Melbourne Prize for Literature Seeks Expressions of Interest
The $60,000 Melbourne Prize for Literature 2012 and the $30,000 Best Writing Award 2012 will open for entry later this year. Established by the Melbourne Prize Trust in 2004, the prize operates on a three-year cycle focusing, in turn, on sculpture, literature and music.
The prize honours a body of work and an outstanding contribution to Australian literature, while the award recognises a single work. Both the literature prize and the writing award are open to Victorian residents only, but there is no residency restriction on those making nominations.
The inaugural winner of the Melbourne Prize for Literature was Helen Garner (2006); she was followed by Gerald Murnane in 2009. The Best Writing Award has been won by Christos Tsiolkas (for Dead Europe) and Nam Le (for The Boat).
To register your interest to receive the 2012 entry form and information, click on the relevant link on the Melbourne Prize Trust's home page or call the Trust on (03) 9696 4410.
Black Inc. Seeks Submissions
Melbourne publisher Black Inc. has announced the editors for its three annual anthologies: Sonya Hartnett will edit The Best Australian Stories 2012; Ramona Koval will edit The Best Australian Essays 2012; and John Tranter will edit The Best Australian Poems 2012.
Submissions for the 2012 anthologies are now open and guidelines can be found on Black Inc.'s website.
Victorian Government Announces Indigenous Honour Roll Inductees
The Victorian government has established an Indigenous Honour Roll to celebrate the lives and accomplishments of Indigenous people ‘whose efforts have significantly impacted society’.
The names of the first twenty inductees have been revealed. Their contributions range across the fields of education, politics, the arts, sport and health. Included on the list are singer, songwriter and storyteller Archie Roach, cricketer and pastoral worker Johnny Mullagh, boxer and former Australian of the Year Lionel Rose, and writer and speaker on spirituality Elizabeth Pike.
For details of all inductees, follow the links on the Victorian Department of Planning and Community Development website.
Adelaide Writers’ Week Dedicated to Margo Lanagan
This year’s Adelaide Writers’ Week is dedicated to novelist and short story writer Margo Lanagan. Announcing the ‘dedicatee’ for 2012, Sean Williams praised Lanagan’s ‘dark wit coupled with a near hypnotic ability to lead her readers into unusual and often uncomfortable places’.
Lanagan’s most recent novel, published in February 2012, is the young adult fantasy Sea Hearts which draws on selkie mythology.
Adelaide Writers’ Week runs from the 3rd to the 8th of March. Australian guests include Garry Disher, Ursula Dubosarsky, Gail Jones, Frank Moorhouse, Les Murray, Garth Nix and Elliot Perlman. For further information, see the festival website.
US Outstanding Books List Recognises Australian Writers
USBBY, the United States section of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY), has announced its ‘2012 list of the 36 most outstanding international books for children and teens’. USBBY sought titles that would help American students ‘see the world from other points of view, and provide a fresh perspective or address a topic otherwise missing from U.S. children’s literature, while often presenting a distinct cultural flavor’.
Four Australian books are included on the 2012 list: Deborah Abela’s The Remarkable Secret of Aurelie Bonhoffen (under the US publication title The Ghosts of Gibblesea Pier), Gabrielle Wang’s The Garden of Empress Cassia, Sonya Hartnett’s The Midnight Zoo and Shaun Tan’s Lost and Found.
The full USBBY list for 2012 is available on the United States Board on Books for Young People website.
NYOR Winning Titles Announced
The National Year of Reading project has announced the titles of the ‘eight books that together paint a picture of the Australian people and the land we live in’. More than 16,000 people voted via the ABC website and at their local libraries to select the book best representing their state or territory during the 2012 Year of Reading.
The eight books are: Smoke and Mirrors by Kel Robertson (Australian Capital Territory),The Idea of Home by John Hughes (New South Wales), Listening to Country by Ros Moriarty (Northern Territory), The White Earth by Andrew McGahan (Queensland), Time’s Long Ruin by Stephen Orr (South Australia), Wanting by Richard Flanagan (Tasmania), Well Done, Those Men by Barry Heard (Victoria) and Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey (Western Australia).
Following the announcement, the chair of the National Year of Reading founders, Margaret Allen, expressed that hope that ‘thousands of readers will take a journey around Australia through the pages of these eight books and come out of it with an even greater depth of understanding about what it means to be Australian’.
Further background on the ‘Our Story’ project is available here. For more information on the National Year of Reading click here.
