Literary awards

Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Publishing Prize 2023 Winning Books Launch with Conversation

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I have written about Finlay Lloyd’s 20/40 Publishing Prize a few times now, so I hope I’m not imposing too much on your precious time. However, this weekend was the launch here in Canberra, and it involved a conversation led by a favourite Canberra journalist, Virginia Hausseger, with the two winning authors. I had to go.

The participants

Rebecca Burton and Kim Kelly are the two winners, and I’ve introduced them before, so just to recap, Burton is an editor and author of two young adult novels, while Kelly is also an editor and the author of twelve adult historical fiction novels.

Virginia Hausseger is, to use Wikipedia’s description, an “Australian journalist, academic advocate for gender equity, media commentator and television presenter”. She is well-known to Canberra audiences, having been our local ABC news presenter from 2001 to 2016.

Julian Davies did the introductions. He is the inspiring publisher and editor behind Finlay Lloyd, a company he runs with great heart and grace (or so it seems to me from the outside.)

The conversation

Before the conversation started proper, Julian provided some background to the prize. Human nature, he said, seems drawn to large things. Why else would we have things like the Big Potato! What is it about large things? He sees it related to the “tussle between quality and quantity” and thinks there’s something problematic in our tendency to admire the grand and overlook the miniature. (Yes!) He believes restrictions can liberate writers, and sees the novella form as perfect for this. It can encourage succinctness while allowing room for development. I don’t expect he had any argument about that in the room.

He reminded us that it was judged blind (by two old men and three young women). That it was won by published writers shows that those who have developed their craft are likely to shine through.

Then, Virginia took over …

On their novellas

Kim described her novella with beautiful succinctness saying it was set in 1922 Sydney in the wake of World War 1, just as the city was starting to wake up. It’s about grief, and about how recognising pain in the other leads to the young women rescuing each other. She added a little later that many novels have been written about the War, but not so many about after it, and even fewer about young women’s experience of that time.

She has written three novellas, and “kind of” knows at the beginning which form the story will be. The impetus for this one was wanting to impress a potential PhD supervisor. While researching Trove she saw the ad for the Room (which she included as an epigraph.) Virginia remarked that the closing pages set up a whole new story.

Rebecca said that hers was about two teenage sisters over six weeks of summer in 1986. The old sister, who is anorexic, has been admitted to hospital for bed-rest, and the younger sister visits her daily. It’s about what the sisters learn about each other, and the impact of this condition on the family.

She said that she hadn’t set out to write a novella, but she is comfortable with a word length which is shorter than the standard novel. Then she saw the prize! Writing adult fiction is a new genre for her, but she had stopped reading YA fiction and adores literary fiction. A friend suggested that she write what she reads. Sounds good advice to me.

On Ladies Rest and Writing Room

Kim explained that rest and writing rooms “were a thing” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for men and women. What is special about hers is that it was in a department store, and how it was advertised.

Dotty’s grief comes out in shopping addiction and behaving as though she had a death wish. She is so tied up in herself that she doesn’t notice her old schoolmate Clarinda. The book is built around the moment of recognition, that is, when Dotty “sees” Clarinda.

When Virginia commented on how well the “story gallops along” while still being “tight, descriptive, elegant”, Kim said that was the “magic of editorial process”. Also, she said, she knows that Sydney well.

On Ravenous girls

Answering where her story came from, Rebecca said that it was a story she had to write. Frankie had been with her for a long time, and a story about her childhood kept coming to her. The trickiness was not so much the 1986 summer story, but managing the way the time telescopes at the end. She wanted to nod at the years that go by after someone comes out of hospital.

When Virginia commented on how well she’d handled the scene of another girl post-hospital, providing an alternative glimpse of how it goes, Rebecca said she wanted to tell other stories because every story is different.

Young Frankie loves her sister, but is bewildered. An enlightening moment for her is when she realises that sister Justine is the only one allowed to suffer, that her own pain is not seen. She realises that the story she’s been told is not right. Hers is a story of loss, grief, sadness. She’s left to her own resources, and because her older sister is sick, she’s left with no role model.

As for Justine, she uses hunger to mute her desires. Rebecca said that her working title was Yearn, and quoted that great line from the novella, “I don’t want to want the things I want”. Justine feels shame for wanting things, and so starves herself for wanting them.

On the physical process of writing

Kim throws her whole self into a new project, trying to get it all down before she loses her emotional or imaginative connection. Then she goes away, coming back some time later to a “full tub of play dough” that she can then mould. She is able to quarantine the time to work this way because as a freelancer she can manage her time. She loves to be free to fly through the story.

Rebecca has a very different more measured process. She works part-time to a set roster, so has a “chipping away” process. Since her new job, she has created a ritual involving getting up an hour earlier than usual, making a cup of tea and writing for an hour. This helps her manage the peaks and troughs that happen with writing. If things go badly she can get up and go away, leaving it for the next time, and if they go well, she can get up feeling good! It’s important for her not to get obsessed with writing.

On the editing process

Rebecca said for her it went structural edit, then copy edit, then the final proofread. The delight of working with small publisher was that time was allowed for growth.

Kim seconded Rebecca’s comment about the delight of working with Julian, who “cares about words and ideas”. In her worklife as commercial fiction editor, time is of the essence, so she luxuriated in the “nurturing” experience of working with Julian.

On what’s next

Kim’s next project is her PhD, which will include a story about an ancestral grandfather who intersects with Dickens. It’s an idea she has had for a long time, but she will need to try Rebecca’s “chipping away” approach for this!

