AustLit News

ASA Announces Picture Book Illustrators’ Grants

Wed, 16 May 2012 01:42:31 GMT

The Australian Society of Authors (ASA) has announced five recipients of Picture Book Illustrators’ Initiative Grants for 2012. The initiative ‘aims to establish a “best-practice” methodology for assessing applications from picture book illustrators for the Australia Council’s New Work funding category’.

The Assessment Panel considered over 100 applications from 92 illustrators and awarded grants in three categories – Emerging, Developing and Established. The Emerging Illustrator’s grant of $5,000 went to Trace Balla and further grant was awarded to Craig Phillips. In the Developing category, Caroline Magerl received $10,000 and Judy Watson, $5,000. The recipient of the $15,000 Established Illustrator’s grant is Narelle Oliver.

To see the full list of shortlisted illustrators, go to the Australian Society of Authors website. And to enjoy some of the emerging artists' work, see Trace Balla's photostream on Flickr and Craig Phillip's illustrations on his website.

National Biography Award to ANU Historian

Tue, 15 May 2012 02:51:52 GMT

Dr Martin Thomas, an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of History at The Australian National University, is the winner of the 2012 National Biography Award. Thomas won the $25,000 award for his 2011 biography, The Many Worlds of R. H. Mathews: In Search of an Australian Anthropologist.

Mathews was a nineteenth-century surveyor and anthropologist who produced a large volume of writing resulting from his field investigations into Indigenous communities in New South Wales.

Alex Byrne, the NSW State Librarian, commented that Thomas’s ‘forensic research’ and ‘superb writing’ produced a biography that reminds Australians of Mathews’s ‘immense contribution’ as an ‘outstanding early investigator of our first peoples and their cultures’.

One of the National Biography Award judges, Peter Rose, said that Thomas’s biography stood out ‘because of its originality, its immense detail and scholarship, and its luminous engagement with his subject’. (NSW State Library media release, 14 May 2012)

For further information on the National Biography Award, click here. To learn more about R. H. Mathews, view his biographical entry at the Australian Dictionary of Biography Online.

Josephine Ulrick Winners Announced

Wed, 09 May 2012 02:57:00 GMT

The winners of the 2012 Josephine Ulrick prizes have been announced in Queensland. The prizes, for a short story and for poetry, are administered by Griffith University's School of Humanities.

The 2012 literature prize was awarded to Matthew Lamb, editor of the Review of Australian Fiction, for his short story ‘Long Grass over Home’. Lamb describes his story as revealing what happens when you ‘lift the crust of the dung heap and let the stench rise’.

Melbourne writer Maria Zajkowski has won the poetry prize for the second year running. In 2011, a suite of poems from her manuscript ‘The Ascendant’ won the award; this year, another suite from the same manuscript has taken out the $20,000 prize. Zajkowksi says her poems are ‘about existence, and that death is not non-existence. They focus on gain as much as loss, and how inseparable these two things are.’ (Griffith University media release, 4 May 2012)

Zajkowski will use her prize money to spend some time in Europe; Lamb hopes his win will ‘help legitimise his work, particularly with the [Review of Australian Fiction] to promote and disseminate Australian fiction and short stories.

More information on the Josephine Ulrick prizes is available on the award website.

Miles Franklin Shortlist Announced

Mon, 07 May 2012 00:07:00 GMT

The shortlist for the 2012 Miles Franklin Literary Award has been revealed by the award’s trustee, The Trust Company. This year’s short list comprises five books, including three by women, one of whom is a first-time novelist.

The shortlisted titles are: Blood by Tony Birch, All That I Am by Anna Funder, Foal’s Bread by Gillian Mears, Cold Light by Frank Moorhouse and Past the Shallows by Favel Parrett.

Parrett’s novel, her first, is set on the south-east coast of Tasmania and explores the life of a dysfunctional family. Brothers Miles and Harry are subject to the anger and violence of their hard-working, hard-drinking father, but offer each other care and protection in this harsh environment.

The Miles Franklin judges wrote: ‘Parrett’s controlled, unadorned narrative completely immerses the reader in the marginalised and isolating world of the boys' circumstances: the all-pervasive, random violence of their father, the ocean which both supports them and drains them, and their own strategies for surviving their situation ... Past the Shallows is an intensely moving novel, about the importance and sustaining power of love and responsibility, and the tragedies which can unfold in their absence.’

