Print-friendly versionFiction Book Award
Emerging Queensland Author - Manuscript Award
Unpublished Indigenous Writer - The David Unaipon Award
Non Fiction - The Dymocks Literacy Foundation Award
History Book Award
Children's Book Award
Young Adult Book Award
Science Writer - the Department of State Development, Trade and Innovation Award
Poetry Collection - Arts Queensland Judith Wright Calanthe Award
Australian Short Story Collection - Arts Queensland Steele Rudd Award
Literary or Media Work Advancing Public Debate - The Harry Williams Award
Drama Script (Stage) Award
Film Script - Pacific Film and Television Commission Award
Television Script - QUT Creative Industries Award
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Fiction Book Award Brian Castro for The Garden Book (Giramondo) Brian Castro's new novel is stunningly original in concept, composition and style. Of imaginative strength, profound insight and complex vision, its prose invokes a wide range of intellectual and emotional responses. The ninth book of this highly awarded author transforms his earlier avant-garde narrative style and structure into a more accessible storytelling that leaves the reader deeply satisfied and intensely moved. Castro's The Garden Book is writing at its best, the truly exciting prose by a master novelist at the peak of his powers, a major contribution to Australian literature. |
Emerging Queensland Author - Manuscript Award
Karen Foxlee for The Anatomy of Wings
Set in an Australian mining town, The Anatomy of Wings is a compelling novel about family life, grief and growing up. As teenage Beth enters a rebellious phase that ends in tragedy, her ten-year-old sister recounts its devastating effect on their family. The real achievement of this manuscript is its ability to be moving and funny in equal measures. Humour is critical to the success of the story, which could otherwise have been very bleak indeed. The author remains in control of her material at all times and has created a narrative voice that will appeal to adult and young adult readers alike (in a way that is reminiscent of Mark Haddon's bestselling English novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night). She makes astute and amusing use of popular culture references and has created believable and flawed characters who are struggling to make sense of a seemingly preventable family tragedy.
Unpublished Indigenous Writer - The David Unaipon Award
Gayle Kennedy for Me, Antman and Fleabag
Me, Antman and Fleabag has a lightness of touch, characters you wanted to know more about and ease of integration and exploration of issues related to Indigeneity and Indigenous experience, are all present - and successfully. Me, Antman and Fleabag offers great humour, often wry, often partnered with interpersonal friction, with an understanding of the ever-presence of violence - real, or implied - in many Indigenous lives, or with a cheerfulness of expletive that many a Koori or Murri would be familiar with. This entry, we feel, would work for all readerships. There's potentially great appeal for all in the sly subversion, or inversion, evidenced in many of the characters and situations.
Non Fiction - The Dymocks Literacy Foundation Award
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Neil Chenoweth for Packer's Lunch |
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Dr Peter Edwards for Arthur Tange: The Last of the Mandarins |
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Martine Murray for
The Slightly Bruised Glory of Cedar B. Hartley (who can't help flying high and falling in deep) (Allen & Unwin) In writing 'The slightly bruised glory of Cedar B. Hartley', Martine Murray plays with language and streams of thought, while her characters learn to play with life's journey and one another. A refreshingly quirky, funny and profound commentary on what matters to a young teen....and indeed anyone. Cedar B. Hartley dreams of joining the Flying Fruit Fly Circus. She has a tree-shaped, already unusual life...and as the title suggests, can't help flying high and falling in deep. |
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Ursula Dubosarsky for The Red Shoe (Allen & Unwin) Is set in the 1950s against a backdrop of the Australian political controversy known as the Petrov Affair. Dubosarsky demonstrates again in this novel, that her ability to combine character, theme and metaphor in her characteristically dreamlike style is extraordinary. Focussed on the lives of Matilda and her two sisters, this novel explores the pain of growing up but suggests other themes such as Australia's cultural maturation in typically obtuse fashion. In the parallel plots of the public and private events being chronicled here, she offers the reader another tour de force which 'leaks' insights long after the book has been finished. |
Science Writer - the Department of State Development, Trade and Innovation Award
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Dr Carole Hungerford for Good Health in the 21st Century (Scribe) Carole Hungerford in "Good Health?" aims to help the lay-person assess "scientific evidence" in a range of health areas that affect us all. As she points out " ..there is good science and bad science and for many, a bewildering amount of information in the press and on the Internet". In her book she shows clearly that there is a knack to looking at evidence. In particular she has presented a fundamental problem: why are so many health problems increasing when western medicine and science continues to advance? By going back to the basics of health through good nutrition and other simple remedies, by drawing on anthropology, agriculture and other ecosystems, she has given us some of the answers to the problems. The book is structured, written in a very readable and accessible format and style. |
Poetry Collection - Arts Queensland Judith Wright Calanthe Award
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Professor John Kinsella for The New Arcadia (Fremantle Arts Centre Press) Kinsella demonstrates with his most exciting collection to date, why he is one of Australia's most internationally respected poets. There is an easy familiarity with demanding forms of poetry from earlier ages, alongside the most contemporary and sophisticated structures of thought. The New Arcadia displays both technical virtuosity and a sensual embracing of the landscape and people it dissects so unflinchingly. The smallest insect and a dazzling array of birds have been brought together seamlessly with politics, history, weddings, births, farms and violence - the many possibilities open to a poetic body that takes the world into its blood. Above all, here is a laser-like intelligence and exhilarating testing of the limits of language and invention. |