Rebecca has these characters in head, and wants to see these young girls into adulthood. This could mean three related novellas, the next set in 1993 with Justine in recovery and in her first relationship. She wants to explore recovery because some never move beyond “functional recovery”. The third book she’d like to be about Frankie in her 30s or 40s to see how things have worked out for her. Some of these futures are hinted at in Ravenous girls.

Virginia was an excellent, well-prepared and enthusiastic interviewer. She knew the books well and showed genuine interest in them and their authors.

There was no Q&A which suited me, as I had to rush off to get to my monthly Jane Austen meeting where we were to discuss the up-and-comers in Austen’s novels. However, I did have a very brief chat, as I was leaving, with the other “old man” judge, John Clanchy whose writing I love and who had commented on my recent novella post. He talked about his interest in the form and the choices writers need to make when working within it, such as which characters or stories to develop and which to leave by the wayside.

The Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Publishing Prize Winning Books of 2023 Launch
Harry Hartog Booksellers, Kambri Centre, ANU
Saturday, 18 November, 12.30-1.30pm

Kim Kelly, Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room (#BookReview)

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Early in the month I reviewed the first of the two winners of Finlay Lloyd’s inaugural 20/40 Publishing Prize, Rebecca Burton’s Ravenous girls (my review). It was set in Sydney in the 1980s. Now, as promised, I bring you the other winner, Kim Kelly’s Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room. It is also set in Sydney, but in the early 1920s. Some of you will know Kim Kelly, as she has published around 12 novels, mostly historical fiction. Not only that but she was longlisted for the ARA Historical Novel Prize 2022 and shortlisted for the Viva La Novella 2021 prize with her novella, The rat catcher: A love story.

So, she has written novellas, before. A check on her GoodReads page revealed others, including what I think is her best known book, Wild chicory. So, she, like Rebecca Burton, is comfortable with the novella form (or length).

Finlay Lloyd describes the book on their website like this:

Two young women, brought up to expect conventional lives, are thrown together in unexpected circumstances. Each has suffered a devastating loss that challenges their belief in life and themselves. It’s rare to come across a work of deep psychological insight conveyed with such verve and lightness of touch.

As I said in my opening paragraph, Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room is set in 1920s Sydney. The title is explained in the first of two epigraphs. It comes from an advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald, in 1922, for the Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room in Farmer’s department store. This “artistic room” was intended as a place of respite for busy shopping ladies. It was also where they could also write any “urgent notes” for “the very next mail”. Writing facilities were provided for the purpose. The room was, of course, intended for the well-heeled, as you paid a “nominal charge of 8d.” to avail yourself of its charming “rose shades”. The second epigraph comes from Sappho, which might or might not tell you something!

The story is told in from alternating third person perspectives of two young women. One is the apparently entitled Dotty, who comes from a wealthy business family and who uses the Room in the opening chapter. She is introduced, however, on the street outside where she plays chicken with a tram every Tuesday on her way to Farmer’s and its titular room. Why does she do this? We soon come to understand the pain this young woman, who seems on the outside to have it all, is dealing with. And it’s to do with World War 1, if you haven’t already guessed from the time setting.

The other young woman is down-on-her-luck Clarinda, who has just started work as the Room’s attendant. She went to school with Dotty, but Dotty, in her grief, doesn’t notice her, which doesn’t surprise Clarinda after her shooldays’ experiences with Dotty. Clarinda has her own sadness, partly stemming from losses in the War, but also from the fact that due to her father’s tragic death she and her mother are now on the proverbial hard times.

The narrative takes place over a few weeks encompassing Christmas, and comes to a head when Dotty’s pain becomes too much for her, resulting in a crisis in the Corset Salon (next door to the Ladies Rest and Writing Room). Clarinda steps in to protect Dotty, and, through what ensues, both young women grow. Clarinda treats Dotty with compassion and forgiveness, while Dotty wakes up to sadnesses in others.

What I most enjoyed about the book is its evocation of post WW1 1920s Sydney. Kim Kelly knows the place and the time well, and, despite the shortness of the novella form, she vividly captures a city and people in flux – the grief of wartime loss, the changing workforce as men return home after the war, the increasing migration, the excitement of change in the air, but with old social values and class structures still in place.

Clarinda, for example, was grateful for having finally landed a decently paid job:

It certainly beat unreliable casual waitressing at three shillings a luncheon, or three and six per dinner service, or sixty hours per week as a shop assistant at considerably less than two pounds, both of which she’d done, piecing together a living. All the better paying more respectable clerical positions for which she was qualified, were being given to returned soldiers, and that was fair enough, except that nothing fair had happened for Clarinda since her brothers were ripped from this life and …

So much is told in these words.

Kelly is also adept at characterisation, creating two well-differentiated characters in Dotty and Clarinda. They immediately come to life on the page, which is particularly important in a novella where there’s no time to waste. We care about them both, because we are privy to what’s going on for them, and thus to their isolation, even if those around them aren’t.

The writing and plotting are assured. Kelly is clearly experienced in writing historical fiction where description and rhetorical language are used to create the sort of atmosphere and tone needed to drive a plot forward. Kelly does this very well, and I quickly became engrossed in these two girls’ lives. It’s a novella that wears its heart on its sleeves, and I wondered at times whether some pulling back might have challenged us readers to delve into more of the complexities, and maybe leave us with more questions than answers. But, that would have been a different book. As it is, Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room is beautifully accessible and will hopefully attract more people to the novella form. It and Ravenous Girls would make excellent stocking stuffers for busy readers in your lives. And I don’t mean this condescendingly! I am referring to their perfect stocking-stuffer size!

