Tag Archives: Elizabeth Bryer

2025 NSW [Premier’s] Literary Awards night

Posted on 20 May 2025 | 11 comments

I almost missed the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards this year. I missed the announcement of the short lists altogether, and only realised that the awards were last night because the Sydney Writers’ Festival is about to start and I think of the NSWPLAs as the first cab off the festival rank.

Here I am making up for the omission. Sadly I’ve read only one of the books, and seen a production of only one script, none of the winners.

Last night, the awards ceremony was live streamed. As always on a Monday, I was busy being grandfather, so I tuned in late. It’s all on YouTube and you can even watch it by clicking the image below. The ceremony begins with didjeridoo and Welcome to Country by Uncle Brendan Kerin, who spoke eloquently about the meaning of the word ‘Country’ in this context. After introductory speeches from librarians and politicians, the presentation of awards by Senior Judge Bernadette Brennan and Library Chair Bob Debus begins at about 29 minutes.

Here are the shortlists in the order of announcements, with links to the judges’ comments. The winners are first in each list, in bold:

UTS Glenda Adam’s Award for New Writing ($10,000)

Dr Tracy Westerman appeared on video, speaking from Perth: ‘As someone who doesn’t consider themselves to be a real writer, as a kid from the Pilbara who had a pretty unorthodox education through distance education, being awarded for my writing feels, frankly, a little bit surreal.’ She went on to talk about mental wellbeing: it ‘should never be just for the privileged, and Jilya sheds light on the reality that it continues to be … because of a one-size-fits-all, monocultural approach to mental health.’

Multicultural NSW Award ($30,000)

Nam Le, also on video, spoke against a background of a bookshelf piled high with books. He thanked many people and dedicated the award to his father, who ‘has been an engine of multiculturalism in this country’.

Indigenous Writers’ Prize ($30,000)

Lorraine Coppin, CEO of Juluwarlu Group, also spoke on video. She and her husband have spent years documenting Yindjibarndi stories – the graphic novel format is a way of making the history accessible to young people.

Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting ($30,000)

Glenn Shea appeared in person! He is a member of the Stolen Generations. The play’s story comes from community. The question it asks is how do we plant seeds for our young people to shift and shape their decision-making about work lives and community. He shouted out La Mama theatre among many others.

Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting ($30,000)

Charles Williams was also in the room. He started out with a remark that must have struck a chord with many people in the movie industry: ‘I usually identify as a director more than as a writer, but I spend a lot of my life writing and not much directing.’ He quoted Charlie Kaufman: ‘A writer is someone for whom writing is harder than it is for other people,’ and noted in passing that Kaufman stole the line from Thomas Mann.

Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature ($30,000)

Katrina Nannestad thanked all the right people, but in particular her mother, whose story is in the book.

Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature ($30,000)

Emma Lord said among other things that everything she writes is for her daughter, even though she is too young for the books. She acknowledged the courage of her publishers who accepted a book with a pandemic in it during a pandemic. Following a developing theme of the evening, she said her mother shared the award.

Translation Prize ($30,000)

Elizabeth Bryer accepted by video. She said she had decided to wind back her translation practice because she couldn’t see a way to make it viable. This award changes that, and means she can take on a project she had been thinking about – to set up a mentorship wth an emerging translator who is a person of colour or a heritage speaker.

Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry ($30,000)

Hasib Hourani described rock flight as intended to explore both historical and speculative acts of liberation in Palestine. ‘Throwing a rock is one kind of protest. A book is another.’

Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction ($40, 000)

James Bradley revealed that winners had been instructed to speak for less than a minute. Among the many thankyous, he thanked Ashley Hay who read every draft. With a nod to W. H. Auden, he said that though it seems like books don’t make anything happen, his experience with this book has shown that this isn’t actually the case: ‘Books change minds, and by changing minds they can change the world, and at the moment that matters more than it has ever mattered before.’

Christina Stead Prize for Fiction ($40,000)

Fiona McFarlane is on the road, so Alex Craig from her publishers Allen & Unwin read a speech on her behalf.

The University of Sydney People’s Choice Award ($10,000)

The Lasting Harm, Lucia Osborne-Crowley (Allen & Unwin)

Lucia Osborne-Crowley was another video appearance. Before she made the necessary thankyous she noted the importance of writers speaking up for Palestinians who are being subjected to genocide and war crimes. She thanked the survivor community who voted for her – the book is for and about and by survivors of sexual violence and child sexual violence.

