Awards for Writers
Best of the Booker and remembering books
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 [...]
You’ve got the best book … no you haven’t
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 [...]
More awards: Christina Stead prize worth A$40,000
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 [...]
Australia-Asia Literary Award sounds like a step in the right direction
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 [...]
Oscar Wao’s brief wondrous life probably gets extended with Pulitzer win
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 [...]
Mail-sorting poets and the importance of writing
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, [...]
Sonya Hartnett a literary and financial success
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 [...]
$100,000 award for Australian writers
Somehow in all the Christmas rush I missed the news that the new Aussie government has done something nice for writers, by creating the Prime Minister’s Literary Prize for fiction and non-fiction books. Yay!!! The prize is A$100,000, tax-free, which finally sounds like the kind of money a great writer deserves to get.
At the moment [...]