As with all Finlay Lloyd books, the design is gorgeous, with an appealing monochromatic cover featuring a woman’s hands writing a letter. Very different to your usual historical fiction cover.

Ladies Rest and Writing Room is a good read about a significant and complicated time in our history. Like Ravenous girls, it is a compassionate book, this one about navigating deep loss and the grief that attends it, and, even more, about the importance of generosity in dealing with others. I wish these two books well and thank Finlay Lloyd for sponsoring such an appealing, targeted prize.

Read for Novellas in November. Lisa (ANZ Litlovers) and Theresa (Theresa Smith Writes) have reviewed both winners in one post, but I have done them separately.

Kim Kelly
Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room
Braidwood: Finlay Lloyd, 2023
122pp.
ISBN: 9780994516596

Prime Minister’s Literary Awards Winners, 2023, announced

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The Winners of the the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards for 2023 were announced this evening.

The website says that 643 entries were received across six literary categories: fiction, non-fiction, young adult literature, children’s literature, poetry, and Australian history. Each shortlisted entry receives $5,000 with the winner of each category receiving $80,000. The awards are now being managed by Creative Australia, rather than by the Department of the Arts, which should provide the right arms’ length distance and avoid the problems of political interference which soured some of the early awards.

The event, which I attended in livestreamed form from the National Library, was slick but not superficial. Arts Minister Tony Burke inspired me once again, not only with his passion for the importance of the arts to Australia and his determination to entrench arts policy in government, but with his obvious personal engagement with arts across all forms. I’ve seen it before, and I saw it again. It’s a joy. As MC, Benjamin Law said, any Minister who takes poetry into the office has “got the vibe”.

Below is the shortlist for the three categories I am most interested in, with the winners marked in bold.

Fiction

  • Jessica Au, Cold enough for snow (my review)
  • George Haddad, Losing face
  • Yumna Kassab, The lovers 
  • Fiona McFarlane, The sun walks down
  • Paddy O’Reilly, Other houses (Lisa’s review) (on my TBR)

Non-fiction

  • Debra Dank, We come with this place (my review)
  • Louisa Lim, Indelible city: Dispossession and defiance in Hong Kong 
  • Brigitta Olubus, Shirley Hazzard: A writing life
  • Thom van Dooren, A world in a shell: Snail stories for a time of extinctions
  • Sam Vincent, My father and other animals: How I took on the family farm (Vincent said that he “wants to change perceptions about what Australian farmers can do and be” particularly regarding their relationships with First Nations people)

Australian history

  • Alan Atkinson, Elizabeth and John: The Macarthurs of Elizabeth Farm
  • Rohan Lloyd, Saving the Reef: The human story behind one of Australia’s greatest environmental treasures
  • Russell Marks, Black lives, white law: Locked up & locked out in Australia
  • Shannyn Palmer, Unmaking Angas Downs: Myth and history on a Central Australian pastoral station
  • Lachlan Strahan, Justice in Kelly Country: The story of the cop who hunted Australia’s most notorious bushrangers

Other category winners …

  • Poetry: Gavin Yuan Gau, At the altar of touch
  • Young Adult fiction: Sarah Winifred Searle, The greatest thing (Searle said during her acceptance speech, referencing how challenging the world is to navigate, “admit you’re scared even if you don’t have answers”.)
  • Children’s fiction: Jasmine Seymour, Open your heart to country

The complete shortlist with judges’ comments can be seen on the website. But I will say that the shortlist and the winners are impressively diverse, in who created the works and in their subject matter. So good to see.

Our lives are made more meaningful in the presence of a talented scribe. (Benjamin Law, closing the awards presentations)

Thoughts?

Rebecca Burton, Ravenous girls (#BookReview)

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When I announced the two winners of Finlay Lloyd’s inaugural 20/40 Publishing Prize, a few days ago, I said I planned to read them for the Novellas in November challenge/meme/reading month. (What do we call these things?) So here, now, is my post on the first I’ve read, Rebecca Burton’s Ravenous girls.

Rebecca Burton, as I’ve said in previous posts on the prize, is an editor, and author of two young adult novels, Leaving Jetty Road and Beyond Evie, both published by HarperCollins Australia. This book, I’d say, is a cross-over. It could be read by YA readers, but its subtle perspective of looking back from some years later, means that it is particularly geared to adult readers.

Finlay Lloyd writes on their website that

Stories of family dysfunction often expose us to relentless failure. And while Ravenous Girls is about the tensions and growing distance between two sisters—the elder burdened by anorexia, the younger by self-doubt—it is distinguished by its lithe and tender understanding of the complexities of growing up.

It is, I suppose, a story of family dysfunction, but in the sense that most families, dare I say, can be dysfunctional to a point. By this I mean that many families face trauma and challenges that can affect how well they function. Which is the chicken, which is the egg? It’s probably not worth much going there – and this book doesn’t. Nonetheless, there is a bit of backstory to why things may be the way they are.

So, Ravenous girls. It’s told first person from the point of view of 14-year-old Frankie, which puts her slap-bang in the coming-of-age category, and like most her age she is unsure about who she is. She feels “the wrongness of me”, which includes sometimes being “too much me”. She is challenged by her friend “racing away” from her, as can often happen at this time of life, with neither the racer-ahead nor the left-behind having the tools – the experience – to manage it gracefully. Frankie feels the loss deeply, just when friendship is most needed.

