Aussie award winners to look out for
Fiction
Siang Lu won the $60,000 Miles Franklin Literary Award for his novel Ghost Cities (UQP), which judges celebrated for ‘shimmering with satire and wisdom, and with an absurdist bravura’, deeming the novel ‘a genuine landmark in Australian literature.’ Ghost Cities was also shortlisted for the Russell Prize for Humour Writing, the John Clarke Prize for Humour Writing in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards (VPLAs), the Age Book of the Year, and the Australian Literature Society (ALS) Gold Medal.
Michelle de Kretser won the $60,000 Stella Prize for her seventh novel, Theory & Practice (Text), which was also shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the fiction category of the VPLAs, and the BookPeople BookData Adult Fiction Book of the Year, as well as longlisted for the Nib Literary Award. Stella judges described Theory & Practice as ‘a brilliantly auto fictive knot, composed of the shifting intensities and treacheries of young love, of complex inheritances both literary and maternal, of overwhelming jealousies and dark shivers of shame’.
Meanwhile, Fiona McFarlane’s Highway 13 (A&U) won both the Australian Literature Society (ALS) Gold Medal and the $25,000 fiction award in the VPLAs, and it was also shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Age Book of the Year award. Organisers for the ALS Gold Medal called McFarlane’s book an ‘inventive and dazzling short story cycle that yields the cohesiveness of a novel even while preserving the integrity of its individual stories’.
Originally published by Books and Publishing (Read More)