The Miles Franklin Award 2013 – shortlist

The Miles Franklin Award is Australia’s most prestigious literary award and is awarded for the best novel representing Australian life.  On the shortlist for the Miles Franklin Award this year are six wonderful novels:

Floundering by Romy Ash

 

The Beloved by Annah Faulkner

 

Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser

 

The Mountain by Drusilla Modjeska

 

Mateship with Birds by Carrie Tiffany

 

The winner of the $60,000 prize will be announced on June 19 at The National Library of Australia in Canberra.  The other five shortlisted authors will receive $5,000 from Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

You can read a synopsis and Judges notes for each shortlisted book here.

Women’s Prize for Fiction

From the twenty books on the Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist blogged about earlier this week, a shortlist of six has been announced at the London Book Fair on Tuesday night London time.

And the shortlist includes :

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

May We Be Forgiven by AM Homes

Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

NW by Zadie Smith

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Winner of the Stella Prize

Mateship with Birds by Carrie Tiffany has been announced as the winner of the inaugural Stella Prize for Australian women’s writing.  Carrie Tiffany receives $50,000 in prize money for her achievement.

Kerryn Goldsworthy, chair of the Stella Prize judges, said, “Mateship with Birds is a deceptively gentle-looking novel whose calm surface belies its many sharp and frank observations about the world. Set in country Victoria in the 1950s, it follows the fortunes of two people whose loneliness is offset by the many active strands of their daily lives: Harry, a farmer whose wife has left him for somebody else; and Betty, an aged-care nurse whose two children have no visible father.

“Tiffany uses the two main characters’ interactions with each other and with a small supporting cast to show the intricate interrelations not only between people, but also between human life and the natural world. There’s complex interdependence among species, and human behaviour is reflected in even the smallest, most attentively observed details of the lives of animals and birds.”

Read more here.

NSW Premier’s Literary Awards 2013 Shortlist

Another shortlist, this time for something close to home; the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards 2013.  There are several categories of prizes to be awarded.  The winners will be announced on 19 May during the Sydney Writers’ Festival.

Christina Stead Prize for Fiction – prize money worth $40,000

• The Voyage by Murray Bail
• The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally
• Foal’s Bread by Gillian Mears
• Cold Light by Frank Moorhouse
• Mateship with Birds by Carrie Tiffany (also nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction)
• Animal People by Charlotte Wood

From the shortlist above, you can have your say in the People’s Choice Award – click here to vote

Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction ($40,000 prize money)

• Exile: the Lives and Hopes of Werner Pelz by Roger Averill
• Ben Jonson : a Life by Ian Donaldson
• Dark Night : Walking with McCahon by Martin Edmond
• The Biggest Estate on Earth : How Aborigines Made Australia by Bill Gammage
• Double Entry : How the Merchants of Venice Shaped the Modern World – and How Their Invention Could Make or Break the Planet by Jane Gleeson-White
• The Office : a Hard Working History by Gideon Haigh

Keith Slessor Prize for Poetry ($30,00 prize money)

• Ruby Moonlight by Ali Cobby-Eckermann
• First Light by Kate Fagan
• Open Sesame by Michael Farrell
• The Welfare of My Enemy by Anthony Lawrence
• Ladylike by Kate Lilly
• Here, There and Elsewhere by Vivian Smith

Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature ($30,000 prize money)

• Three Summers by Judith Clarke
• The Ink Bridge by Neil Grant
• Sea Hearts by Margo Lanagan
• A Corner of White by Jaclyn Moriarty
• Into That Forest by Louis Nowra
• Unforgotten by Tohby Riddle

Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature ($30,000 prize money)

• The Ghost of Miss Annabel Spoon by Aaron Blabey
• Brotherband 1 : The Outcasts by John Flanagan
• Pookie Aleera is Not My Boyfriend by Steven Herrick
• A Bear and a Tree by Stephen Michael King
• The Tender Moments of Saffron Silk by Glenda Millard
• Dragonkeeper Book 4 : Blood Brothers by Carole Wilkinson

There is also a $20,000 Community Relations Commission Award, the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing and the NSW Premier’s Translation Prize.

Women’s Prize for Fiction Longlist

The longlist for what was, until funding was withdrawn last year, called The Orange Prize was announced in the middle of March. Somehow it passed me by at the time, but it’s an important literary prize and should not be ignored, so better late than never as my old Granny used to say.

Here are the 20 contenders for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2013:

• A Trick I Learned From Men by Kitty Aldridge
• Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
• The Marlowe Papers by Ros Barber
• The People of Forever Are Not Afraid by Shani Boianjiu
• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
• How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti
• May We Be Forgiven by AM Homes
• Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver
• The Red Book by Deborah Copaken Kogan
• Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
• Lamb by Bonnie Nadzam
• The Forrests by Emily Perkins
• Ignorance by Michele Roberts
• The Innocents by Francesca Segal
• Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
• Honour by Elif Shafak
• NW by Zadie Smith
• The Light Between Oceans by ML Stedman
• Mateship With Birds by Carrie Tiffany
• Alif the Unseen by G Willow Wilson

The Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist will be announced tomorrow in London.  Which books would you like to see on the shortlist?

The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction Shortlist

This British literary prize is for the novel considered by the judges to best capture the comic spirit of PG Wodehouse.  This year, the prize’s 14th, the judges are Everyman’s Library publisher David Campbell, Hay Festival director Peter Florence and broadcaster and author Jim Naughtie.

“This is one of the strongest shortlists I have seen – all five novels are truly brilliantly funny,” Campbell said.

The five shortlisted novels for 2013 are:

Zoo Time by Howard Jacobson

This is the tale of Guy Ableman, a writer in torment, both over his affections for both his wife and mother-in-law, and the terminal state of literature.

Skios by Michael Frayn

Skios was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2012.  It is a farce about a case of mistaken identity on the fictional Greek island of the title. 

I read this book last year, I found it only mildly amusing.  If it were made into a movie it would have to star Barbara Windsor, Kenneth Williams, Hattie Jacques, Sid James et al.

England’s Lane by Joseph Connolly

A “darkly humorous” tale of three couples who owned shops on a street in north London in the late 1950s and the secrets hidden behind their shop fronts.

Heartbreak Hotel by Deborah Moggach

Moggach’s novel, These Foolish Things, was adapted into The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. This one is the story of an old actor who inherits a Welsh guesthouse.

Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt

An “uproariously funny” tale following failing salesman Joe as he launches a plan to stamp out sexual harassment in the workplace.

This is what a Gloucester Old Spot pig looks like

The winning title will be announced in late May and will have the rather dubious honour of having a Gloucestershire Old Spot pig named after their winning title.

Previous winners that I have read include :

• A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka (what a name for a pig!)
• Solar by Ian McEwan (had me snorting out loud)
• Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday

You can read the list of winners and short listed novels here on Wikipedia.