Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature has ‘acknowledges the achievements of eminent literary writers over the age of 60 who have made an outstanding and lifelong contribution to Australian literature’ and it awarded Helen Garner for her dedication to literature this year.
The NSW Premier’s Literary Awards highlight the importance of literacy and distinguished achievement by Australian writers. The shortlists for the 2019 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards have been announced. You can also vote for the People’s Choice Award now.
The shortlisted titles in each category are:
Book of the Year winner
Deep time dreaming (Billy Griffiths, Black Inc.)
Christina Stead Prize for Fiction
Man Out of Time (Stephanie Bishop, Hachette)
Boy Swallows Universe (Trent Dalton, Fourth Estate)
The Life to Come (Michelle De Kretser, A&U) – Winner
The Everlasting Sunday (Robert Lukins, UQP)
Border Districts (Gerald Murnane, Giramondo)
The Shepherd’s Hut (Tim Winton, Hamish Hamilton)
Douglas Stewart Prize for Nonfiction Continue reading
A quick update from Australian Romance Readers Awards that 2018 winners have been announced. For those who love reading romance, I’m sure, you’ll find one of your favourite. Continue reading
The longlist for the 2019 Stella Prize has been announced and City of Parramatta Libraries have all 12 titles for loan.
One particular news item that caught my attention was The Victorian Prize for literature, Non-Fiction award and the winner, Behrouz Boochani for his No friend but the mountains: writing from Manus Prison (Picador Australia).
A Kurdish-Iranian asylum seeker and currently held on Manus Island, Boochani has been recognised as an Australian writer to win the $100,000 prize, the richest of its kind in Australia. Ironically the author has not been allowed to set foot in Australia by the system, yet.
One says ‘Boochani was arguably the most important literary phenomenon in Australian literature in 2018. In part, this is because of the distinctive qualities of No Friend But the Mountains, an epic work that moves between verse and prose, reportage and fantasy, the mundane and the historical. The fact that Boochani’s political memoir of what he calls Manus Prison was ever published in book form defies the odds. ‘ (The conversation http://theconversation.com/behrouz-boochanis-literary-prize-cements-his-status-as-an-australian-writer-110986 )