Tag Archives: NSWPLA

NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Night 2021

Posted on 26 April 2021 | 5 comments

For the second year in a row, the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Night has been an online event. I was one of 65 people watching it at the beginning, an audience that grew to 68 near the end. Not exactly the Oscars.

Here’s how it went:

After a number of introductory speeches – by State Librarian John Vallance who quoted Aristotle in the State Library’s Shakespeare Room, Wiradjuri woman Yvonne Weldon who welcomed us to Gadigal land, President of the Library Council of NSW George Souris, Minister for the Arts Don Harwin who promoted the government’s support for literature, Premier Gladys Berejiklian who came out as a passionate reader. We then went on to the winners, presented by John Vallance except wher I note otherwise:

Multicultural NSW Award presented by Joseph La Posta, CEO of Multicultural NSW: Throat, Ellen van Neerven (UQP) – my blog post here. Ellen van Neerven skyped in. ‘This book has been more than just a book. It has been a chance to write alongside my mum among others …’

NSW Premier’s Translation Prize (awarded every second year) also presented by Joseph La Costa, to two winners: Imminence by Marian Dimópoulos, translated by Alice Whitmore (Giramondo) and Autumn Manuscripts, Tasos Leivaditis, translated by N. N. Trakakis (Smokestack Books). Both spoke beautifully; Nick quoted a poem.

Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting: Milk, Dylan van den Berg (The Street Theatre). In true theatre style, the winner thanked many many people, including ‘the Mob’ in the ACT.

Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting: Freeman, Laurence Billiet (General Strike and Matchbox Pictures). Laurence Billiet acknowledged her subject, Kathy Freeman. The novel was made during the Melbourne lockdown, ‘or should I say the Melbourne lockdowns’.

Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature: The Grandest Bookshop in the World, Amelia Mellor (Affirm Press). ‘I was a broke student when I started writing this book.’ She thanked libraries for making the book possible.

Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature: The End of the World is Bigger than Love, Davina Bell (Text). ‘I am honoured and humbled and genuinely shocked.’ Among other people, she singled out her editor to thank.

Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry: Ellen van Neerven again.

Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction: The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire, Kate Fullagar (Yale University Press). Thanked the army of scholars who helped her write it. ‘I will donate some of the prize money to two scholarly organisations.’ One is a Cherokee organisation. The other is Pacifika Student Organisation.

UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing: Cherry Beach, Laura McPhee-Browne (Text). Interestingly, she thanked the judges by their first names. Her editor also got a big plug.

People’s Choice Award: The Dictionary of Lost Words, Pip Williams. when she has enjoyed a book she goes to the acknowledgements page and offers up a silent prayer of thanks to the author.

Christina Stead Prize for Fiction: A Room Made of Leaves, Kate Grenville (Text Publishing). ‘There is no best book, but the judges had to pick one, so thank you.’ She thanked the descendants of John and Elizabeth Macarthur for their generosity in depositing papers in the State Library, and spoke of Elizabeth Macarthur as a foremother.

Book of the Year, presented by the senior judge, Jane McCredie: Throat, Ellen van Neerven (UQP). They were stuck for words on their second prize, and even more so here. [Added later: But she did manage one glowing sentence: ‘It gives me a boost to continue doing what I’m attempting to do, which is to write as gently and as considerately as possible.’]

The Special Award: Melina Marchetta. Wow, and also Yay! Usually this prize goes to someone who is nearing the end of a career, possibly with death around the corner. Hopefully, Melina Marchetta has many yers of creativity and literacy activism ahead of her. She spoke of how stories came into her life around a table during meals, and she wishes she could be with us in person. ‘I feel so much pride that I wrote my first novel on Gadigal land.’ And she expressed gratitude to her family who allowed her – ‘I don’t know if they allowed me, but I did it anyhow’ – to use their stories. She dedicated the award to her daughter.

That was it.

You can watch the whole ceremony at:

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2021 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards shortlist

Posted on 24 March 2021 | 3 comments

The shortlist for the 2021 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards has been announced. The State Library of NSW has the full list on its website, but you have to do a lot of clicking back back and forth to read it.

Here’s an attempt to make the list accessible in one place, and in the order that the awards are generally announced on the big night. If you click on a title you will be taken to the judges’ comments. I’ve also added links to the very few titles that I’ve read and blogged about. In memory of my youthful enjoyment of betting on roulette, I’ve bolded the titles I’m tipping to win. [Added later: I’ve marked the actual winners with a triple asterisk ***.]

NSW Premier’s Translation Prize

If I remember correctly, in the past this award was given to translators without being tied to a particular book. This year it’s for ‘a translation in book form’.

UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing

Multicultural NSW Award

Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting

Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting

Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature

Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature

Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry

Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction

Christina Stead Prize for Fiction

Awards that don’t have shortlists

  • Residents of New South Wales can vote for any of the titles on the Christina Stead Prize shortlist for the People’s Choice Award (click here to vote)
  • The judges get to choose from among the winners of the other categories for the Book of the Year award
  • The judges can make a Special Award for a) an Australian literary work that is not readily covered by the existing categories; b) a lifetime achievement award for an Australian writer (this is also known as the Kiss of Death Award, though several people have lived on after receiving it); or c) a significant contribution to the literary life of Australia.

