2008 fiction short list
- Burning In Mireille Juchau
- El Dorado Dorothy Porter
- Jamaica Malcolm Knox
- Sorry Gail Jones
- The Complete Stories David Malouf
- The Widow and Her Hero Tom Keneally
- The Zookeeper’s War Steven Conte
Burning In Mireille Juchau (Giramondo)
Burning In is an intensely observed psychological novel, an extended meditation on the sense of grief and loss which persists as an unspoken legacy across the generations. The author has a compelling eye for detail and an unerring feel for the rhythm of thought and feeling. (Giramondo)
The author
Mireille Juchau’s first novel, Machines for Feeling (2001), was short-listed for the 1999 Australian/Vogel Literary Award. In 2002 her play, White Gifts, won the Perishable Theatre International Women’s Playwriting Competition and was performed and published in the US. Juchau has received grants from the Ian Potter Foundation, the NSW Ministry for the Arts and the Australia Council, and was awarded the 2004–5 Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship. She has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Western Sydney, and her short fiction, essays and art
reviews have been published internationally and in Australia, and anthologised in collections
by Pan Macmillan and Random House.
Fiction judging panel comments
A lost child is at the heart of Mireille Juchau’s Burning In. Martine, a Sydney photographer now based in New York, has to surmount personal grief to effect a reconstitution of her own life, and the lives of her family, shadowed as they are by the legacy of the Holocaust. The novel ranges fluently across continents and generations. Its title metaphor—of photographic prints given extra exposure to darken some areas—indicates the sombre tone of an accomplished novel, yet one that reaches for the recovery of joy.
El Dorado Dorothy Porter (Picador)
There is a serial child killer stalking the streets of Melbourne. He kills his victims gently and places a gold mark on their head. The mark of El Dorado. He doesn’t kill because he hates children, but because he loves them. He believes in childhood innocence, and he will kill to entomb them there …
This is a book about a friendship under siege; about how jealousy and betrayal cast very long shadows—which can stalk you to the grave. El Dorado is Dorothy Porter’s finest verse novel to date. Unflinching and morally uncompromising, it is both a complex thriller and a completely unique and compelling reading experience from Australia’s most maverick and versatile poet. (Picador)
The author
Dorothy Porter is an acclaimed poet, lyricist and librettist. She wrote the lyrics for Before Time Could Change Us, (Katie Noonan sang on the album), which won an ARIA for Best Jazz Album 2005. Her second opera, The Eternity Man (2003), for which she wrote the libretto, is in pre-production with the UK’s Channel Four for a film. She is the author of the bestselling The Monkey’s Mask (1994), What a Piece of Work (1999), and Wild Surmise (2002), all of which have won numerous literary awards.
Fiction judging panel comments
Dorothy Porter’s fifth verse novel, El Dorado, centres on the fate of lost children, a sadness that has haunted the Australian imagination since the nineteenth century. Now the agent of harm is not the bush, but human predators, in this case a serial killer who murders but does not molest his victims in order for them to ‘stay children forever’. The poetry is edgy, taut and studded with unsettling images. This bravura performance confidently combines the demands of fiction with those of verse.
Jamaica: A novel Malcolm Knox (Allen and Unwin)
Welcome to Jamaica, have a nice breakdown! A group of six friends converge on the fabled island of Jamaica to compete in a marathon relay swim across treacherous water. Most have known each other since school, scions of wealth, breeding and privilege and members of the upper echelon of supposedly classless Sydney. The odd man out is new money Jeremy Hutchison (Hut), who is tolerated by the group because of the fortune he has made, but never really accepted. It is a group of people on the edge of crisis, none more so than Hut, who is guarding a terrible truth. As the sleazy charms of Jamaica insinuate themselves onto the group, things fall apart in predictable and surprising ways, and the secrets of the past must be addressed. (Allen and Unwin)
The author
Malcolm Knox is the author of three novels, Summerland (2000), A Private Man (2005), and most recently, Jamaica: A novel. Each has been published internationally. Knox was formerly literary editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, where he broke the Norma Khouri hoax story, for which he won a Walkley Award. He is also the author of Secrets of the Jury Room (2005), a non-fiction account of his experience as a juror and a history of the jury system. He lives in Sydney.
Fiction judging panel comments
No recent Australian novelist has probed the nation’s masculinity more acridly, yet sympathetically, than Malcolm Knox. Nor has any contemporary writer more subtly dissected the role of sport in male self-definition and self-deception. Jamaica, ‘dedicated to the facts that got out of the way of a good story’, explores the desires and expectations of rich men whose excesses find more flagrant and damaging expression when they rampage abroad. Knox is perhaps the foremost analyst of the nihilism that is disturbingly familiar in Australian life.
Sorry Gail Jones (Vintage)
In the remote outback of Western Australia during World War Two, English anthropologist Nicholas Keene and his wife, Stella, raise a lonely child, Perdita. Her upbringing is far from ordinary: in a shack in the wilderness, with a distant father burying himself in books and an unstable mother whose knowledge of Shakespeare forms the backbone of the girl’s limited education.
Emotionally adrift, Perdita becomes friends with a deaf and mute boy, Billy, and an Aboriginal girl, Mary. Perdita and Mary come to call one another sister and to share a very special bond. They are content with life in this remote corner of the globe, until a terrible event lays waste to their lives. (Vintage)
The author
Gail Jones is the author of two collections of short stories, Fetish Lives (1997) and The House of Breathing (1992). Her first novel, Black Mirror (2002), won the Nita B. Kibble Award and the Fiction Prize in the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards in 2003. Her second novel, Sixty Lights (2004), was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2004, short-listed for the 2005 Miles Franklin Award, and won the 2005 Age Book of the Year Award for Fiction.
