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 The Festival Awards range across published and unpublished writing in eight categories.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.