Meanwhile, Frankie’s family life is challenged by the fact that Justine, her seventeen-year-old sister, is, as the book opens, about to enter an Eating Disorders Unit as a live-in patient. The third person in this family is Iris, their mother. She – and all of them – still suffer from the premature death of husband and father some eleven years earlier. I have seen this happen – a mother’s grief over the early death of her husband derailing family relationships. That seems to be part of the situation here.

The story primarily covers the months over the summer holidays when Justine is in hospital. Frankie, at loose ends because friend Narelle has secured a holiday job, visits Justine every day. She observes Justine, and thinks about what is happening to her and why. She and her mother attend, with Justine, a poorly-handled family therapy session, and she also attends a family support group. Neither of these provide much help or support. She doesn’t see either Justine or her family in these, so she continues to try to work it out for herself. She sees her mother’s tiredness and pain, and she sees there is no space for her own concerns when Justine’s needs are so great, which is something Justine, bound up in her own growing-up challenges, doesn’t appreciate.

What elevates this reading from what could have been a “woe is me” tale are the occasional foreshadowings or hints from later Frankie, telling us what she now knows, or in some cases, still doesn’t know. These references play several roles, from recognising their naiveté at the time (“It astonishes me now that this is the way we thought”) or her own self-absorbed inattention (“maybe if I’d listened more carefully”) to sharing lessons learnt or hinting that character development had occurred (“But now I think that I may have been a monster too”). Burton handles these later reflections adroitly – they add richness and depth without spoiling the conclusion or losing the tension or reducing our care for the characters.

The novella is set in 1985/1986 Adelaide, and Burton captures the era well – the political happenings from Queensland’s Joh Bjelke-Peterson to America’s Unabomber, the technology (cordless phones appearing, but certainly no mobiles!), the films and music. I could ask why the novel is set then, which is my usual question for novels set in the past, but, for a start, an earlier time-period is necessary to enable the inclusion of that perspective, I’ve mentioned, of the much older Frankie.

There are references during the novella to Frankie and her mum reading books about anorexia and other recovery memoirs – as readers will do when confronted by difficult situations. I liked this comment – or warning – about such memoirs:

It didn’t occur to me that what was truth for one person might not be true for another – or that the truth as people wrote about it wasn’t always the truth as they’d experienced it.

Fortunately, Ravenous girls isn’t a memoir!

As with all Finlay Lloyd books, the design is gorgeous. It has their unique shape, a dust jacket despite being a paperback, and a stylish but minimalist overall design aesthetic with elements that carry through to the other winner.

Before I close I must mention the title, Ravenous girls, which relates to anorexia and the hunger its sufferers experience. In anorexia, as we know, the hunger, and hence the title, is not purely literal. For Justine, as she articulates to Frankie, it’s about “wants”: “I don’t want to want the things I want, you know?” “Ravenous” perfectly encapsulates the intensity of need explored here.

Ravenous girls is a compassionate book that sensitively charts the emotional ups and downs that are part of the anorexia landscape, and explores the helplessness about understanding what is such an individual and complex mental condition. It also conveys something more generally relatable about family relationships – sisterhood and daughterhood, in particular – and about how darned hard it is to grow up. But, grow up we do.

Read for Novellas in November. Lisa (ANZ Litlovers) and Theresa (Theresa Smith Writes) have reviewed both winners in one post, but I am doing them separately. Watch this space.

Rebecca Burton
Ravenous girls
Braidwood: Finlay Lloyd, 2023
103pp.
ISBN: 9780645927009

Monday musings on Australian literature: Australian Political Book of the Year

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It’s fascinating just how many book awards there are in specialised areas. Last week I posted on the Dame Mary Gilmore Award, which started as a trade union supported award, but is now a more general poetry award. Yesterday I posted about the winners of the 20/40 short form prose award. Another specialised award is the Australian Political Book of the Year Award.

This is a new award that was first made in 2022. It is not a huge award in prize money, but it’s not minuscule either. The winning author (or authors) receives $15,000 and each shortlisted author receives $1,000. It’s great to see, in fact, more and more awards offering a monetary prize to the shortlisted books.

The award’s website says that the award

recognises the vital part political books play in better understanding Australian politics and public policy. Well researched, balanced and compelling political books that engage Australians are vital to the strength or our democracy.

Further, it says, the longlisted, shortlisted and winning books will be those the judges determine to have

provided the most compelling contribution to the understanding of Australian political events and debates.

The award is sponsored by a Melbourne independent bookshop, Hill of Content Bookshop, and the York Park Group.

Last year’s lists (that is winner, short and long for 2022) are available on the site. The shortlist for 2023 is on the site too, but I’ll also share them here:

  • James Curran, Australia’s China odyssey: From euphoria to fear (NewSouth Publishing): looks at the relationship between China and Australia through Australia’s prime minister from Gough Whitlam in 1972.
  • Russell Marks, Black lives, white law: Locked up and locked out in Australia (La Trobe University Press): interrogates the fact that First Nations Australians are the most incarcerated people on the planet. This book has also just been shortlisted for the Australian History section of the 2023 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.
  • Nick Mackenzie, Crossing the line (Hachette Australia): exposes the story behind the fall of SAS hero Ben Roberts-Smith.
  • Nikki Sava, Bulldozed: Scott Morrison’s fall and Anthony Albanese’s rise (Scribe Publications): self-explanatory, I’d say!

You can see the 2023 longlist on the same page. It includes books by the historian Frank Bongiorno, First Nations author Stan Grant, and author, ex-political advisor and speechwriter, Don Watson. This year’s judges are well-known political journalists Laura Tingle and Barrie Cassidy, and the academic John Warhurst.