Australian Short Story Collection - Arts Queensland Steele Rudd Award
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Craig Cormick for A Funny thing Happened at 27 000 Feet (Ginninderra Press) Craig Cormick's collection of 6 short stories have a superficial sense of playfulness, humour and vivacity - as well as a fertile inventiveness - that seems the most powerful and fitting Australian response to the contemporary age of terror. Certainly, these are not stories that could come from any other country. Although we are thrust almost recklessly into the modern milieu of air hijacks, terrorists and fanaticism, the narrative voice keeps creating a curious counterpoint with the ordinary, the everyday and the strange pathos of the colloquial. Many of the stories are about travel, trippers, people displaced from their normal surroundings. These are stories very much of our world, but it is a world as discomforting as it is recklessly hilarious. It is very frightening. Craig Cormick knows how to twist the knife, and even in the funny bits, we feel the edge. |
Literary or Media Work Advancing Public Debate - The Harry Williams Award
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Gideon Haigh for
Asbestos House (Scribe) Gideon Haigh presents a chronicle of company history, personal stories and an analysis of corporate behaviour in his timely study of the biggest contributor to asbestos-related disease in Australia, the manufacturer James Hardie Industries, known for the fibre cement products important to post-war development. Hardie continued to manufacture fibro products well into the'80s, but failed to investigate health dangers of asbestos and met claims of corporate culpability with a series of legal manoeuvres. This well written, well-researched account debates the conflict between a boardroom's defence of its commercial interests and its obligations to the victims of its commercial success. |
Noelle Janaczewska for Mrs Petrov's Shoe
(Theatre @ Risk)
This play re-tells the Demidenko/Darville story, and finely done in a script of multiple layerings of narrative voice. The construction is outstanding, moving from the subject 'Ania's' first masquerade of 'Polish' self-representation at the literary award, through her fictional view of her life, to her English suburban youth, her exposure and her renewed self-representations. People may think that Australia is 'over' the Demidenko event now, but this play doesn't come at the Demidenko affair as a crass exposé or a moralising documentary. It employs simplicity and control in the telling, but the lightness and sureness of technical touch should not be confused with insignificance of purpose or achievement. In this play, Janaczewska has crafted a profound and engaging play out of familiar material, using it to create probing questions about ethnicity and self-representation which directly affect all modern citizens, and which are critically important for Australians to hear now. 'Ethnicity' is a story created in an on-going imagining, the play suggests, and while fashions in marginality or romantic identities do notoriously come and go, nobody is 'authentically' more 'Australian' than anybody else. The script shows the playwright's signature level of sophistication in conceptualisation of dramatic style and structure, yet this is an engaging and delightful script which audiences will greatly enjoy whether or not they are up to speed with the details of the events of the mid-90s.
Film Script - Pacific Film and Television Commission Award
Rolf de Heer for Ten Canoes
(Vertigo Productions)
This film marks a miraculous departure for Australian filmmaking. The result of a close collaboration between Rolf de Heer, David Gulpilil and the people of Gulipilil's community, this film is an elegant and mysterious mix of ethnography, ancient storytelling forms, ancient stories, jokes, re-enactments, community-devised situation, traditional canoe-building and hunting technologies, screenwriting, and filmmaking technologies. It is funny, mysterious, dramatic, engaging, entertaining, wise and full of wonder, but it achieves all of this in new ways. It tells a story that is set in ancient times, tribal times, but in turn within that film it tells a teaching story set in the far more ancient mythical past, ancestor time - a love story. It is about wrong love, kidnapping, sorcery, revenge-murder, payback and mistaken identity. The story is told in a mix of English narration, and Ganalbingu language which will be subtitled. The script was devised as much as scripted, and edited as much as written, a true collaborative open-system work, and the result is a classic of world cinema. It is not only a landmark work in itself but it points the way to a future of astonishing possibilities in which Indigenous Australian filmmakers will work together with filmmakers from all other cultures, including those of multi-cultural Australia, to make a new kind of storytelling in cinema. There has never been a film in Australia like this, and it represents a new dawn.
Television Script - QUT Creative Industries Award
Katherine Thomson for Unfolding Florence
(Film Australia/Becker Entertainment)
This piece is a semi-dramatised documentary on the life and loves of Florence Broadhurst. Through extensive research the writer has unearthed a very wide range of materials in audio, written and filmic forms from which she has been able to draw the full, (and it is a very full) expansive and driven character of an extraordinary woman who lived an extraordinary life of celebrity, controversy, and great achievement, but which ended in her tragic murder. The dramaticised and monologised elements of the script which have Florence telling her own life and asserting her opinions are particularly vivid and fine. They capture exactly the character of the woman we have seen and heard in real life. In addition to this, the writer has excelled herself by her careful selection from the wide choice of materials she had at her disposal. By any measure, this is an outstanding piece of narrative television writing.