Special Award

This award went to Liminal. The award was accepted by founding editor Leah Jing McIntosh. Evidently aware than many people watching the awards or reading about them might not have herd of Liminal, she began by explaining that it is ‘a project driven by the desire to make visible the unacknowledged structures of racism that so dehumanise all of us.’ She went on, ‘We work towards new ways of thinking, of seeing, of being in the world. That is to say, we work together towards a better future. We know we cannot do it alone.’

Book of the Year ($10,000)

36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, Nam Le (Scribner Australia). Ben Ball from Scribner Australia read a speech written by Nam Le. He expanded on his earlier dedication to his father, and spoke interestingly and powerfully about multiculturalism. I won’t try to summarise his speech here out of respect for his intellectual property. I hope it’s published somewhere. At heart it was a warning against complacency.

The twin shadows of Gaza and Trump were never far from the stage, and repudiations of all they stood for were frequent. And what a reading list has emerged from the evening, even if only of the winners.

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Journal Catch-up 15

Posted on 30 Sep 2022 | Leave a comment

Here I am once again with two journals, each of which has produced another issue after the one I’m writing about.

Alexandra Christie (editor), Heat Series 3 Nº 3 (Giramondo 2022)

I’ve just read a tweet quoting Helen Garner about Heat series three:

So slender and elegant, nothing wasted, nothing grandiose – and beautiful work.

Beautifully said!

The third issue is true to Heat‘s original goal to publish culturally diverse voices. It has a bit of a theme going:

  • ‘Australian Capital Territory’, a short story by Madeleine Watts, in which a man and a woman search in and around Canberra for somewhere to have sex, and finally succeed in a manner that is most satisfactory to them, the watching kangaroos and the reader. So, sex.
  • ‘Small Talk’ by Kenneth Chong, a very different short fiction, presented as a kind of abstract memoir, about a young man of faith dealing with troubling issues. So, sex and religion
  • ‘Cain’s Feast’, a short story by Mexican writer Aniela Rodríguez, translated by Elizabeth Bryer, in which a young woman is seduced by a priest and a young man takes revenge. So, sex, religion and violence
  • ‘Tongue Broken‘ by Kate Crowcroft, not so much an essay as a collection of disparate thing connected with the author’s research on the tongue (she has completed a PhD and has a book coming out on the subject). It does one of my least favourite things, presents a word’s etymology as if it offers a kind of magical access to the word’s inner meaning. But the rest is variously lively, unexpected and informative. Also: religion and violence
  • Five terrific poems by each of Jarad Bruinstroop and Iman Mersal, the latter translated from Arabic by Robyn Creswell. Discreet sex, but no violence.

Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk (editors), Overland 245 (Summer 2021)
(Much of the content is online at overland.org.au, and I’ve included links)

Overland is always so full of interesting things that I can’t possibly name every item. Here are some things that stand out for me in this issue

Of the articles, one or two of which are too academic for my blood, the two that stand out for me are:

  • ‘Perpetrators‘ by Rachael Hambleton, about her complex relationship with her father, who spent much of his life in prison. The essay expands into profound reflections on grief, punishment, the prison system and intergenerational trauma.
  • ‘What lies beyond the vortex‘ by Mauricio Rivera Ramirez, which focuses on the novel La vorágine (1924) by José Eustasio Rivera. Though the subject may seems unpromisingly niche to a general reader, it includes fascinating insights into the colonial rubber trade in Latin America.

I’m often intimidated by the poetry section in Overland, edited by the marvellous Toby Fitch. I mostly enjoy the poetry but have no idea how to talk about it. In this issue, I was delighted to find a poem by Eileen Chong, ‘Dream kitchen’ (sadly not on the Overland website at the time of writing), which narrates a dream of the poet’s grandmother’s kitchen with wonderful surrealist gusto and ends in an echo of classic Chinese poetry:

_______________________-____I knew it was only a dream,
because I was in my bed, alone. I was far from her, and home.

There are three excellent short stories:

  • ‘The first to lose‘ by Hop Dac, a story of Vietnamese-Australian family life
  • ‘Machine works‘ by Jordon Conway, a brilliant sketch of work, class, relationships and integrity in the context of forklifts, lathes and vehicle repair.
  • ‘Fontanelle‘ by Sarah Walker, an excellent companion piece to ‘Machine works’, a semi-futuristic piece about the work conditions of long-distance truck-drivers.

