Established in 1986, the Adelaide Festival Literary Awards , are granted biennially to the best authors for books in Australian children's literature, fiction, innovation, non-fiction and poetry.
2010 Winners & Shortlisted Titles -
$10,000 Premier's award (there are no entries in this category) Tales from Outer Suburbia,by Shaun Tan (Allen & Unwin
Children's literature award ($15,000) - for a published children's book, fiction or non-fiction.
- Randa Abdel-Fattah (NSW), Where the Streets had a Name, Pan Macmillan Books.
- Christine Harris (SA), Audrey's Big Secret, Little Hare.
- David Metzenthen (VIC), Jarvis 24, Penguin Books.
- Glenda Millard and Rebecca Cool (VIC) Isabella's Garden, Walker Books.
- Ruth Starke (SA), Noodle Pie, Omnibus Books.
- WINNER: Shaun Tan (VIC), Tales from Outer Suburbia, Allen & Unwin.
Fiction award ($15,000) - for a published novel or collection of short stories.
- Brian Castro (SA), The Bath Fugues, Giramondo.
- J.M. Coetzee (SA), Summertime, Knopf/Random House.
- John Harwood (SA), The Séance: A Victorian Mystery, Vintage.
- Robert Hollingworth (NSW), They Called me the Wildman: the prison diary of Henricke Nelsen, Pier 9/Murdoch Books.
- Julia Leigh (NSW), Disquiet, Penguin Books.
- WINNER: David Malouf (NSW), Ransom, Knopf/Random House.
Innovation award ($10,000) - for a published book which departs from the conventional use of genre by borrowing elements from a number of genres such as fiction, non-fiction, biography, autobiography, poetry or cultural criticism.
- Marion May Campbell (VIC), Fragments from a Paper Witch, Salt Publishing.
- MTC Cronin (QLD), Squeezing Desire Through a Sieve: Micro-essays on Judgement and Justice, Puncher and Wattmann.
- Ross Gibson (NSW), The Summer Exercises, University of Western Australia Press.
- Prof Stephen Muecke (NSW), Joe in the Andamans and other fictocritical stories, Local Consumptions Publications.
- WINNER: Gerald Murnane (VIC), Barley Patch, Giramondo.
Non-fiction award ($15,000) - for a published work of non-fiction demonstrating a command of the subject as well as a fluent and outstanding literary style.
- James Boyce (TAS), Van Diemen's Land, Black Inc.
- David Day(VIC), Andrew Fisher: Prime Minister of Australia, HarperCollins Publishers.
- Chloe Hooper (VIC), The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island, Penguin/Hamish Hamilton.
- Jacqueline Kent (NSW), An Exacting Heart: The Story of Hephzibah Menuhin, Penguin/Viking.
- Iain McCalman (NSW), Darwin's Armada: How four voyagers to Australasia won the battle for evolution and changed the world, Penguin/Viking.
- WINNER: Jill Roe (NSW), Stella Miles Franklin: A Biography, Fourth Estate/HarperCollins.
John Bray poetry award ($15,000) - for a published collection of poetry.
- Adam Aitken (NSW), Eighth Habitation, Giramondo Poets.
- Pam Brown (NSW), True Thoughts, Salt Publishing.
- Martin Harrison (NSW), Wild Bees: New and Selected Poems, University of Western Australia Press.
- Emma Jones (Aust/UK), The Striped World, Faber and Faber Ltd.
- Martin Langford (NSW), The Human Project: New and Selected Poems, Puncher and Wattmann Poetry.
- WINNER: Bronwyn Lea (QLD), The Other Way Out, Giramondo Poets.
Unpublished manuscript award ($10,000) - South Australian writers only.
- Deb Kandelaars, Memoirs of a Suburban Girl.
- Sharon Kernot, Underground Road.
- Amy T Matthews, End of the Night Girl.
- Louise Nicholas, The List of Last Remaining.
- Cameron Raynes, The Dress and Other Stories.
- Alastair Sarre, Prohibited Zone.
- Anna Solding, The Hum of Concrete.
Jill Blewett playwright's award ($10,000) - South Australian writers only.
- Alan Grace, The Embryos.