The winners will be announced online on Monday 26 April at 7.30 pm (AEST), and on Tuesday 27 April at 11.30 am at the State Library of NSW and online, the winners will do readings, as part of the Sydney Writers’ Festival.

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NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Night

Posted on 26 April 2020 | 4 comments

The NSWPLA night used to be a grand affair. Long before my time there was a bread-roll throwing affair when Morris West droned on too long in his acceptance speech. I got to be on the free list one year, then coughed up good money for a number of years after that, and one year I got to be the plus one of my shortlisted niece. It became less fun when it changed from being a full-blown dinner to a drinks and powerpoint affair, but I still followed it, at least on Twitter. (I dutifully blogged the event for quite a while, and if you really want to, you can plough through my blog posts for 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017).

This year, thanks to the Great Leveller, SARS-Cov2, it was again possible to attend the whole event without stirring from home or spending a cent.

So here’s how it went:

After an elegant introduction by John Vallance, Chief Librarian, speaking to us from an empty Mitchell Library, President of the Library Council George Souris spoke from his home and introduced Gladys Berejiklian, who somehow found time off from crisis-management to record a short message. John Vallance then announced the winners without any frills apart from little speeches from a range of relevant politicians:

Multicultural NSW Award went to The Pillars by Peter Polites (Hachette Australia). Peter did a to-camera piece expressing gratitude to, among other things, his publisher’s bowties.

Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting: Counting and Cracking, S Shakthidharan and auxiliary writer Eamon Flack. The writer, the second from Western Sydney: ‘This award helps to weave this little story from Western Sydney into the tapestry of all the great Australian stories.’ Eamon Flack used his platform to contrast the ‘neglect and carelessness’ of current art policy with the years of policy that enabled Counting and Cracking to happen.

Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting: joint winners The Cry, Episode 2, Jacqueline Perske (Synchronicity Films), and Missing, Kylie Boltin (SBS). Kylie Boltin dedicated the award to her mother and grandmother. Her grandmother died yesterday.

Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature: Ella and the Ocean, Lian Tanner, Jonathan Bentley (Allen & Unwin). Both author and illustrator spoke. She spoke of starting the book twelve years ago and then leaving it in the folder marked ‘Abject Failures’ for years. He, a humble illustrator: ‘Thank you for choosing me.’

Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature: Lenny’s Book of Everything, Karen Foxlee (Allen & Unwin). Karen said, ‘I want to use this platform to thank readers everywhere who continue to buy books in these times. I want to thank everyone who supports the arts.’

Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry: Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness, Peter Boyle (Vagabond Press). Peter Boyle paid tribute to his late partner Debora Bird Rose (herself a great writer).

Indigenous Writers’ Prize: The White Girl, Tony Birch (University of Queensland Press). Tony Birch gave a shout out to ‘every Blackfella across Australia who is writing’.

Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction: from 136 entries, the winner was Tiberius With a Telephone, Patrick Mullins (Scribe Publications), a book about William McMahon. Patrick Mullins, looking scarily young, acknowledged his debt to writers and journalists whose work was important to his, and to the many people he interviewed.

UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing: Real Differences, SL LIM (Transit Lounge). SL LIM looked even younger, with pink hair and a soft toy, and plugged her coming book, which (I think I heard correctly) calls for the end of the family.

Fiction (Christina Stead Award): The Yield, Tara June Winch (Penguin Random House). Tara June Winch spoke of the centrality of language to human life. ‘It is a sacred thing,’ she said, in Wiradjuri. The Yield also won the People’s Choice Award and the Book of the Year. Tara June Winch got to speak again, and spoke of her esteem and fellow feeling for the other writers having a hard time just now. She asked the Federal Government to treat ‘our sector’ as our families do. ‘We can’t tell you the story of what is happening to our country now if the only thing on our minds is how to afford the next week’s rent.’ She hopes that our First Languages will be included in our schools’ curriculum.

That was it. It turns out that though I’d read a couple of the shortlisted books, I hadn’t read a single one of the winners, and had seen only one of the performances – the absolutely stunning Counting and Cracking.

You can watch the whole ceremony at:

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NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Shortlist 2019

Posted on 2 March 2019 | 2 comments

The 2019 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards were announced this week. The State Library of NSW has the full list on its website, but you have to do a lot of clicking back back and forth to read it. Lisa at ANZ LitLovers has listed most of the categories in easily readable form – just click here.

I haven’t read any of the books shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction or the UTS Glenda Adams Prize for New Writing, though more than one are on my TBR list. None of the contenders for the NSW Premier’s Prize for Translation show up when I search my blog for their names.

I’ve done marginally better on the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction. I’ve read Tracker by Alexis Wright (my review here) and I’ve listened to most of an audio book of Saga Land by Richard Fidler & Kári Gíslason (review to come when I listen to the rest of it).

Of the Multicultural NSW Award, I’ve read only Rainforest by Eileen Chong (my review here).

The biennial Indigenous Writing Prize lists two works I’ve read/seen: Taboo by Kim Scott, which we read for the Book Group (my review here), and Leah Purcell’s play The Drover’s Wife, which I was completely blown away by at the Belvoir.

Then there are the categories not blogged by Lisa (and mostly unread by me, sadly). I’ve commented where I have more than nothing to say:

People’s Choice Award:
If you live in New South wales you can vote for any of the titles on the Christina Stead Prize shortlist (click here).

Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry:
Interval by Judith Bishop
I Love Poetry by Michael Farrell (my review here)
Things I’ve Thought To Tell You Since I Saw You Last by Penelope Layland
Wildlife of Berlin by Philip Neilsen
Blindside by Mark Reid
Rondo by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature:
Between Us by Clare Atkins
Small Spaces by Sarah Epstein
I Am Out With Lanterns by Emily Gale
Amelia Westlake by Erin Gough
Stone Girl by Eleni Hale
The Art of Taxidermy by Sharon Kernot

Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature:
Shine Mountain by Julie Hunt
Maya and Cat by Caroline Magerl
Leave Taking by Lorraine Marwood (I haven’t read this but I did blog about her Downhill all the Way, Five Islands Press 2005)
Dingo by Claire Saxby and Tannya Harricks
Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow by Jessica Townsend
The Dog with Seven Names by Dianne Wolfer

Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting:
The Almighty Sometimes by Kendall Feaver
Oil Babies by Petra Kalive
Going Down by Michele Lee
Lost Boys by Lachlan Philpott
The Long Forgotten Dream by Howard Lawrence Sumner (I saw this in the Sydney Theatre Company, and though the performances were terrific there was something unresolved about the play itself,
Barbara and the Camp Dogs by Ursula Yovich and Alana Valentine (I saw this at the Belvoir, and loved it – but I’d love anything that had Ursula Yovich in it, and this had Elaine Crombie as well)

Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting:
Picnic at Hanging Rock, Episode 4 by Alice Addison (Has this been screened yet?)
Jirga by Benjamin Gilmour (I saw this at the Sydney Film Festival, and it was one of my favourite films of 2018.)
Seoul City Sue by Noëlle Janaczewska
Mystery Road, Episode 5 – ‘The Waterhole’ by Timothy Lee (I loved this series, more than the first series, but I never remember individual episodes.)
Mystery Road, Episode 1 – ‘Gone’ by Michaeley O’Brien (Ditto)
Riot by Greg Waters

The winners will be announced on 29 April, on the eve of the Sydney Writers’ Festival.

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SWF 2017 Thursday

Posted on 25 May 2017 | 4 comments

It was T-shirt weather for my first day of this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival at Walsh Bay. The crowds and queues were big enough to create a buzz without  inducing panic. Having collected my tickets for the next five days I started out with a free event in the early afternoon:

1.30 And the Award Goes to…

This is a regular event showcasing winners of the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Not all of them, of course: this year’s it was Heather Rose, who won the Christina Stead prize for her novel The Museum of Modern Love, and James Roy and Noël Zihabamwe, who won the Ethel Turner Prize for their A Thousand Hills. Suzanne Leal, the Senior Judge of the Awards, chaired.

Heather Rose spoke of the advantages of obscurity: The Museum is her seventh novel, all the others having been published to little acclaim. Add that she lives in Tasmania, and she has been able to write as she wants, without having to meet someone else’s marketing or other agenda. She said she wrote this novel as a love letter to women in art, who do marvellous work and then are sidelined by art historians. Marina Abramovich, whose performance piece The Artist Is Present is central to the book, became famous when the novel was well under way, and her new celebrity meant significant changes in the book: if I heard properly, at that stage the character in the novel had to be Marina herself rather than a fictional Marina-like character.

James Roy had a different take on obscurity. He opened with something he would have liked to say at the awards ceremony but realised it would have been graceless: even though he has been well supported and has won substantial prizes, he knew on Sunday night that if he won the award on Monday night, he would still have to turn up for his job in retail on Tuesday morning. (Suzanne Leal interjected that she had recently interviewed some women who had collaborated on a writing project because they wanted to earn a lot of money – cue disbelieving laughter.)

Noël Zihabamwe’s own story is similar to that of the book’s hero – both lost their families in the Rwandan massacre of 1994. So for him the writing was an intense experience. He told us that one effect of having the book published was to feel that he was acknowledged: ‘I’m not nothing. I’m something.’ He read from the book, and the conversation addressed the big question, how to write about such a monstrous event and keep some sense of hope.

All four people on the stage were warm, open, smart. James Roy did a nice favour to those of us who couldn’t be at the awards ceremony. He quoted a number of times from Joanna Murray-Smith’s address. An image that resonated with him and, he thought, with every writer, is that every work begins as a tiny burning wick, which if you persevere expands until it lights up all the corners of the room. I think it’s fair to say that the Sydney Dance 2 was lit up by these four luminaries.

I sat next to a young man who arrived clutching a copy of Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife (which won Book of the Year). I asked if he’d seen the play at Belvoir Street. No, but he had seen the archive video – evidently you can contact the Belvoir and arrange a time to see the archive version of any of their productions. How good is that bit of incidental learning?

3 pm: Poetry and Performance
Poetry has moved up the status chain at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. This event didn’t happen in the tiny sun-drenched mezzanine room at the end of the wharf that we have been accustomed to, but in the main theatre across the road with more than ten times the capacity. And it wasn’t free.

