Dixon, Professor Morag Fraser AM, Lesley McKay, Regina Sutton and Murray Waldren.