The 2008 winners
The Prime Minister the Honourable Kevin Rudd has announced the Fiction and Non-fiction winners of the new Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.
Non-fiction winner:
Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers Philip Jones
Ochre and Rust takes Aboriginal artefacts from their museum shelves and traces their stories, revealing charged and nuanced moments of encounter in Australia’s frontier history. Philip Jones positions them at the centre of these gripping, poignant tales, transporting the reader into the heart of Australia's frontier zone.
Ochre and Rust builds incrementally, resulting in a convincing new insight into our frontier past and the motives of its characters. (Wakefield Press)
Fiction winner:
The Zookeeper's War Steven Conte
A story of passion and sacrifice in a city battered by war. It is 1943 and each night in a bomb shelter beneath the Berlin Zoo an Australian woman, Vera, shelters with her German husband, Axel, the zoo’s director. As tensions mount in the closing days of the war, nothing, and no one, it seems, can be trusted.
The Zookeeper’s War is a powerful novel of a marriage, and of a city collapsing. It confronts not only the brutality of war but the possibility of heroism. (Fourth Estate)
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Contacts
For further information please contact the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, at the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts:
Phone: 1800 707 889
Email: pmliteraryawards @environment.gov.au
For media inquiries phone: (02) 62759590, 0417 047 990