But maybe of course it’s not poetry as such that’s moved up. Maybe today’s crowd was drawn by clickbait titles like Keats is Dead so Fuck me From Behind,  or fusses about menstrual images on Instagram, or the prestige of poet laureateship, or other forms of cool, rather than the art of purifying the language. Whatever, this was a terrific event. In order of appearance:

  • Miles Merrill, who has done more than anyone to foster spoke word in Australia, emceed, opening proceedings with some of his trademark mouth noises, which he told us was a work called ‘Some poems can’t be written down’
  • Carol Ann Duffy, proving that a UK poet laureate can be fun, read from a lectern at the side of the stage  from her collection The World’s Wife. The witty, acerbic narratives of ‘Mrs Tiresias’ and ‘Mrs Aesop’ were perfect for the occasion. ‘Mrs Tiresias’, a monologue by the wife of Tiresias, a man who was turned into a woman for seven years, lightly challenges some modern pieties about gender fluidity.
  • Hera Lindsay Bird (who wrote the aforementioned clickbait) walked to centre stage and read a number of poems, including one that revolved around her dislike for the character Monica in the TV sitcom Friends. So pop culture reference, frequent use of the work ‘fuck’, and a preoccupation with relationships: not my cup of tea.
  • Canadian Ivan Coyote started out by saying, ‘I’m not a poet, I’m a story teller,’ and read us a number of ‘Doritos’, which would certainly pass for poems. Most of them dealt with other people’s struggle with Coyote’s challenge to seeing people in terms of  gender binaries. I loved the moment when a small child, told by his mother to stop bothering (her) Coyote, looked long and steady ito COyote’s eyes and said,  ‘I don’t think he’s a lady. I think he’s a man, but with pretty eyes.’
  • Ali Cobby Eckermann took things to a different place: she began with an acknowledgement of country, reminded us that this is the 20th anniversary of the Bringing Them Home report, and said that more Aboriginal children have been removed from their parents in recent years than ever before in Australian history. Having grabbed our attention, she then held it with poems from a number of her books, including the marvellous Inside My Mother.
  • Rupi Kaur (who has been the subject of a big fuss on Instagram) read some poems and then performed a couple of spoken word pieces. I think I would have preferred to hear her (and Hera Lindsay Bird) at a spoken word event, where audience response is so much part of things. No clicking of foot-stamping or voting here, so lines like  ‘I want to apologise to all the women I have called pretty before I’ve called them intelligent or brave’ end up sounding a little glibly correct-line.

Even if people came for the sexy controversy, they got poetry, and a fabulous variety of it.

Then I got to sit in the sun and read, occasionally chatting to passing strangers (including one man who had been to school with Tom Keneally), and back to the big theatre a bit later for:

6.30 pm The Politics of Fear
David Marr and John Safran chatted with the Wheeler Centre’s Sophie Black about Pauline Hanson’s followers and Australia’s extreme right. Sophie introduced them by saying they would join the dots between those two groups, but not a lot of dot-joining happened, or really was needed.

David Marr spoke to his recent Quarterly Essay The White Queen, and John Safran to his Depends What You Mean By Extremist: Going Rogue with Australian Deplorables. Both were interesting and insightful, and at times surprising. It was an excellent conversation, an I left it wondering if there isn’t something futile about too much close reading of the far right, with the end message that even though these people are a small minority they wield a lot of power because of the way our electoral system works. As David Marr said towards the end, the vast majority of Australians – including most Hanson followers – think same-sex marriage and euthanasia should be legalised and penalty rates should stay in place, but governments simply won’t or can’t follow the clear will of the people. It took one of the questioners at the end to ask what is to be done, and the answer wasn’t particularly satisfying.

So we went home glad we’d been but a little disgruhntled through the final run-throughs of a number of Vivid installations (opening the next night).

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NSWPLA 2017

Posted on 22 May 2017 | 3 comments

Last night (that is, Monday 22 May), the New South Wales Premier’s Literature Awards were announced at a cocktail event at the Art Gallery of NSW. The award recipients collectively took home a total of $310.000. I have attended this event in the past, but for a number of years now I’ve settled for watching from afar, depending on the generosity of tweeters for glimpses of the event. Here’s what I garnered this year, depending mainly on the hashtag #PremiersLitAwards. Links are mainly to either my blog posts about books or the State Library’s listings of the awards.

In the lead-up, there were plenty of congratulations to the shortlisted authors, plus an occasional erotic spam and on Sunday the rumour that the evening would be hosted by Sunil Badami. A little before 6 last night that rumour was scotched when Hamish Macdonald (not the comedian Hamish who appears on radio with Andy) tweeted that he was ‘delighted to be hosting’ and added that the awards were to be presented by ‘@GladysB’, which I think makes her the first non-Labor premier to have done so in person for a very long time.

Uncle Allen Madden started things off with a ‘wonderful’ Welcome to Country. Joanna Murray-Smith gave the keynote address. Don Harwin, Minister for the Arts, spoke briefly. Gladys Berejiklian gave the Premier’s address. No tweet quoted any of them as saying anything memorable – which I attribute to the tweeters not realising that there were people out here hanging on their words.

Hamish Mc took the mic. His first act was to pay a ‘lovely tribute to the late Dr Rosie Scott’, recipient of the special award last year. His second tweeted utterance was to promise to tackle anyone who made too long a speech. This may be the reason that hardly a word from any of the recipients was tweeted from the room. A pity, because the acceptance speeches are part of the joy of these evenings.

The serious business of handing out the prizes began with the Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting. My money was on The Drover’s Wife by Leah Purcell. I hadn’t seen any of the other shortlisted works, but they would have had to be bloody brilliant to snatch the prize. They didn’t.

The Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting was shared by The Code, Series 2 Episode 4 by Shelley Birse and Down Under by Abe Forsythe. No argument from me, though a citizen of Sutherland Shire, the setting of much of Down Under, had dimmed my enjoyment of that movie with some pretty telling information about its lack of attention to detail. (I wonder if anyone from the Shire is on the judging panel.) .

They were now zooming through the prizes. The Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature went to Iris and the Tiger by Leanne Hall, and the Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature to One Thousand Hills by James Roy and Noël Zihabamwe.

Peter Boyle’s Ghostspeaking won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, and he had the distinction of being quoted on Twitter. He thanked Vagabond Press for ‘allowing him to have the length he needed to express himself’.

I’m glad I wasn’t a judge for the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction, because i would have found it hard to pick between Talking To My Country by Stan Grant, The Art of Time Travel: Historians and Their Craft by Tom Griffiths and Everywhere I Look by Helen Garner. It turned out the judges chose Our Man Elsewhere: In Search of Alan Moorehead by Thornton McCamish, which must be a fabulous book.

About now, @RobinElizabee tweeted, ‘So many authors were so confident that they wouldn’t win that they didn’t prepare a speech. Imposter syndrome is real.’ Ah, the humility!

The UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing went to Letter to Pessoa by Michelle Cahill.

The Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, one of the big ones, went to The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose. I haven’t read this book but the Emerging Artist has been going on about it for months, so the judges’ decision is heartily endorsed in my house.

At this stage, the Premier handed over the Distributor of Bounty role to Ray Williams, Minister for Multiculturalism, He spoke and presented the next three awards.

The biennial Translation Prize went to Royall Tyler (who translates from Japanese). This year for the first time, there’s a second translation prize, the Multicultural NSW Early Career Translator Prize, which was won by Jan Owen.

Of the contenders for the Multicultural Award NSW I’d read only The Hate Race by Maxine Beneba Clarke (aka @slamup). I was very happy to see it win. @JulieKoh tweeted a photo of the book’s publisher Robert Watkins, a very white man, accepting for Clarke, a very black woman. On the screen above him his words are being typed: ‘I am very clearly not [her]’, the only laugh of the night that made it out to the Twitterverse. It was followed by tears: @RobinElizabee tweeted, ‘Robert Watkins reading of @slamup’s speech had him and all of us in tears. Let’s do better.’

Now @thatsunilbadami, earlier rumoured to be hosting the event, appeared on Twitter to congratulate Maxine Beneba Clarke ‘for her powerful, inspiring & accomplished memoir’. Western Sydney solidarity is a beautiful thing.

The People’s Choice Award went to Vancouver, the third novella in the series Wisdom Tree by Nick Earls, who shortly afterwards tweeted this photo with the words, ‘People! Look what you did! Thank you.’gong.jpg

The evening ended with the big prize: Book of the Year went to The Drover’s Wife, the first play to win this award. I wish I’d been there to applaud. The State Library tweeted video of Leah Purcell’s completely charming acceptance speech (if you watch, be sure you stay to the very end). ‘I’m speechless. Just as well I got my thankyous in first, eh?’ You have to love the contrast between her demeanour and the completely appropriate tone of the judges’ report as quoted in today’s Guardian:

Leah Purcell’s retooling of Henry Lawson’s story represents a seismic shift in postcolonial Australian playwriting. Brave, ruthless and utterly compelling from the first image, this epic tragedy is a passionate howl of pain and rage … a bold and exciting contribution to Australian playwriting – and, arguably, to Australia’s very identity.

Which is part of why I love these awards evenings. People of whose achievements I am rightly in awe step up to the podium one after another and reveal themselves as people just like you and me, even though they are still awe-inspiring. Who knew?

Added later: Lisa Hill has a post on the awards that gives links to reviews, her own and other people’s, of almost all the winners, plus the shortlisted titles. Click here to get there.

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SWF: My Day 1

Posted on 18 May 2016 | 8 comments

The Sydney Writers’ Festival is off and running. I’m having a soft entry: just one event yesterday and none today, and  I don’t expect to see Walsh Bay until tomorrow morning.

Yesterday’s talk, Craig Munro: Under Cover, was at the State Library, just next door to the Mitchell Library, scene of last night’s awards ceremony. Craig Munro was in conversation with Rachel Franks from the library, talking about Under Cover, his memoir of three decades working as an editor at University of Queensland Press.

I’m lucky enough to have earned my living as an editor, and I have never found the work less than interesting, whether in the book trade, on a children’s magazine (that was the best!), or in the publications section of a government department. But it’s not glamorous, and I struggle to see why anyone not an editor would be interested to hear one of us talk about it. However, a respectable crowd turned out for this talk, and seemed to like what they got.

What we got was some tips about self editing (‘the most important thing is to create distance from the initial writing’), advice on how to write a pitch for a publisher or agent (spend at least a week honing it), information and opinions about the changing face of publishing (paper books are here to stay; a poetry book is best-seller in Australia if it sells 400 copies), and glimpses of famous authors (David Malouf and the underrated Barbara Hanrahan are the only two writers Munro has dealt with whose manuscripts arrive at the publisher pretty well word perfect).

