If you happen to have been following my 2010 reading list, you’ll have found it a bit boring recently. After ploughing through a book at least every two days during most of the year, in April my reading came to a bit of a standstill. Which is hardly surprising considering what happened on 2 April. But anyway: my April reading totalled this -

The World Beneathby Cate Kennedy

However, I’m still going to announce The World Beneath as my book of the month, because it really was excellent. If it hadn’t been, …

When it was announced around two years ago that the new government had created the Prime Minister’s Literary Prize worth A$100,000 for the best fiction and non-fiction books of the year, I was pretty impressed. It’s truly nice to see writers getting some monetary recognition of the thousands of hours of work that go into the writing of a novel – or in the case of the 2009 winner, Nam Le, a collection of short stories.
I’ve been having a bit of an ambivalent relationship with short stories recently. I’d like …

Remember how I insanely finished my novel to enter the TAG Hungerford contest? I knew that a last-minute finish was a bad thing for that novel, but the value for me of actually getting something finished to enter the contest far outweighed the inevitability of not getting anywhere with the contest. But now that the award procedure is almost over (there are three shortlisted novels now, although the winner won’t be announced until February 2009), I’ve got even more value out of the process.
I recently received a “thanks but no …

It was announced this week that Salman Rushdie’s book Midnight’s Children has (again) won the Best of the Booker (this time for the 40th anniversary of the prize). I looked at the shortlist a while back – for some reason, just six previous Booker winners were nominated to be potential Best of the Bookers, which seems a bit unfair – but in any case, I couldn’t decide that any of them were better than the others, and didn’t vote.
But apparently 36% of the voters decided on Midnight’s Children, a pretty …

I’m quite obsessed with news about awards for writers. I guess partly that’s because I hope that one day (in the far distant future …) I might actually win one, and partly because I’m always intrigued to see how much our society values writers – or should I say, how little many parts of our society value writers, especially compared to actors or musicians. But that’s a rant for another day.
I just heard about a terrible awards night when the wrong writer was announced as the winner. It was at …

Since I’ve started paying attention to the awards available to writers – particularly Australian novelists, because it’s good to have dreams of what I could achieve one day! – I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see that some very good writers are getting decent amounts of money to reward their achievements in creating great literature. Of course, I’m aware that most great writers don’t earn anywhere near as much as they should, but I’d somehow thought that the situation was absolutely dire and nobody got anything. But if you check my …

What’s happening to my country? Are we actually supporting literature? This week in my state, a new award was announced: the Western Australian Premier’s Australia-Asia Literary Award. It’s for books published by Australian or Asian writers, or largely set in these regions, published in the preceding year, and the especially nice part is it’s worth A$110,000. This makes it one of the richest prizes of its kind – even the Man Booker Prize is only worth a little bit more.
It was only a few months back I mentioned the new …

Over on my travel writing blog, I reviewed The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao a couple of months ago. It’s a first novel by Junot Díaz that takes place mostly in the Dominican Republic, and was something my friend Katrina passed on to me because it was hyped up as being a great novel – one of my favourite novelists, Hanif Kureishi, had really said good things about it. Despite that, Katrina told me it wasn’t that great, but thought it might be interesting for me to look at …

I think it’s just lovely when I read newspaper articles about writers who’ve won awards with prize money that’s actually worth something. Writers seem to draw the short straw so often – as do many creative arts – because people do it because they’re passionate, and not for the financial reward. Yet a financial reward, and the freedom to live without being scared of the next bill coming in, while creating incredible books and stories and poetry that can change the world, is pretty important. Right?
Okay, my rant’s over now. …

Not long ago I mentioned that nice new Australian prize, worth $100,000, known as the Prime Minister’s Literary Prize. And while that would certainly help a good Aussie writer to survive a couple of years longer without having to take another job, I was pretty excited to hear that an Australian author has just picked up a prize worth $880,000. That’s serious money!
Melbourne-based young adult writer Sonya Hartnett just won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award from the Swedish government.
She’s not a writer I’m familiar with – yet! – but according …