It also won the Fiction and Premier’s Prize in both the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards 2004 and the South Australian Festival Award for Literature in 2006. Her next novel, Dreams of Speaking (2006), was short-listed in 2007 for the Miles Franklin Award, the NSW Premier’s Award and the Nita B. Kibble Award. Sorry is her latest novel.
Fiction judging panel comments
Set in outback Western Australia during the Second World War, Gail Jones’ Sorry explores the strange, intense, deadly conformation of ‘a ruined family’. Perdita, whose name indicates that this is the story of a lost child, is forced to deal with loneliness, the obsessions of others and the false consolations of withdrawal from the world. Yet some around her are ‘given to the marvel of things’. There is some prospect of reconciliation between individuals and races in this unusual, disturbing, highly-wrought fiction.
The Complete Stories David Malouf (Knopf)
David Malouf ’s imagination inhabits shocking violence, quick humour, appealing warmth and harsh cruelty with equal intensity. He shares tales of bookish boys, taciturn men and intimate stories of men and women looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on.
This is a comprehensive compilation of Malouf ’s shorter work. Stories are set in the stark and challenging Australian interior and the more lush and mysterious coastal enclaves; others are set in Australia’s past.
The youthful dreams, physical desires and mental despair of Malouf ’s richly varied characters as they explore their place in the world are always moving and universal.
Readers won’t want to skim a single page of the 31 stories in this epic collection, a few of which are novella length. Together, they represent a quarter-century of a formidable craftsman’s career. (Knopf)
The Author
David Malouf is the author of short story collections Dream Stuff (2000), Every Move You Make (2006) and of acclaimed novels including The Great World (1990), winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ and Miles Franklin Prizes, and Remembering Babylon (1993), short-listed for the Booker Prize and winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Malouf also writes poetry, drama and libretti for operas. Born and brought up in Brisbane, he lives in Sydney.
Fiction judging panel comments
David Malouf ’s The Complete Stories represents one of the finest achievements in short fiction in the national literature; this from a writer who is also a celebrated poet and novelist. Traversing a quarter-century of his career, the stories insinuate us into the consciousness of individuals at points of crisis—muted or violent. The prose is eloquent, resonant, measured. The settings transport us across countries, languages and different ways of reckoning the world with a cosmopolitan ease matched by few Australian writers.
The Widow and Her Hero Tom Keneally (Doubleday)
When Grace married the genial and handsome Captain Leo Waterhouse in Australia in 1943, they were young, in love—and at war. Like many other young men and women, they were ready, willing and able to put the war effort first. They never seriously doubted that they would come through unscathed. But Leo never returned from a commando mission masterminded by his own hero figure, an eccentric and charismatic man who inspired total loyalty from those under his command.
Sixty years on, Grace is still haunted by the tragedy of her doomed hero when the real story of his ill-fated secret mission is at last unearthed. As new fragments of her hero’s story emerge, Grace is forced to keep revising her picture of what happened to Leo and his fellow commandos—until she learns about the final piece in the jigsaw, and the ultimate betrayal. (Doubleday)
The author
Tom Keneally won the Booker Prize in 1982 with Schindler’s Ark (1982), later made into Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award-winning film Schindler’s List (1993). He has written nine works of non-fiction, including The Commonwealth of Thieves (2005), The Great Shame (1998) and American Scoundrel (2002), and 27 works of fiction, including An Angel in Australia (2002) and Bettany’s Book (2000). His novels The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1972), Gossip From The Forest (1975), and Confederates (1979) were all short-listed for the Booker Prize, while Bring Larks and Heroes (1967) and Three Cheers For The Paraclete (1968) both won the Miles Franklin Award.
Fiction judging panel comments
In the fifth decade of his career, Tom Keneally’s powers of renewal and his unflagging appetite for story-telling distinguish his latest novel, The Widow and Her Hero. He turns to his favoured historical period—the Second World War, where a number of his works are set—and in particular to the Australian commando raids against Japanese shipping in Singapore in 1943 and 1944. This master-class fiction work is an interrogation of the nature of heroism, perhaps unproblematic for men in action, but of deep ambivalence for the women left behind.
The Zookeeper’s War Steven Conte (Fourth Estate)
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. Together, they struggle to look after the animals through the air raids and food shortages. This is a city where a foreign accent is a constant source of suspicion, where busybodies report the names of neighbours’ dinner guests to the Gestapo. 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)
The author
Steven Conte was born in Sydney in 1966 and raised in Guyra in rural New South Wales. After six years in a country boarding school, he worked for a year as a bank teller in Sydney before hitchhiking 3000 kilometres around Europe. He was a cleaner in Brussels and a waiter in Cornwall. He also lived for several months in Berlin, which later provided the initial inspiration for The Zookeeper’s War. Conte studied professional writing at the University of Canberra, as well as Australian literature (as a civilian) at the Australian Defence Force Academy, in Canberra. He has supported his writing by working as a barman, life model, taxi driver, public servant and book reviewer.
In 2000 Conte began a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne, developing the manuscript that became The Zookeeper’s War. He graduated in 2005 and now works as a student advisor in a university college.
Fiction judging panel comments
Stephen Conte’s The Zookeeper’s War is a striking first novel, imbued with the melancholy of a collapsing world—Nazi Germany in the last years of the Second World War. Vera, married to the keeper of the Berlin Zoo, struggles each day to survive Allied air raids and betrayal by neighbours. All around are frightened people, some tenacious, some treacherous. While Conte’s research is formidable, it is the breadth of his historical imagination that enriches this novel. As characters negotiate intricate and destructive moral choices, the narrative drive is sustained to the satisfyingly uncertain ending.