The best thing about the session was the readings that topped and tailed it. The first told of the author’s first meeting with David Malouf, in which they worked out the name for Malouf’s first novel. The second, with brilliant timing, told the story of the infamous NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Dinner of 1985, at which the book people gathered in the Intercontinental Hotel grew unruly during Morris West’s sermonical Address (the poet Martin Johnston shouting ‘Bullshit!’ at one point), Nadia Wheatley criticised Premier Neville Wran’s housing policy when accepting her award from him, and Wran himself reverted to Parliamentary behaviour and called on someone to put a bun in the mouth of one rowdy interjector. The passage should be read aloud at the start of each Awards evening, to remind us all that slide shows, civility and smiling decorum may not always be preferable to honest ill temper and rowdiness. Craig Munro’s manifest pleasure in reading it to us cast a different light on his own quietly courteous, considered manner.

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NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Night

Posted on 17 May 2016 | 3 comments

I’d love to go to the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards again one of these years, but $60 for a cocktail event is a stretch even for people who drink alcohol, and it’s way out of my range for hors d’oeuvres, sparkling water and speeches. Maybe I’ll get a freebie one of these years as a designated blogger, but for this year, as for the last couple, here’s how the evening went as gleaned from Twitter (Noting by the way that Twitter account @NSW_PLA has been silent for five years, and the facebook page ‘NSW Premier’s Literary Awards‘ for nearly three, I put my faith, mainly, in #PremiersLitAwards).

In the lead-up, there was a flurry of good-luck messages from publishers, seven tweets from one publisher lobbying for votes in the People’s Choice Award, and at least one person wondering if the recent Australia Council cuts to literary magazines would lead to an ‘interesting’ evening.

The first tweeter of the evening, a book editor from Text Publishing, turned up about 10 to 6, and a little later the State Library account posted a moody photo of the crowd gathering upstairs at the Mitchell Library, and we were away.

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Twitter was fairly tightlipped during the night – nothing about what anyone was wearing, no jokes, and little from acceptance speeches. Maybe that’s what happens when it’s a cocktail event rather than a dinner. However, here’s what I’ve got. Links are to either my blog posts about books or the State Library’s listings of the awards.

Just before 7 the State Librarian officially welcomed everyone. The Welcome to Country included didgeridoo, but no one tweeted the name of the welcomer(s). Ross Grayson Bell, senior judge (I guess that’s what used to be call Chair of the Judging Panel), spoke briefly, saying that the Awards reflected the diversity of Australian writing (and so foreshadowing a major theme of the evening). Wesley Enoch delivered what Twitter said was an inspiring Address: among other things he said that when you are feeling your lowest is when you should make more art, and spoke of ‘storytelling for a nation that is in want of a memory’ (Wesley Enoch is a Murri man).

In a welcome departure from recent practice the Premier Mike Baird himself presented the awards. He spoke of J D Salinger, and said that ‘stories remind us why we’re here, what we’ve forgotten, and help us to inhabit other worlds’, echoing Wesley Enoch’s words. Jennifer Byrne took over as MC and the announcements (what she called a ‘rollcall of excellence’) began.

Multicultural NSW Award ($20,000) went to Good Muslim Boy by Osamah Sami (Hardie Grant Books). He gave a ‘very funny and memorable’ acceptance speech. No details.

Indigenous Writer’s Prize (a new biennial award worth $30,000). Of the shortlisted books I’d read only Inside My Mother by Ali Cobby Eckermann (Giramondo). The prize was shared between Dark Emu  by Bruce Pascoe (Magabala Books) and Heat and Light by Ellen van Neerven (University of Queensland Press), which must be wonderful books.

Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting ($30,000).  The Bleeding Tree, Angus Cerini (Currency Press in association with Griffin Theatre Company). I knew I should have subscribed to the Griffin.

Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting ($30,000). Of the shortlist, I’ve seen only Last Cab to Darwin, and though it had many good things about it, it would have surprised me if it won. The winner was the fourth episode of Deadline Gallipoli, ‘The Letter’, written by Cate Shortland (Matchbox Pictures) and screened on Foxtel, so bad luck for us non-subscribers.

The Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature ($30,000) went to Teacup, written by Rebecca Young & illustrated by Matt Ottley (Scholastic Australia). The Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature ($30,000) was won by Alice Pung’s Laurinda (Black Inc.).

Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry ($30,000). Again, I’d only read one book, Joanne Burns’s brush (Giramondo). It won!

Of the shortlist for the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction ($40,000) I had once again just one book under my belt, Magda Szubanski’s wonderful Reckoning: A Memoir (Text Publishing). Once again, it won. I was doing well. Mike Baird held Magda’s phone for her so her mother and brother could hear her acceptance speech. Someone tweeted at this point that a number of award winners spoke of their family histories and ‘complex journeys to Australia as displaced persons’.

UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing (a mere $5000) went to An Astronaut’s Life by Sonja Dechian (Text Publishing). Christina Stead Prize for Fiction ($40,000)went to Locust Girl, A Lovesong by Merlinda Bobis (Spinifex Press), a post-apocalyptic novel. One tweeter congratulated her for helping us ‘care across borders’. The People’s Choice Prize, which is restricted to the grown-up novels, went to The Life of Houses, Lisa Gorton (Giramondo).

The Special Award (for which, if money is involved, the amount is not easily discoverable) was given to Rosie Scott, described by Susan Wyndham on Twitter as ‘admired author, supporter of young writers, asylum seekers, refugees, many social causes’.