Then, tucked away up the back, there are the 2020 Emerging Older Poets Mentorship (one poem) and the five poems shortlisted for the 2020 Oodgeroo Noonuccal Indigenous Poetry Prize, including Claire G Coleman’s witty ‘Blame Ireland’ and the prize winner, ‘Choice cuts‘ by Mykaela Saunders, a long, fiercely anguished meditation on the commodification of Indigenous culture:

–how to hold onto my integrity
when cold neoliberal logic drills into me
and the colonial vacuum sucks the marrow from me as fodder

Next time: Heat 3, Overland 246, an issue of Australian Poetry, and – if I can overcome my reluctance to read journals online – Southerly 79:3.

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Heat 20: Plain Vanilla Futures

Posted on 29 Sep 2009 | 3 comments

Ivor Indyk (editor), Heat #20: Plain Vanilla Futures (Giramondo Publishing Company August 2009)

heat

John Freeman, of Granta magazine, had an excellent piece in The Australian in July (pretty much the same article as published in the Independent a month earlier, with a little Australian – and Australian – content inserted). The primary function of literary journals, he said:

is to […] promote gross miscegenation, messiness, conflict and disorder; to subvert the market; and to place writers in unexpected places, where they can create an unlikely community of readers. …

It is presumptuous of any literary journal to claim that it has discovered any writers – novelists and poets are hardly nickel deposits, after all – yet a good journal can make it far easier for readers to discover a new writer’s work. It can take a piece of writing, regardless of where it comes from and what unusual shape its story takes, and ask readers to smash into it. For these reasons the ideal reader of a literary journal is one who yearns for the lash of the new, the way a boxer needs to be hit.

I can’t say that I yearn to be lashed by anything, really, but Heat does offer the kind of discomfort John Freeman describes, and I suppose I read it as a kind of homage to the gods of literature. Every issue contains things by writers who are completely new to me. Admittedly some of them are also, to me, almost completely unreadable; but others are sublime. In this issue Jennifer Maiden’s ‘Diary Poem: Uses of Privacy’ is in the sublime category, though I’m not new to her poetry. And there are a number of pieces that range from completely engrossing to callow, self-indulgent or academic-exercise-ish. I enjoyed and was instructed by Elizabeth Bryer’s ‘Peru’s Heartbeat’, an essay on a Peruvian drum. I was glad to learn about Aileen Palmer, daughter of Vance and Netty, and Rosa Cappiello who wrote novels in Italian during her years as an immigrant in Sydney (though I’m deterred from reading the latter’s Oh Lucky Country by the fact that her translator’s article here includes more than one sentence as awkward as this: ‘The Italian original is written in a language that is precise and explicit and yet metaphorically complex, and which sometimes reflects the influence of Neapolitan syntax and lexemes, popular Italian and some elements of the Australian variety of Italian.’)

It’s two translations from the Chinese, though, that got me closest to a lashing and mashing experience, both of them being unsettlingly odd: ‘An Inexperienced World‘ by Sheng Keyi, in which an older woman/writer lusts after a younger man she meets on a train; and ‘1989: My Confession‘ by Ah Jian, which seems to be excerpts from a longer, gossipy account of events among Beijing intellectuals in and around Tian’anmen Square in that year.

Part of each issue these days seems to be devoted the literary equivalent of “The Making Of” pieces: this time Evelyn Juers writes fascinatingly about her recent Giramondo title House of Exile: The life and times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann, blending diverse elements including subtle self-disclosure, intriguing historical snippets, and tourist impressionism.

I share Pavlov Cat’s view that Ivor Indyk is a living national treasure, but the copy-editing of Heat often gives me pause. This issue is no exception: a supercede and at least one faux-gentility (‘a literary prize that enabled my partner and I to…’) have snuck past the editorial defences. Everyone makes mistakes. But there is one genuine puzzlement. In Ah Jian’s piece we read that the writer’s friend Zhao Yueshen wrote ‘about the ancient Greek [sic] poet Virgil’s Georgics‘. That ‘[sic]’ is not mine. It’s in the magazine. So someone – most likely the (uncredited) translator – made a note of Ah Jian’s slip (Virgil was actually Roman), and someone – most likely an editor or a series of editors and proofreaders –  decided to leave it there so the readers would see it as well. It looks as if the editors, being primarily academics, treated the text as if it were something they were quoting in a scholarly paper, distancing themselves from the error but taking care to quote it accurately. But such meticulous respect for the text ends up looking like derision of the author. For the record, I want editors, quietly and without fuss, to correct my stupid mistakes.

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