It has been now a couple of weeks since the announcement that there will be no Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction and this year, yet the chatter continues. I have been looking at my own massive stack of books waiting to be read and I keep asking myself were there really no books worthy this award in 2012? The Pulitzer Award is not actualy chosen by the jury, the 3 member jury does only the initial work of selecting the shortlist. It is the the Pulitzer Prize board, made up of 20 journalists and academics, 18 of them voting members, …
The Australian literary voices are well alive and vibrant since the jury of the most prestigious literary award of this country has chosen three fiction debuts to be part of the five book shortlist! Congratulations to Tony Birch, Anna Funder and Favel Parrett for achieving this amazing feat. They will be contending for the winning spot with well respected and well loved Frank Moorhouse and Gillian Mears. Are you looking for some great books to read, here are five highlights from Australia, get started now. The winner will be announced on the 20th of June!
I don’t think that anybody would argue with the statement that news headlines are dominated by bad news, and good stories are far and few between. In light of this statement one should not be surprised to find out that the entire shortlist for The Orwell Prize this year has one thing in common, all are about “dark matters” of the contemporary world. The six shortlisted books deal with the subject of drugs, murder, urban gangs, cyber crime, bloody battles in Afghanistan, and the dark side of the rapid rise of India. It would be very logical to ask why …
The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award is one of the most original literary awards and is Australia’s richest and the most prestigious award for an unpublished manuscript by a writer under the age of thirty-five. The award is open to a resident of Australia who has a manuscript of the novel ready for submission. This year’s winner is Paul D. Carter, a 32 year-old teacher, who has written a coming of age novel Eleven Seasons. Overnight this aspiring novelist found himself in the very illustrious company of writers such as Tim Winton, Kate Grenville and Andrew McGahan, all of whose writing careers …
25 April is ANZAC Day, Australia and New Zealand’s day of national remembrance. This day marks the anniversary of the landing of Gallipoli and the first action fought by Australian and New Zealand forces during World War I. It is a day to pause and reflect upon the many different meanings of war. Luckily for a lot of us this reflection can only be experienced via books, films, photographs and other sources. I think that it would be close to an impossible task to write about something so horrible and difficult to comprehend as the experience of …
