2012 Prime Minister's Literary Award winners announced

The winners of the 2012 Prime Minister’s Literary Award have been announced in Canberra this morning.

Congratulations to the winners who are each awarded $80,000.

Fiction : Foal’s Bread by Gillian Mears

Judges’ comments : “written in transfixing prose and with an, at times, aching affinity for the harsh landscape the book describes.”

Poetry (offered for the first time this year) :  Interferon Psalms : 33 Psalms on the 99 Names of God by Luke Davies

Judges’ comments : “encompasses not only the meditative intensities of the dark night of the soul but a tragicomic vision which is by turns dramatic, alarming and luminous in its formal expression.”

Non-fiction : An Eye for Eternity : The Life of Manning Clark by Mark McKenna

Judges’ comments : “essential reading for all Australians seeking to understand the transformation of Australian cultural nationalism in the second half of the twentieth century.”

Prize for Australian History (incorporated in the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for the first time this year) : The Biggest Estate on Earth : How Aborigines Made Australia by Bill Gammage

Judges’ comments : “demonstrates a rare capacity to open a fresh horizon, capturing both history and his reader.”

YA Fiction : When We Were Two by Robert Newton

Judges’ comments : “faultlessly constructed and told with brilliantly understated, tragi-comic dialogue… This is historical fiction of rare accomplishment.”

Children’s Fiction : Goodnight, Mice! by Frances Watt, illustrated by Judy Watson

Judges’ comments : “an almost perfect bedtime book.”

Click here to see all the books in the shortlists and read the first chapter of each.

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