Australia’s current treasurer, Jim Chalmers, announced the 2022 winner at a National Press Club event, the winner being Dean Ashenden’s Telling Tennant’s Story: the strange career of the great Australian silence. It’s about Tennant Creek’s, and by extension, Australia’s silence about the past, about the truth of what happened between settler and First Nations Australians.

Anyhow, back to Chalmers … he spoke, of course, about the prize, the judges and the books. I particularly liked this point he made about political books:

A good book is never just a collection of speeches or an extra-long feature piece – it’s a true study of an issue or idea, full of complications and confirmation, and with the pleasure of illustration, story-telling, portraiture.

He says more, but I’ll just share one more excerpt from his speech, in which he talked about “narratives that don’t just help us recognise patterns but also help us question our assumptions about the patterns we think we see”. That’s the important thing, isn’t it – to keep questioning the assumptions we make, because it is too easy to get locked into them, even when the world and/or our own lives and experiences change.

POSTSCRIPT: Nancy Elin noted in the comments that she has read all the shortlist, and has predicted the winner. Rather than link to each post, I’m giving you this link to her blog as she is an assiduous reader of Aussie books.

Had you heard of the Australian Political Book of the Year Award, and, regardless, does such an award interest you?

Winners announced for the inaugural 20/40 Prize

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Last November, I announced the creation of the new 20/40 Publishing Prize by independent, non-profit publisher, Finlay Lloyd. And then, early this month, I announced the shortlist for the inaugural prize. Today, I announce the Winners.

First though, I’ll remind you that 20/40 is a manuscript award, with the prize being publication. It is not limited to debut or young or women or any other subgroup of writers, as some manuscript awards are. However, it does have some criteria, in addition to looking for “writing of the highest quality”. Submissions must be prose, and must be between 20,000 and 40,000 words (hence the name). Outside of these criteria, works submitted can be “all genres … including hybrid forms”. The plan is to choose two winners, as they have this year, and they hope to run this prize for many years to come.

And now, the Winners

From six on the shortlist, we now have our two winners:

  • Rebecca Burton, Ravenous girls. FL says “Stories of family dysfunction often expose us to relentless failure. And while Ravenous Girls is about the tensions and growing distance between two sisters—the elder burdened by anorexia, the younger by self-doubt—it is distinguished by its lithe and tender understanding of the complexities of growing up.”. Burton is an editor, and author of two young adult novels, Leaving Jetty Road and Beyond Evie, both published by HarperCollins Australia.
  • Kim Kelly, Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room. FL says “Two young women, brought up to expect conventional lives, are thrown together in unexpected circumstances. Each has suffered a devastating loss that challenges their belief in life and themselves. It’s rare to come across a work of deep psychological insight conveyed with such verve and lightness of touch”. Kelly is known to many already, I think, as the author of historical fiction, most if not all published now by Brio Books.

Finlay Lloyd had hoped to make one award to fiction and one to non-fiction, but there were not enough strong non-fiction entries this year. They hope this changes as the prize becomes better known. I hope so too, as I enjoy creative non-fiction.

You can read Finlay Lloyd’s announcement here. Also, Lisa has read the winners, while I plan to read them for Novellas in November. Here is Lisa’s post.

It would be great to see Aussie readers, not to mention others, get behind this publishing prize. You can order the winners at Finlay Lloyd, with a special deal if you buy the two.

There is to be a launch of the books in Canberra on 18 November. If you will be in town that day, and would like to attend, comment here, and I will contact you with the details.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Dame Mary Gilmore Award

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In last week’s 1962-themed Monday Musings post, I mentioned that I would post separately on the Dame Mary Gilmore Award. This was because it has an interesting history.

Mary Gilmore, 1927 (Public Domain, State Library of QLD, via Wikipedia)

First though, a bit on Mary Gilmore, for those who don’t know here. She was an Australian writer and journalist, best known as a poet. One day, I will write separately on her, but for now, I will just say that she was highly political, and was part of the utopian socialist New Australia colony set up by William Lane in Paraguay. I wrote about this in another Monday Musings back in 2015.

Gilmore lived a long life, dying in 1962 (in fact!), at the age of 97. She was involved in socialist and trade union movements, and wrote for Tribune, the Communist Party of Australia’s newspaper, though she was apparently never a party member. Her political interests are relevant to the award.

The Award has been known by different names since its creation in 1956 by the ACTU, the Australian Council of Trade Unions. According to AustLit, it was called the ACTU Dame Mary Gilmore Award, and its goal was, ‘to encourage literature “significant to the life and aspirations of the Australian People”‘. Over the years, says Wikipedia, it has been “awarded for a range of categories, including novels, poetry, a three-act (full-length) play, and a short story”. Reading between the lines, I assume this means it was more about content than form.

Since 1985, it has been confined to poetry – to a first book of poetry, in fact – and since around 2019 has been managed by ASAL, the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. Its specific history, I must say, is not particularly clear, but at some time its name was simplified to the Mary Gilmore Award. It was awarded annually until 1998, was then biennial until 2016, but now seems to be annual again. It’s a good example of the challenge to survive that many awards face. The Wikipedia article linked above lists the winners from 1985 to the present.

Pre-1985

It’s the early years of the award that I’m most interested in, mainly because they are less well documented. I’ve tried various search permutations in Trove and have found scattered bits of information, some of which I’ll share here. My first comment is, Wot’s in a name?

I have not found a formal announcement of the award, unless this advertisement in the Tribune of 21 March 1956, the year the award was apparently established, is it. It calls the award the Mary Gilmore Prize, and says submissions should be made to the Victorian May Day Committee. The May Day Committee isn’t the ACTU, but they are closely related, and both support workers’ rights. Indeed, the Victorian May Day Committee page notes that “The labour movement and the trade union movement should continue to build this day as it is the working people’s day”.