The winner of this year’s Miles Franklin will be announced on 30 June. To read all the judges’ notes, go to the Miles Franklin website and follow the links to the shortlist.

Jeanine Leane Shortlisted for New Commonwealth Prize

Tue, 01 May 2012 03:55:13 GMT

Jeanine Leane is one of four Australians shortlisted for the inaugural Commonwealth Book Prize. Leane, a former co-ordinator of AustLit’s BlackWords Research Community, is shortlisted for her intertwined collection of stories, Purple Threads. Other Australians on the shortlist are Christopher Currie, for The Ottoman Motel, Mette Jakobsen, for The Vanishing Act, and Cory Taylor, for Me and Mr Booker.

The Commonwealth Book Prize is being offered by Commonwealth Writers, a new cultural program running under the auspices of the Commonwealth Foundation. Prizes will be awarded for each of five regions — Africa, Asia, Canada and Europe, the Caribbean, and the Pacific — and an overall winner will then be selected.

Book Prize chair Margaret Busby commented that the judges were looking for ‘potential and promise from the entries. We certainly found what we were hoping for with some consummately accomplished writing from some very interesting writers.’

The five regional winners will be announced on 22 May and the overall winner on 8 June. To see the full shortlist and read more of the judges’ comments, follow the links on the Commonwealth Foundation’s news site.

Vogel Win for Melbourne Writer

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 01:52:32 GMT

Paul D. Carter, a Melbourne secondary school teacher, is the winner of the 2012 Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript by a writer under thirty-five. Carter’s novel, Eleven Seasons, follows a schoolboy’s passions and secrets through successive seasons of Australian Rules football.

In a review of the novel published in the Australian, award judge and literary critic Geordie Williamson says that ‘while Eleven Seasons is a book about a young man obsessed with football, it is not a football novel. It is a story about the ways in which masculinity, as it is conceived by — and endorsed through — sport, can harden like a carapace around the individual, severing finer feelings or emotional connections, sometimes even permitting evil acts to be committed under the banner of esprit de corps.’ ('Intersecting Forces of Sport and Masculinity', 28 April 2012)

Carter receives $20,000 in prize money for his Vogel win and publication with Allen & Unwin. Under new arrangements (implemented in 2010), the winning title is now published simultaneously with the award announcement. For more information on Eleven Seasons and its availability, see Allen & Unwin’s website.

Remembering Bruce Bennett

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 02:46:21 GMT

Friends and colleagues of the late Professor Bruce Bennett are invited to share their thoughts and memories via the comments function on AustLit’s News Blog.

We begin with the following words from US scholar Nicholas Birns:
'With the passing of Bruce Bennett, all literary scholars of Australia have lost a friend, a helping hand and an esteemed, guiding sensibility. He was a commanding figure in the field, but even more he was simply a gracious and likable man...

'Bruce had the intellect and the breadth to be an intimidatingly erudite scholar but he added to that an availability, an affable if not necessarily matey graciousness, and a humility that has made him not only profoundly respected but also widely admired. The way he pursued his career exemplifies what an academic life can and should be: a vocation in which one’s daily conduct is in synch with the ideals of learning and scholarship that inspire so many to enter it...

'His passing leaves a huge gap in Australian literary study. He knew the field; encouraged the young, and called attention to the deserving. He was a teacher, reader, and colleague. He was liked and respected. I will miss him tremendously.'

Please click on 'Read More' (below) to read the full version of Nicholas Birns's message or to leave your own comment.

Champion of Australian Literature Dies in Canberra

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 02:41:16 GMT

Emeritus Professor Bruce Bennett, AO, has died at his home in Canberra. A Rhodes Scholar, Professor Bennett was a graduate of the Universities of Western Australia, Oxford and London. He taught at the University of Western Australia from 1968 to 1992 and at the University of New South Wales, Canberra from 1993 until his retirement.

