This will be a short Monday Musings … aren’t you pleased!
The literary award season for 2013 is hotting up with the most exciting thing on the horizon being the announcement of the inaugural Stella Prize due tomorrow, 16 April. In addition to this, though, we have also seen the announcement of longlists and shortlists for a few other awards, and even a winner or two. I’m finding it hard to keep up …
No. 1! (Courtesy: OCAL via clker.com)
Now, while I don’t make a practice of reporting on all awards, I do like to know what’s going on. So, I have created a new page on my blog for Australia’s main national literary awards. It’s not a complete list of all literary awards offered in Australia but of the significant ones that are exclusively or mostly awarded to fiction books or fiction writers in the national arena. I plan to include in the page the major dates for announcements of long lists, short lists, and winners for each award for the current year. I have linked each award, where possible, to its Wikipedia page, on the assumption that that’s likely to be the most stable page and will, in most cases, provide a link to the award’s official site – where there is one. I find it quite frustrating, in fact, that many of the awards do not have well-maintained sites. It is quite hard, for example, to find the important dates for this year’s announcements, and so you’ll see that the list is incomplete.
Anyhow, there you have it for this week … please look at the page if you are interested, and if you see any glaring omissions or errors, let me know.
Whispering Gums 
Speaking of awards, albeit not Australian, I was delighted to read that “The Orphan Master’s Son” by Adam Johnson won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It’s a remarkable novel, set in North Korea. It blew my mind when I read it earlier this year.
BTW, I’m actually reading an Australian novel at the moment – “The Rosie Project” by Graeme Simpsion. A clever and amusing comedy of errors.
Oh thanks Anne … I’d seen the win but didn’t know the work. I’ve read the Simsion, and enjoyed it too — would love your comments when you’ve finished.
Great idea Sue. I’ve also been finding it frustrating finding a list of awards for nonfiction books. A calendar of awards would be good also. I might work on doing a similar thing to you for histories, biographies and memoirs.
Thanks Yvonne … That would be a good idea. I decided to limit mine to prevent exceeding my ability to keep up!
I’ve created my list of major awards for histories, biographies and memoirs on a google spreadsheet so it would be easy to up date.
I agree with you about the poor standard of awards websites! I wrote to one organisation suggesting they fix theirs. It is sad for the organisation giving the award as well as the shortlisted/winning authors when so much money is put into the award and presentation only to be let down by shoddy websites. I’m sure that authors would like the awards to at the very least keep a complete list of winners/shortlisted authors of prior years. Storing the judges citations of prior years on awards websites would be even better. This is not very hard to accomplish.
Totally agree Yvonne … thanks for the link.