- Duncan Graham, And Burn My Shadow.
- Nina Pearce, This Place.
2008 Winners |Winners 1986 -2006
2008 Adelaide Festival Winners
|
||
|
* Premier's award: Urban Myths: 210 Poems by John Tranter
* Award for Children's literature: Don't Call Me Ishmael!
* Award for fiction: The Ballad of Desmond Kale by Roger McDonald
* Award for innovation: Someone Else by John Hughes
* Award for non-fiction: Sunrise West
* John Bray poetry award:Urban Myths: 210 Poems by John Tranter
* Jill Blewett Playwright's Award for the Creative Development of a play script by a South Australian emerging writer: Merger - art, life and the other thing by Duncan Graham
* Award for an Unpublished Manuscript by a SA writer to be Published by Wakefield Press: The Second Fouling Mark by Stephen Orr
* Barbara Hanrahan Fellowship: Steve Evans
* Carclew Fellowship: Rosanne Hawke
John Tranter's Urban Myths: 210 Poems Wins Premier's Prize for 2008
For the first time in recent years a collection of poetry has taken the top prize at South Australia's Festival Awards for Literature.
John Tranter (right) has won the South Australian Premier's Award with his complex and sophisticated collection of poetry,Urban Myths: 210 Poems (new and selected). His work also took out the John Bray Poetry Award, giving Tranter a total win of $25,000.
The win by Sydney based Tranter, was announced during Adelaide Writers' Week in March by the Hon. Mike Rann Premier of South Australia, along with the other categories in the 2008 Festival Awards for Literature.
Established in 1986, the national Festival Awards for Literature, valued at $130,000, are granted biennially to the best authors in Australian children's literature, fiction, innovation, non-fiction and poetry. The awards, which judge the best works published in Australia in the previous two years, are the nation's most competitive literary awards with 667 entries submitted for 2008. There are 10 award categories - comprising five national awards, open to all Australians, and two specifically for SA writers. The national awards are - Children's Literature ($15,000), Fiction ($15,000), Innovation ($10,000), Non-Fiction ($15,000), John Bray Poetry Award ($15,000) and the Premier's Award ($10,000).
John Tranter- A Poet of Our Time
One of Australia’s most accomplished poets, Sydney-based John Tranter's Urban Myths: 210 Poems , has obviously touched a cord in the collective psyche. Gleaning the highlights from previous works starting with Parallax (1970) to Studio Moon (2003),it also includes previously uncollected poems and new work. Prior to it's most recent triumph in winning the major biennially awarded Premier's prize at the Adelaide Festival, the book won the 2006 CJ Dennis Prize for poetry in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and the 2007 Kenneth Slessor Prize for poetry in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.
Mr. Tranter has published over twenty books of poetry, four anthologies of other writer's work and was a co-editor of the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry. In 1997 he founded the free Internet literary magazine Jacket.
Currently he is an honorary associate in the School of Letters, Arts and Media at the University of Sydney, and an honorary fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. According to his web site, he is completing a doctorate degree at the University of Wollongong, managing Jacket, working as a part-time advisor to the APRIL project and as a director and systems manager of Australian Literary Management (a literary agency), and somehow 'writing a few poems'. Busy man.
The judges of the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards had this to say about the book:
The new and uncollected poems in John Tranter's Urban Myths make a significant addition to his oeuvre. Control and ease are evident in the writing, which displays personages, occasions and moods of the metropolitan modern world. Tranter's latest poems refresh through the exercise of urbane skills: this is a poet suave and playful, but never aloof; linguistically various, assured in style, and never less than fully attentive.
An online read-only version of Urban Myths: 210 Poems -
A selection of John Tranter Poems- Courtesy of the Poets web site
Roger McDonald- No Stranger to Award World
ROGER MCDONALD (right) winner of 2008 Adelaide Festival prize for fiction for The Ballad of Desmond Kale is no stranger to the world of Australian book awards. The Ballad of Desmond was also the winner of the prestigious 2006 Miles Franklin Award whilst his internationally acclaimed bestseller, Mr Darwin's Shooter, was awarded the New South Wales, Victorian, and South Australian Premiers’ Literary Awards, and the National Fiction Award at the 2000 Adelaide Writers’ Week. Quite a pedigree.