Professor Bennett wrote and edited numerous books and articles on Australian literature, culture and society. He was still working in the final weeks of his life. As his friend and colleague Professor Paul Eggert commented: ‘One remarkable thing is that he went out as a scholar, "with the ink still wet on the page"—as Mary Gilmore said of her mother’. In recent months, Professor Bennett, with Anne Pender, completed a book on Australian expatriate writers. Another title, ‘The Spying Game: An Australian Angle’ is also with the publisher.

Professor Bennett was a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Among his many professional roles, he chaired the Modern Language Association of America's Division 33 (Literatures in English Other Than British and American) and was Vice-Chair of the Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies. In 2005-2006, he was the Group of Eight Chair at The Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies at Georgetown University, Washington DC.

Professor Bennett was chair of the AustLit Board from its beginnings until 2004. AustLit’s Board, partners and contributors extend their deepest sympathy to Bruce’s wife, Trish, and to their family.

Queensland Literary Awards to Proceed under New Management

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 04:17:00 GMT

Members of Queensland’s literary and arts communities, under the guidance of writers Matthew Condon and Krissy Kneen, have banded together to ensure that literary awards will be offered in their home state in 2012.

The Queensland Literary Awards were established on 4 April in response to Premier Campbell Newman’s decision to not proceed with the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards in 2012. The new awards will ‘attempt to reward and recognise established and emerging writers across the 14 original categories which constituted previous Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards’.

Condon, Kneen and their supporters have set up a Queensland Literary Awards website. Submissions for the awards are now open and will be received until 6 May 2012. Guidelines and entry forms are available on the website. For further details, click here.

NSW Premier’s Awards ‘Reinvigorated’ Following Review

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 02:48:12 GMT

New South Wales Premier Barry O’Farrell has announced that the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and the state’s History Awards are to be managed in future by the State Library of New South Wales. Winners of the 2012 awards will be announced in a ceremony at the Mitchell Library Reading Room in November. (In recent years, the Literature Awards have been part of the Sydney Writers' Festival, held in May.)

The premier had requested a review of the awards in 2011. In the wake of Queensland Premier Campbell Newman’s decision to cancel his state’s 2012 awards, Mr O’Farrell released the plans for this year’s NSW awards, saying they have been ‘reinvigorated and strengthened’.

Mr O’Farrell says that his decision ‘is a clear demonstration of the importance that my Government places on re-establishing Sydney and NSW as the cultural capital of Australia’.

The premier’s full media release is available here.

2012 Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards Cancelled

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 05:53:26 GMT

New Queensland Premier Campbell Newman has decided not to proceed with the state’s literary awards in 2012. In a brief statement on 3 April, the website for the awards simply acknowledges ‘all the sponsors, judges, stakeholders, entrants and winners for their valued contribution to the program to date’.

A spokesperson for Mr Newman issued a statement on the afternoon of 4 April, saying that ‘cancelling the awards was part of the LNP Government's plan to control government spending and lower the cost of living for Queenslanders’. The decision will ‘save Queensland taxpayers $244, 475’ (News.com website).

Response to the announcement has been impassioned. Writers, members of the arts community and representatives of cultural organisations have spoken to media outlets, started a petition and established a facebook page. Stuart Glover, a University of Queensland academic and member of the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts, posted his view on his blog: ‘These awards cost far less than nearly any other government program, but they deliver clear cultural and economic dividends... Economically, they signal that Queensland values cultural life and cultural appurtenances... Culture and economics go hand in hand’.

The Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards were first awarded in 1999. Asked about the future of the awards, Mr Newman told the Courier-Mail newspaper: ‘I hope we can restore funding in the future but I make no commitment today’ (Courier-Mail website, 4 April 2012).

New AustLit Features - LORE, Resource Maps and Trails

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 02:07:04 GMT

Over recent years, AustLit users will have noticed new features provided by the Aus-e-Lit Project (2008-2011). A Federated Search that targets a number of external databases has been available since 2010. More recently, a Toolkit has provided an introduction to digital literary studies and access to LORE, an extension to the Firefox browser that supports the collection and sharing of Internet resources. And 'Resource Maps', created when using LORE, can be exported into a variety of formats, including documents, slideshows and trails.

For more information on these new features, and for ideas on how you might use them, please visit the AustLit Toolkit where you can download a copy of LORE and register for a user account.