The book of the year (again, monetary value not easily discovered) went to Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe. Accepting his award, he said to the people in the room, ‘I want to hear your story, because I would be spellbound.’

Then the State Library account tweeted the hashtag #BestSpeechesEver. So those of us pressing our noses against the glass wall of Twitter know what we missed out on. It was all over bar the reading – oh, and the many pictures of underdressed young women that began appearing with the Awards hashtag during the night.

 

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NSW Premier’s Literary Awards 2016 Shortlist

Posted on 21 April 2016 | Leave a comment

I love the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. As a country boy at heart, I’ve had the best time when I’ve attended the awards dinner, just gawking at the Writers, including the ones I can claim as friends or – once – a relation. This year’s short list was announced this week. You can see the full list with judges’ comments on a pdf press release from the State Library, and you can click through to notes on the list on the State Library’s website here.

In case you missed it in the press (as I did), here it is, not as a dreaded PDF or requiring you to click back and forth, but with added links to my blog posts on the shamefully few I’ve read (or seen).

Christina Stead Prize for Fiction ($40,000)
Ghost River, Tony Birch (University of Queensland Press)
Locust Girl, A Lovesong, Merlinda Bobis (Spinifex Press)
Clade, James Bradley (Penguin Random House)
The Life of Houses, Lisa Gorton (Giramondo)
A Guide to Berlin, Gail Jones (Penguin Random House)
The World Without Us, Mireille Juchau (Bloomsbury)

UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing ($5,000)
 Fever of Animals, Miles Allinson (Scribe Publications)
An Astronaut’s Life, Sonja Dechian (Text Publishing)
Relativity, Antonia Hayes (Penguin Random House)
In the Quiet, Eliza Henry-Jones (HarperCollins Publisher)
When There’s Nowhere Else to Run, Murray Middleton (Allen & Unwin)
Hot Little Hands, Abigail Ulman (Penguin Random House)

Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction ($40,000)
The Nashos’ War: Australia’s National Servicemen and Vietnam, Mark Dapin (Penguin Random House)
One Life: My Mother’s Story, Kate Grenville (Text Publishing)
Across the Seas: Australia’s Response to Refugees: A History, Klaus Neumann (Black Inc.)
Reckoning: A Memoir, Magda Szubanski (Text Publishing)
Island Home, Tim Winton (Penguin Random House)
Small Acts of Disappearance, Fiona Wright (Giramondo)

Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry ($30,000)
Brush, Joanne Burns (Giramondo)
Eelahroo (Long Ago) Nyah (Looking) Möbö-Möbö (Future), Lionel G. Fogarty (Vagabond Press)
The Hazards, Sarah Holland-Batt (University of Queensland Press)
Fainting with Freedom, Ouyang Yu (Five Islands Press)
Terra Bravura, Meredith Wattison (Puncher & Wattmann)
Not Fox Nor Axe, Chloe Wilson (Hunter Publishers

Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature ($30,000)
Tea and Sugar Christmas, Jane Jolly & Robert Ingpen (National Library of Australia)
A Single Stone, Meg McKinlay (Walker Books Australia)
Molly and Pim and the Millions of Stars, Martine Murray (Text Publishing)
The Greatest Gatsby: A Visual Book of Grammar, Tohby Riddle (Penguin Random House
Teacup, Rebecca Young & Matt Ottley (Scholastic Australia)
Flight, Nadia Wheatley & Armin Greder (Windy Hollow Books)

Ethel Turner Prize for Young Adult’s Literature ($30,000)
Battlesaurus: Rampage at Waterloo, Brian Falkner (Pan Macmillan)
Freedom Ride, Sue Lawson (Black Dog Books)
Laurinda, Alice Pung (Black Inc.)
Welcome to Orphancorp, Marlee Jane Ward (Seizure)
The Peony Lantern, Frances Watts (HarperCollins Publisher)
The Guy, the Girl, the Artist and his Ex, Gabrielle Williams (Allen & Unwin)

2016 Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting ($30,000)
Boys Will Be Boys, Melissa Bubnic (Sydney Theatre Company)
Broken, Mary Anne Butler (Currency Press)
The Bleeding Tree, Angus Cerini (Currency Press in association with Griffin Theatre Company)
Battle of Waterloo, Kylie Coolwell (Sydney Theatre Company)
Hello, Goodbye & Happy Birthday, Roslyn Oades (Malthouse Theatre)

Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting ($30,000)
Last Cab to Darwin, Reg Cribb & Jeremy Sims (Last Cab Productions)
Deadline Gallipoli, Episode 1, Jacquelin Perske (Matchbox Pictures)
The Secret River, Part 2, Jan Sardi & Mac Gudgeon (Ruby Entertainment)
Deadline Gallipoli, Episode 4: “The Letter”, Cate Shortland (Matchbox Pictures)
House of Hancock, Katherine Thomson (Cordell Jigsaw Zapruder)

Multicultural NSW Award ($20,000)
Shining: The Story of a Lucky Man, Abdi Aden & Robert Hillman (HarperCollins Publisher)
The Other Side of the World, Stephanie Bishop (Hachette Australia)
The Principal, Episode 1, Kristen Dunphy (Essential Media and Entertainment)
Good Muslim Boy, Osamah Sami (Hardie Grant Books)
We Are Here, Cat, Thao Nguyen (Allen & Unwin)
Vera: My Story, Vera Wasowski & Robert Hillman (Black Inc.)