As well as the above his work includes, 1915, Slipstream, Rough Wallaby, Water Man, The Slap. His account of travels with New Zealand shearers in the Australian outback, Shearers’ Motel, won the 1993 National Book Council Banjo award for non-fiction and has been republished by Vintage.
Desmond Kale is the story of an escaped convict and sheep breeder who disappears with more than 300 fine-wool-producing sheep in a quest for a perfect pastoral setting.
As obsessed with sheep — and Kale too — is the parson and magistrate Matthew Stanton, the novel's brilliantly realised polar opposite to the big-hearted convict.
McDonald said that of all his novels this one was the most conscious storytelling effort. "If the writer's not engrossed in anticipating what's next, there's no likelihood the reader will be, and that's the essence of the reader experience: the question of what happens next."
Rosenberg's Genius Comes to the Fore Once More as Sequel Wins As Well
"So how do we describe Jacob G. Rosenberg's (below left. Photo: Sloshi Jacobs) particular type of greatness? Inevitably you start to make comparisons when encountering such things. Rosenberg's lyricism and mastery of language puts him up there with other Jewish masters of story: Singer, Potok and Levi. He has that essential element of greatness, a flavour all his own, a voice and style distinct from any other." Juliette Hughes
Thus wrote Juliette Hughes in an Age article in September, 2005 about Jacob Rosenberg's East of Time. This collection of stories, set in Poland under the Nazis, in the Lodz ghetto, when the author, Jacob Rosenberg, was a boy captures fragments that tell of the people he knew and what happened to them with a poignancy that is both darkly ironic and poetic.The book won 2006 NSW Premier's Literary Award for Non-Fiction and the 2007 National Biography Award.. Now Mr. Rosenberg has been rewarded with the 2008 Adelaide Festival Award for non-fiction for the sequel, Sunrise West.
Navigating between the two worlds of wartime experiences in Europe and new life in Australia, this moving memoir of a Holocaust survivor is imbued with an element of fiction. This deeply personal narrative travels from darkness to hope as the author loses his family at Auschwitz, spends the war in concentration camps, and ultimately emigrates to Australia with his wife, leading to an eventual restoration that remains coloured by a tragic past.
Jacob G. Rosenberg was born in Lodz, Poland, the youngest member of a working-class family. After the Germans occupied Poland he was confined, with his parents, his two sisters and their little girls, to the hermetically sealed Lodz Ghetto, from which they were eventually transported to Auschwitz. With the exception of one sister (who committed suicide a few days later) all the members of his family were gassed on the day of their arrival. He remained in Auschwitz for about two months, then spent the rest of the war in other concentration camps.
In 1948 he emigrated to Australia with his wife Esther. Their only child, Marcia, was born in Melbourne. Rosenberg’s poetry and prose have been published in both Australia and overseas, and a number of poems have been translated into Hebrew and Russian.
