AustLit
History
Latest Winners / Recipients
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Year: 1997
winner y Solitude of Illusions St Leonards : Allen and Unwin , 1996 Z394955 1996 single work novel''She was meant to teach him about manners and behaviour, about love-making and its pleasures beyond the act itself. Instead. he learned about the vulnerability of the human heart and the way it defies reason.'
'Plagued by terminal illness, Khalid Sharif leaves his home in Calcutta to visit his Australian son, Javed. Javed is confounded by the old man's rebellious idiosyncrasies that contradict a life-long impression of a dull, predictable father who had devoted his life to business and family. What Javed does not know is that, as a young man, Khalid Sharif was sent to a sophisticated house of courtesans for a cultural education. Against convention, he fell in love with a young courtesan, Nazli, and asked her to marry him. An outraged family pressured him into breaking his betrothal. It is this broken promise that continues to haunt Khalid Sharif for the rest of his life.
'As he gets close to death, memories of his youth, especially his passion for Nazli, become more vivid. ' (Publication summary)
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Year: 1995
winner y Ceremony at Lang Nho Ringwood : McPhee Gribble , 1994 Z539240 1994 single work novel -
Year: 1993
winner y A Fence around the Cuckoo Ringwood : Viking , 1992 Z501992 1992 single work autobiography'This first volume of Ruth Park’s autobiography is an account of her isolated childhood in the rainforests of New Zealand, her convent education which encouraged her love of words and writing, and the bitter years of the Depression.She then entered the rough-and-tumble world of journalism and began a reluctant correspondence with a young Australian writer.
'In 1942, Park moved to Sydney and married that writer, D’Arcy Niland. There she would write The Harp in the South, the first of her classic Australian novels. A Fence Around the Cuckoo is the story of one of Australia’s best storytellers and how she learnt her craft.'
Source: Publisher's blurb (Text ed.)
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Year: 1992
winner y Jewels and Ashes Newham : Scribe , 1991 Z195663 1991 biography First his parents made a journey to the New World. It was the 1930s, and Europe was seething. As he grew up, Arnold Zable heard tales, songs, fragments of the world they had left behind. He had inherited a fractured, vibrant past which both fascinated and disturbed him. Finally, he had to confront the mystery: he had to travel back to the Old World, to his parents' home, to his grandparents' birthplace, and to a land pervaded by ancestral ghosts. (Publisher's blurb)