The Hon Peter Garrett MP, Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, today announced the shortlist for the 2009 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.
And guess what? Three of the short-listed writers will be speaking at our October conference, Flight of the Mind: Writing and the Creative Imagination. Short-listers Geraldine Brooks, Peter Goldsworthy and Brian Dibble, and judges Peter Pierce and Peter Rose, will be joining the winner of last year’s Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction, Steven Conte, here in Canberra on Saturday and Sunday, 24 and 25 October. Geraldine will also be giving the inaugural Ray Mathew Lecture at the National Library on Thursday, 22 October at 6pm.
The short-listed writers for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards this year are:
Non-Fiction
Van Diemen’s Land – James Boyce (Black Inc.)
Doing Life: A Biography of Elizabeth Jolley – Brian Dibble (UWA Press)Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History – Jenny Hocking (Melbourne University Publishing)
The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island – Chloe Hooper (Penguin Books)
House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann – Evelyn Juers (Giramondo)
Drawing the Global Colour Line – Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds (Melbourne University Publishing)
The Henson Case – David Marr (Text Publishing)
American Journeys – Don Watson (Random House)
Fiction
The Pages – Murray Bail (Text Publishing)
People of the Book – Geraldine Brooks (Harper Collins)
Wanting – Richard Flanagan (Random House)
Everything I Knew – Peter Goldsworthy (Penguin Books)
One Foot Wrong – Sofie Laguna (Allen and Unwin)
The Boat – Nam Le (Penguin Books)
The Good Parents – Joan London (Random House).
Congratulations to all the short-listed authors. Anyone care to guess who the winners might be?
More information:
- Flight of the Mind: Writing and the Creative Imagination, a major National Library conference supported by the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL)’s Cultural Fund, the Ray Mathew and Eva Kollsman Trust, and Alison Sanchez – 24 & 25 October 2009
- Geraldine Brooks and the inaugural Ray Mathew Lecture, supported by the Ray Mathew and Eva Kollsman Trust - 22 October 2009
- Prime Minister’s Literary Awards 2009