Previous Award Winners 1986- to 2006
|
|
|
|
Premier's Award
2006 Sixty Lightsby Gail Jones (Vintage Books)
2004 Wild Surmiseby Dorothy Porter (Picador)
2002 The True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (University of Queensland Press)
2000 Mr Darwin's Shooter by Roger McDonald (Vintage Books)
1998 The Drownerby Robert Drewe (Pan MacMillan)
1996 The Future Eaters: Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and Peopleby Tim Flannery (Reed Books)
Award for Children's Literature (National)
|
|
|
|
|
2006 It's Not All About You, Calma! by Barry Jonsberg (Allen and |Unwin)
2004 Abyssinia by Ursula Dubosarsky (Viking Penguin)
2002 Lirael: Daughter of the Clayr (Old Kingdom Trilogy S.) by Garth Nix (Harper Collins)
2000 Deadly, Unna? by Phillip Gwynne (Puffin Penguin)
1998 The Listmakerby Robin Klein (Viking Penguin)
1996 The Third Day, the Frost by John Marsden (Pan MacMillan Australia)
1994 Angel's Gate by Gary Crew (William Heinemann Australia)
1992 The House Guest by Eleanor Nilsson (Viking Penguin)
1990 Beyond the Labyrinth by Gillian Rubinstein (Hyland House)
1988 Space Demons by Gillian Rubinstein (Omnibus Books)
1986 The Long Night Watch by Ivan Southall (Methuen)-
Award For Fiction (National)
2006 Sixty Lights by Gail Jones (Vintage Books)
2004 Moral Hazard by Kate Jennings (Picador)
2002 The True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (University of Queensland Press)
2000 Mr Darwin's Shooter by Roger McDonald (Vintage Books)
1998 The Drownerby Robert Drewe (Pan MacMillan)
1996 Death of a River Guide by Richard Flanagan (McPhee Gribble/Penguin)
1994 Grand Days by Frank Moorhouse (William Heinemann Australia)
1992 The Great World by David Malouf (Chatto & Windus)
1990 Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey (UQP)
1988 Julia Paradise by Rod Jones (McPhee Gribble)
1986 The Children's Bach by Helen Garner (McPhee Gribble)
Award for innovation in writing (National)
2006 <More or Less> 1-100 by MTC Cronin (Shearsman Books)
2004 The Eastern Slope Chronicle by Ouyang Yu (Brandl and Schlesinger)
Award for Non-Fiction (National)
|
|
|
|
2006 Velocity: A Memoir by Mandy Sayer (Vintage)
2004 Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island by Rebe Taylor (Wakefield Press)
2002 Leviathan: The Unauthorised Biography of Sydney by John Birmingham (Random House)
2000 Throwim Way Leg: An Adventure by Tim Flannery (Text Publishing Company)
1998 Claiming a Continent: A New History of Australia by David Day (Harper Collins)
1996 The Future Eaters by Tim Flannery (Reed Books)
1994 Sort of a Place Like Home: Remembering the Moore River Native Settlement by Susan Maushart
(Fremantle Arts Centre Press)
1992 Patrick White - A Life by David Marr (Random House Australia)
1990 Satura by John Bray (Wakefield Press) (for South Australian non-fiction)
1988 The Myriad Faces of War by Trevor Wilson (Polity/Blackwells) (for South Australian non-fiction)
1986 A History of Prince Alfred College by R M Gibbs (Peacock Publications) (for South Australian
non-fiction)
The Jill Blewett Playwright's Award for the creative development of a play script by a South Australian writer
2006 This Uncharted Hour by Finegan Kruckemeyer
2004 Beautiful Words: A Trilogy by Sean Riley
2002 Small Faith by Josh Tyler
The John Bray Award for Poetry (National)
2006 Totem: Totem Poem Plus 40 Love Poems by Luke Davies (Allen Unwin)
2004 Wild Surmise by Dorothy Porter (Picador)
2002 Around Here by Cath Kenneally (Wakefield Press)
2000 The Harbour by Dimitris Tsaloumas (UQP)
1998 The Blue Cloud of Crying by Peter Boyle (Hale & Ironmonger)
1996 The Silo: A Pastoral Symphony by John Kinsella (Fremantle Arts Centre Press)
1994 Between Glances by Andrew Lansdown (Fremantle Arts Centre Press)
1992 Last Poems by Vincent Buckley (McPhee Gribble)
1990 Bone Scan by Gwen Harwood (Angus & Robertson)
1988 The Daylight Moon by Les A Murray (Angus & Robertson)
1986 Selected Poems - 1963-1983 by Robert Gray (Angus & Robertson)
Award for an Unpublished Manuscript by a South Australian Writer to be published by Wakefield Press
2006 The Quakers by Rachel Hennessy
2004 The Goddamn Bus of Happiness by Stefan Laszczuk
2002 The Black Dream by Corrie Hosking
2006 Mike Ladd
2004 Kirsty Brooks
2002 Graham Rowlands
2000 Jan Owen
1998 Cath Kenneally
1996 Moya Costello
1994 Barry Westburg
Carclew Fellowships
2006 Christine Harris
2004 Marguerite Hann-Syme
2002 Ruth Starke
2000 Ian Bone
1998 Phil Cummings
1996 Chris Tugwell
1994 Peter McFarlane
1992 Anne Brookman
1990 Anne-Marie Mykyta
1988 Geoff Goodfellow