Anyhow, the ad invites submissions to the “May Day competitions” and then says that “the best three stories and the best three verses will be eligible for consideration for the Mary Gilmore Prize of £50”. It sounds like May Day literary competitions were already established – the prizes were small, just £5 and £3  – but now a bigger prize was to be offered in the name of Mary Gilmore. And, this year at least, short stories and poetry were the chosen forms. The ad also says that:

The short story and verse most favored by the judges will be those best expressing the aspirations and democratic traditions of the Australian people.

Then, on 12 December 1956, the Tribune announced that “two Mary Gilmore Literary Competitions have been announced by the May Day Committees of Melbourne; Sydney, Brisbane and Newcastle”. For May Day 1957, the “Mary Gilmore Literary Competition” would award prizes for the “first and second short stories and poems, in each of two classes”, meaning four prizes in each class. Class A was for “established” (or )published writers, and B for “new” writers. For May Day 1958, they offered the “Mary Gilmore Novel Competition”, with “a substantial prize, to be announced later” for the “best novel submitted”. The overall announcement added that:

The judges will prefer stories and poems which deal with the life and aspirations of the Australian people.

You can see how tricky the history of awards can be. I have to assume this is the “ACTU Dame Mary Gilmore Award”.

The next mention I found – and I could have missed some – was from the Tribune of 6 January 1960, which, announcing some new publications from the Australasian Book Society, included

Available now, The last blue sea – David Forrest (Winner, Dame Mary Gilmore Award). 

Interestingly, it’s a World War II set story.

Then, again in the Tribune, but this one, almost two years later on 13 December 1961, there is a report on a reception for Ron Tullipan who had won “the 1961 Dame Mary Gilmore Award for his novel, Rear vision“. It’s quite an extensive report which includes references to Jack Beasley, who was “one of the judges of the competition, which is sponsored each year in association with May Day celebrations”. He was concerned about the suggested takeover of the publisher, Angus and Robertson, by Consolidated Press. Read the article if you are interested. The report also noted that:

The Dame Mary Gilmore Award was probably unique in the capitalist world, and a real contribution to Australian literature.

On 22 August 1962, the Tribune announced the presentation of the Dame Mary Gilmore Awards for “poetry, novels and stories”. The winners were Jack Penberthy’s story, “The Bridge”, and Dennis Kevans’ poem, “For Rebecca”. Mysteriously, no novel is named. This report also helpfully names past winners of the award, but without more detail – Joan Hendry, Vera Deacon, Ron Tullipan, Dorothy Hewett, Hugh Mason, and David Forrest. Dorothy Hewett is probably the only one of these still known today.

This article also shared that the Award’s National Chairman, George Seelaf, believed that “in a few years they would be the major literary competitions in our country” but “still more financial support from more unions” was “urgently required”:

“Trade Unionism has always been strongest and literature has always been strongest when writers and unions were closest together. We will encourage writers who tell of the life and aspirations of the  Australian people”.

Don’t you love this conviction about the value of literature?

Also in 1962, another Tribune article (5 September), quotes the Dame herself. She didn’t attend the presentation, but the paper reports

that she was particularly glad to learn of the high standard and the large number of entries. “The more writers, the better expressed will be the thoughts and wishes of Australians,” she says. 

The Canberra Times – for a change – reported on 29 September 1962 that Ron Tullipan had won the “Mary Gilmore Award” with his “hard novel”, March into morning (which I described in my last Monday Musings). Is this the novel not mentioned in Tribune’s August report?

I found more award-winners from the 1960s, and they are interesting in terms of form. In 1963, for example, Hesba Brinsmead’s manuscript of the children’s (young adult) book, Pastures of the blue crane, won. That year, the “Mary Gilmore Award” was for a children’s book, with a second award for a book by a teenager. (Tribune 16 January 1963). In 1967, Pat Flower won the “Dame Mary Gilmore Award” for her hour-long television drama, Tilley landed on our shores. By then, the award was worth $500.

More work needs to be done on this, but it looks like the Dame Mary Gilmore Award Committee would decide each year what the award was for, rather than make it always open to multiple forms. The 1964 award, for example, seems to have been for a novel, while the 1966 one was for poetry. Whatever, the point is that all through this era of the award, the trade unions were behind it, until – well, I haven’t discovered yet how that aspect of it ended. But, what an interesting award.

Thoughts?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Shortlist for the inaugural 20/40 Prize

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Last November, I announced the creation of the new 20/40 Publishing Prize by the wonderful (and local-ish to me), independent, non-profit publisher, Finlay Lloyd. Now, eleven months later, the awarding of the inaugural prize is imminent, with the shortlist being announced last Friday and the winners to be announced on 28 October.

But, just to recap, 20/40 is a manuscript award, with the prize being publication. It is not limited to debut or young or women or any other subgroup of writers, as some manuscript awards are. However, it does have some criteria, in addition to looking for “writing of the highest quality”. The submissions can be fiction or non-fiction, must be prose (but “all genres … including hybrid forms” are welcome), and must be between 20,000 and 40,000 words (hence the award’s name, the 20/40 Prize). They aim to choose two winners, each year. In the communication I received last week about the shortlist, Finlay Lloyd publisher and commissioning editor, Julian Davies, says:

Our passion for creating this opportunity for writers and bringing their work to the reading public will continue next year and, we hope, for many more.

That’s great to hear … and we can do our bit to help by buying and reading the winning published novels.

