Kim Scott's That Deadman Dance (Image courtesy Picador Australia)
The Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature are biennial awards, coinciding, funnily enough, with the holding of the biennial Adelaide Festival. I understand, however, that from 2012 the festival will be an annual event. Presumably this means the literary awards will also be awarded annually from now on. If that’s the plan, South Australia will finally have an annual literary award, like most other Australian states.
Anyhow, this year’s winners, which were announced earlier this month, are:
- Premier’s and Fiction award ($15,000) award: Kim Scott‘s That deadman dance (My review)
- Nonfiction award: Mark McKenna’s An eye for eternity: The life of Manning Clark
- John Bray Poetry Award: Les Murray’s Taller when prone
- Barbara Hanrahan Fellowship: Nicki Bloom for The sun and other stars
- Wakefield Press Unpublished Manuscript Award: Margret Merrilees’ The First Week
There are a few other prizes including for Children’s and Young Adult books, but these are the ones of main interest to me and so they’re the ones I’m giving you!
It’s great to see Kim Scott garnering another two awards for That deadman dance. It has now won:
- Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, Fiction and Premier’s prizes, 2012
- ALS Gold Medal, 2011
- Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book, South-east Asia and the Pacific, 2011
- Kate Challis RAKA Award, 2011
- Miles Franklin Literary Award, 2011
- Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, Victorian Prize for Literature and Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, 2011
- Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards, Premier’s Prize and Fiction Book, 2011
It was shortlisted for several other Australian literary awards in 2011 and has also been longlisted for the 2012 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. I do hope it is starting to make inroads into overseas markets.
Whispering Gums 
Oooh, I wonder if that poem is online?
It’s a collection … so some individual poems may be. Read Ramble, in my Blog Roll, has reviewed and discussed a couple of the poems, with Pykk writing a post in response. Let me know if you want help tracking those posts down.
He has six of the Prone poems on his website if you want to take a look: http://www.lesmurray.org/recent.htm
Oh, thanks DKS … Will check that out. Was at your blog the other day then got called away before I was able to comment … Will get there again this weekend I hope as it’s been too long!