Awards’ Season Underway
Two shortlists and one longlist for literary awards have been announced in recent weeks. The Indie Awards, selected by Australia’s independent booksellers, released their 2012 shortlist in late January. The awards span four categories – fiction, debut fiction, non-fiction and children’s literature. In early February the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature announced their shortlist, and the longlist for the ALS Gold Medal was also released. The Festival Awards range across published and unpublished writing in eight categories. The ALS Gold Medal is for ‘an outstanding literary work published in the preceding calendar year’.
Two writers have been nominated for all three awards: Anna Funder for All That I Am and Gail Jones for Five Bells. Jones said it was ‘a great honour’ to be shortlisted for the Indie Awards: ‘Independent bookstores support our reading and writing culture in essential and indispensable ways ... above all by promoting a genuine solidarity with both readers and writers.’
Award shortlists can be found on these websites: Indie Awards and Festival Awards for Literature (media release); ALS Gold Medal news will be added to the Association for the Study of Australian Literature site shortly. In the meantime, view the longlisted titles here via AustLit’s Advanced Search.
Dickens Celebrations
Tuesday, 7 February 2012, marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens. World-wide celebrations include a British Council-sponsored read-a-thon that begins in Australia with a reading from Dombey and Son. (Follow the reading on Twitter via the hashtag #Dickens2012.)
Dickens's connections with Australia have been well-documented. They manifested themselves in his fictional characters and in his personal life. Dickens transported a raft of characters to New South Wales including Uriah Heep in David Copperfield, Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations and Wackford Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby. Two of Dickens’s sons, Alfred and Edward, also made the journey – in their case as free settlers.
Dickens wrote regularly about Australia in the journal Household Words. A collection of his essays from this source has been gathered in the five-book set Charles Dickens' Australia. Coral Lansbury, in her Dickens article for the Australian Dictionary of Biography notes that these articles were ‘widely published in the Australian press and helped to impose Dickens's own view of Australia on Australian life and society’. ('Charles Dickens 1812-1870')
Gleeson Awarded 2011 Dromkeen Medal
Libby Gleeson is the winner of the 2011 Dromkeen Medal. The annual award is presented to ‘an Australian citizen for a significant contribution to the appreciation and development of children’s literature in Australia’.
Gleeson is the author of more than thirty children’s books including award winners Amy and Louis (illustrated by Freya Blackwood) and The Great Bear (illustrated by Armin Greder). Gleeson has been shortlisted more than a dozen times for Children’s Book Council of Australia awards and various Premiers’ Literary Awards from 1985 to 2011. She was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2007 for her service to literature as an author, literacy advocate and writers’ mentor and guide.
Gleeson will receive the medal from the Governors of the Court Oldmeadow Children’s Literature Foundation at a ceremony in March 2012. For more information on the work of Dromkeen, ‘The Home of Australian Children's Book Illustration’, see the Dromkeen pages on Scholastic Australia’s website.
Death of NT Writer
Writer Andrew McMillan has died at his home in Darwin. Born in Brisbane, the journalist, poet and musician settled in the Northern Territory after covering the 1988 Midnight Oil / Warumpi Band tour. In a statement released following his death, McMillan was described as ‘one of the Territory’s great eccentrics — but also one of its best contemporary writers’.
McMillan’s book An Intruder's Guide to East Arnhem Land, first published in 2001 and then in a revised edition in 2007, won the Northern Territory Chief Minister's Book of the Year Award in 2009. The book speaks to McMillan’s deep connection with the Yolngu people over many years.
The Age newspaper reports that proceeds from McMillan’s estate ‘will be dedicated to setting up a writer's retreat in his favourite place, the tiny settlement of Larrimah, 430 kilometres south-east of Darwin’. ('NT Writer Loses Cancer Fight') An anthology of McMillan’s writing, in preparation at the time of his death, will be published posthumously.
The statement released after McMillan’s death is available on the Crikey.com website.
Inaugural AACTAs Announced
The inaugural winners of the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA) Awards have been announced during three separate events between 15 and 31 January 2012.
As anticipated, the box office favourite Red Dog — an adaptation of a Louis de Bernieres novella — won the award for Best Film. In other categories, The Slap won the award for Best Telefeature, Mini Series or Short Run Series. The television version of Christos Tsiolkas’s novel also collected the award for Best Screenplay in Television (Brendan Cowell for episode three, Harry).
Other writing awards went to Leon Ford for Griff the Invisible (Best Original Screenplay), Shaun Grant for Snowtown (Best Adapted Screenplay) and Anthony Maras for The Palace (Best Screenplay in a Short Film).
The AACTA Awards are ‘a continuum of the ... heritage established by the Australian Film Institute's (AFI) Awards’. A full list of inaugural winners is available on the AACTA website.