And now, the Shortlist

You can read a brief description of the six works at the announcement link above, so here I will provide some brief author information that I have found online.

  • Roger Averill, Slippage: freelance researcher, editor and writer, with four books published by Transit Lounge – Exile: The lives and hope of Werner Pelz (Lisa’s review), the memoir Boy he cry: An island odyssey, and two novels, Keeping faith and Relatively famous (Lisa’s review).
  • Rebecca Burton, Ravenous girls: editor, and author of two young adult novels, Leaving Jetty Road and Beyond Evie, both published by HarperCollins Australia.
  • Rachel Flynn, New moon rising: author of children’s picture books and novels, including the I hate Friday series, published by Penguin.
  • Kim Kelly, Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room: author of 12 , mostly historical fiction, novels, most if not all published by Brio Books.
  • Jane Skelton, Breathing water: writer of poetry, short fiction and novels, published by Flying River Press, Rochford Press, Spineless Wonders and others.
  • Olivia De Zilva, Hold on tight: writer and poet.

Julian Davies explains on the shortlist page that the works were judged blind.

The judging panel for the inaugural prize comprised Katia Ariel (author and editor), Christina Balint (whose novella, Water music, I’ve reviewed), John Clanchy (novelist and short story writer whom I’ve reviewed a few times), Julian Davies (the publisher and also an author whom I’ve also reviewed a few times), and Stefanie Markidis (writer and researcher).

When I first announced this prize last November, I noted its relevance to Novellas in November. So, I am thrilled about the timing of this announcement, because you can pre-order the two winning novellas at the Finlay Lloyd site, for a special discounted price of $43.20 (instead of $24 each). A bargain. And, if you’ve never read a Finlay Lloyd book before, you won’t be disappointed I’m sure in the artefacts themselves, as publishing good writing in beautiful packaging is what they do. Pre-ordered books will be shipped on announcement day, October 28, giving you time to read one or both by the end of November! I plan to.

Monday musings on Australian literature: 2023 Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award shortlist

/ Whispering Gums / 11 Comments

Occasionally, as you know, I use my Monday Musings post to make awards announcements, particularly if the announcement is made on Monday, as this award usually is. And so it happened again today, a Monday, that the shortlist for this award was announced.

I have written about it before and so if you are interested to read about its origins and intentions please check that link. In a nutshell, it celebrates “excellence in research and writing”, and, like the Stella Prize, it is not limited by genre. However, given its research focus, nonfiction always features heavily.

The new thing, though, that is worth sharing in today’s post is that in April this year, Waverley Council which manages the award announced that the winner’s prize had doubled in value from $20,000 to $40,000, thanks, they say on their website, “to an ongoing multiyear commitment by the award’s principal sponsors, Sydney philanthropists, Mark and Evette Moran, Co-Founders/Co-CEOs of the Mark Moran Group”. This is a significant prize. The Council’s announcement also said that it had “also increased the People’s Choice Prize to $4000 and will be offering six shortlist prizes of $1,500 each”.

The Award is also supported by community partner Gertrude and Alice Bookshop and Café.

The judges for the 2023 award are Katerina Cosgrove (author), Jamie Grant (poet and editor), and Julia Carlomagno (publisher).

The 2023 shortlist

  • Alison Bashford, An intimate history of evolution: The story of the Huxley family (family biography, Allen Lane)
  • André Dao, Anam (debut novel, Hamish Hamilton) (Brona’s review)
  • Jim Davidson, Emperors in Lilliput: Clem Christesen of Meanjin and Stephen Murray-Smith of Overland (dual literary biography, The Miegunyah Press)
  • Fiona McMillian-Webster, The age of seeds: How plants hacked time and why our future depends on it (science nonfiction, Thames & Hudson Australia)
  • Ross McMullin, Life so full of promise: further biographies of Australia’s lost generation (multi-biography, Scribe)
  • Brigitta Olubas, Shirley Hazzard: A writing life (literary biography, Virago, on my TBR)

Waverley Council Mayor, Paula Masselos, said that the shortlist was chosen from more than 230 nominations, a number that, she said, reinforces “the importance and gravitas of this award”.

As commonly happens with this award, life-writing features heavily in the shortlist, with just one work of fiction. It is not as diverse as other awards are increasingly becoming, but most of these books wold interest me.

The winner of the overall prize and the People’s Choice Award will be announced on 9 November. For information on how to vote for the People’s Choice Award, check out the shortlist announcement page.

Do you know any of these books?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Miles Franklin Award 2023 Shadow Jury

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Some of you have probably heard of “shadow juries”. I took part in one a decade ago, for the now defunct Man Asian Literary Prize. It was great, but I haven’t taken part in any blogger-inspired shadow juries again because of the time commitment needed. If I was already impressed by the work of literary award juries, I was even more so after that experience. But, had any of you heard of a Shadow Jury for the Miles Franklin Award? I hadn’t.

It was a project of the University of Queensland’s Writing Centre. Their jury is a bit different to the blogger-run ones I’ve seen, because their aim was not to select a winner. Here is how they describe their idea of a shadow jury, its composition and its aims:

A shadow jury is an independent panel of passionate readers, critics, and literary enthusiasts who come together to review a longlist of books. While the official judging panel ultimately determines the award-winning book, the shadow jury offers an alternative lens through which to appreciate and analyse the longlisted works. 

In this post, we present reviews from our shadow jury, which included students, writers and critics from UQ who delved into each longlisted book. Through these reviews, we aim to provide readers with a multifaceted understanding of the longlisted works and spark engaging conversations about their literary significance.