Indigenous Writer’s Prize (New Award) ($30,000)
Ghost River, Tony Birch (University of Queensland Press)
Inside My Mother, Ali Cobby Eckermann (Giramondo)
Dirty Words, Natalie Harkin (Cordite Publishing Inc.)
Dark Emu, Bruce Pascoe (Magabala Books)
Heat and Light, Ellen van Neerven (University of Queensland Press)
Not Just Black and White, Lesley Williams and Tammy Williams (University of Queensland Press)

The awards are announced on 16 May, no longer at a dinner but at an exclusive cocktail event, at the start of the Sydney Writers’ Festival. I’m hoping to have read a couple more by then. It’s a big list.

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NSW Premier’s Literary Awards night, 2015

Posted on 19 May 2015 | 2 comments

The New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards were presented last night at the State Library. At one stage I thought I might be able to go as a handbag, but it turned out handbags had to pay their own way, so you won’t see a pic of me in cocktail attire on Twitter. But speaking of Twitter, it’s now possible to participate in such events by proxy and non-simultaneously. Here’s my version of the evening.

The earliest interesting tweet was from someone worrying about the dress code. I could have told her not to worry. This is an event for writers, and though some of the pics that began to appear at hashtag  at about 6 o’clock were decidedly glam, there were plenty to put the worrier’s mind at ease.

Uncle Allan Madden did the welcome to Country, playwright Ross Mueller delivered the Address (in which, as well as saying some wise things about the arts he made an AFL joke or two and commented, amicably I hope, on recent events to do with literary awards in Queensland), Acting Premier and Arts Minister Troy Brampton spoke briefly, so did Richard Neville the Mitchell Librarian, and the show was on the road.

John George Ajaka, NSW Minister for Multiculturalism, announced the winner of the biennial Prize for Translation and the inaugural NSW Early Career Translator Prize. Brian Nelson won the former, and Lilit Zelukin the latter. Few if any other literary awards include prizes for translation, so these are a win for all translators.

Multicultural NSW Award. I saw Donna Abela’s Jump for Jordan at the Griffin Theatre Company last year with the wonderful Alice Ansara, and would have been happy to see it win. The winner, Black and Proud: The story of an AFL photo by Matthew Klugman and Gary Osmond, is a book I hope to read.

Of the Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting shortlist I’d only seen Brothers Wreck by Jada Alberts, featuring Hunter Page-Lochard’s terrifying performance of a young man on the edge of self-destruction, at Belvoir. The smart money was on Tom Wright’s Black Diggers, about World War One’s Aboriginal soldiers. The smart money had it right.

The Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting was taken out by The Babadook by Jennifer Kent. I’m glad on two counts: it’s good to see a genre piece being gonged, and this film in particular has been much more honoured abroad than at home. Jennifer Kent’s acceptance remarks were recorded on Twitter as mentioning the joys of libraries.

The Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature was shared by Tamsin Janu’s Figgy in the World and Catherine Norton’s Crossing, both published by Scholastic Omnibus.

The Ethel Turner Prize for Young Adult Literature went to The Cracks in the Kingdom by Jaclyn Moriarty, who shared some letters from her readers..

(At about this point in the evening, the ABC Book Club’s Twitter account decided that the embargo was lifted and revealed the remaining winners. This would have been the moment to lay bets on David Williamson.)

The favourite for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry was surely David Malouf’s  Earth Hour, which happens to be the only shortlisted book I’d read. It won. David was described on Twitter as ‘wonderful’, ‘amazing’ and an ‘Australian icon’. A text sent to me from the room described him as ‘ever gracious and lovely’.

How do people possibly choose among the range of books shortlisted for the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction? Intimate memoir, passionate court reporting, grand history, cultural essays: it’s a lot harder than apples vs oranges. However, choose the judges did, and gave the gong to Don Watson’s The Bush. In accepting the prize he said, no doubt with his usual gloomy demeanour: ‘You need encouragement when you’re young, but also when you’re old.’

The UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing: I’ve just finished reading Omar Musa’s Here Come the Dogs (blog post to come after the book group meets) and was backing it to win. The actual winner, An Elegant Young Man by Luke Carman, is a worthy recipient of whom I am a fan, though I expect the judges did some soul searching when they realised he was the only white man on the shortlist. Omar Musa congratulated Luke on Twitter within minutes.

The Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, generally regarded as the big prize of the night, went to The Snow Kimono by Mark Henshaw, who compared writing a novel to running a marathon.

The special award was given to David Williamson. The State Library’s tweeter described his work as laconic. Is that the sound of pedants writhing? Laconic or not, the tall man is giving his prize money to the Ensemble Theatre to ensure the production of new Australian work. [Later: My mistake. The tweet in question said iconic, not laconic. I’m not sure how DW is iconic, but that description fits him better than the other.]

The book of the year went to Don Watson for The Bush, who Twitter said was dumbstruck.

Voting for the People’s Choice Prize, which is restricted to the grown-up novels – so Helen Garner and Biff Ward aren’t in the running – closes at midnight on Thursday. The prize will be announced on Friday.

So there you have it. Congratulations all round. People in the room acknowledged the Auslan signers. I acknowledge the tweeters. It was almost like being there.

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