So, what I am going to do here is add an excerpt from the Shadow Jury’s reviews, for each book, to whet your appetite. You might then go on and read the review (which you can find at the UQ link above) and/or, perhaps, the book itself! I’ve added UQ’s reviewer’s name in brackets at the end of the excerpt

  • Kgshak Akec, Hopeless kingdom (UWAP): “This impressive first novel is less about immigration itself, and more about family as a living organism that once uprooted, wills itself to do more than survive.” The reviewer also comments on the losses that come with immigration, such as “the normalcy of being Black in Sudan, [which is] replaced by minority status and the accompanying racism in Egypt and Australia” (Doreen Baingana)
  • Robbie Arnott, Limberlost (Text): “The first chapter is a revelation and a masterclass in the economy of words”. The whole novel is, I’d say. “Would I go as far as to declare that Arnott is Tasmania’s Tim Winton? Yes, I would, and I am willing to die on that hill. Limberlost is a superb rendering of a coming-of-age story. Tender, evocative, brutal and radiant.” (Carly-Jay Metcalfe)
  • Jessica Au, Cold enough for snow (Giramondo): “The novel’s elliptical tone plays constantly with time and memory. How much we can know another person, even those as intimately connected as mother and daughter, haunts the book, as does how much we can know our (past, present, future) self…New Australian fiction, especially from the second- and third-generation diasporic communities of Western Sydney, is quietly but determinedly shattering the white male ceiling of Australian literature, as Maxine Beneba Clarke notes elsewhere, creating a provincial literature that is both local and global in scale. ” (Professor Anna Johnston)
  • Shankari Chandran, Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens (Ultimo Press): “What does it mean to be Australian in the 21st century? Shankari Chandran’s Miles Franklin shortlisted novel Chai Time At Cinnamon Gardens ponders this question with grace, humility, and confronting depictions of racism raging with Shakespearean levels of drama and tragedy…Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens is an important and enthralling read. While it lacks subtlety on some occasions, the message it evokes is damningly clear.” (Olivia de Silva)
  • Claire G Coleman, Enclave (Hachette): “Few works of speculative fiction have been considered for Australia’s most prestigious literary award, a symptom of the genre’s uneasy relationship to literary fiction and culture…In addition to its literary merits, Enclave is concerned with decolonising Australia’s stories about itself and its future. In the process, the unexamined racism still driving speculative fiction’s narratives of empire, progress, or pastoral idyll are also decolonised.” (Dr Natalie Collie)
  • George Haddad, Losing face (UQP): “Ivan and Joey’s romance is what makes this an understated, lovely book with an episode of Special Victims Unit wedged inside. It’s the unusual parts of Losing Face that make it a remarkable Australian novel, not the parts ripped from the headlines.” (Pierce Wilcox)
  • Pirooz Jafari, Forty nights (Ultimo Press): “Forty Nights is a debut work of literary fiction by Pirooz Jafari, who has fictionalised his own life story in this novel…Insightful, tender and whimsical, Forty Nights is a standout novel on this year’s longlist.” (Martine Kropkowski)
  • Julie Janson, Madukka: The river serpent (UWAP): “While at times I struggled to understand how Janson’s first foray into crime writing had qualified for the longlist of the Miles Franklin, Madukka’s handling of issues of racism, climate change, drug use, and the ongoing First Nations’ struggle for land back and recognition ultimately makes it worthwhile. I’ll end with my initial thought; I actually think I’d really enjoy seeing this story adapted for the screen.” (Rani Tesiram)
  • Yumna Kassab, The lovers (Ultimo Press): “I expected a modern fable underscored by Arabic folklore with more traditional, less didactic conventions. What I found instead was something far more poignant, raw and real…Irrespective of whether The Lovers is the recipient of the 2023 Miles Franklin, its nomination speaks to the state and tenor of contemporary Australian literature embracing the novel as an experimental form.” (Bianca Millroy)
  • Fiona Kelly McGregor, Iris (Pan Macmillan Australia): “The blurb of this book asks a simple question: is Iris Webber innocent or guilty? At the end of some 430 pages, however, such a dichotomy feels terribly pale. It is the larger questions of history, reclamation, oppression, and humanity that mark McGregor’s work and transform the form of the historical novel into something alive and urgent, innovative and instructive. At its heart, Iris is (as Peter Doyle notes) a remarkable work of conjuring. With charm and grit, Iris conjures up Sydney of the 1930s, in all its grim glory. And Fiona Kelly McGregor, in a feat of sensitivity and skill, has conjured Iris Webber.” (Madeleine Dale)
  • Adam Ouston, Waypoints (Puncher & Wattmann): “an anxiety dream of a novel… In a breathless spiralling narrative told (more or less) in a single feverish paragraph, Cripp [the protagonist] pinballs from one association to another, circling back to grasp at his bearings before bouncing off again into further tangents, digressions, curlicues and cul-de-sacs. In lengthy, slippery sentences, he details the history of Houdini’s failed record-breaking attempt, he dips into Victorian showmanship, the swirl of misinformation around the disappearance of MH370, the history of powered flight, Alzheimer’s disease and Australia itself…It’s a strange, ambitious, reckless thing. But it flies; it really flies…” (Vince Haig)

It is damning – but true to our time – that so many these novels address racism. But there are other subjects here too, plus a variety of forms, and, it seems, some bold new writing. I enjoyed these reviews, particularly because, as you’d expect, they critiqued the books as literary works, as content, and against the forms or styles they represent.

Shankari Chandran won the official jury’s prize with Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens – as most of you know.

Thoughts?