2009 Prime Minister's Literary Awards
Winners
Fiction
The Boat by Nam Le
Judging panel comments
Nam Le's collection of fiction, The Boat, which comprises short and long stories, artfully arrayed, is one of the most impressive debuts of recent years. The range of subjects and settings astonishes, as does the assurance and control with which the author immerses us in the stories that he makes from them. While the span of the fiction is cosmopolitan, each story is intensely attuned to the local circumstances that deform and enable the lives of these varied characters, animated as they are by love and despair. As shown especially in the final and title story, Nam Le combines almost reckless artistic boldness with highly disciplined craft.
Non-fiction
Two books share the 2009 Non-fiction award:
- House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann by Evelyn Juers
- Drawing the Global Colour Line by Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds
Judging panel comments for House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann
An exemplar of the new 'group biography', Juers follows Heinrich, brother of one of the greatest twentieth century writers, to the US where he finds troubled refuge in Los Angeles. This book is remarkable for both its research and its prose. Juers has devoted years to the former and the skills of a novelist to the latter, seeing the horrors of the 1930s, in particular the desperate diaspora of Jews seeking to escape the malignancy of Nazism, through the experiences of one distinguished family.
Judging panel comments for Drawing the Global Colour Line
The White Australia Policy did not exist in isolation. It was called into being because around the world racial attitudes were changing and being dangerously politicised. Kindled in the bigotries of the nineteenth century, the issue of race would become the most dominant and disastrous fracture line in the twentieth and shows little sign of fading in the twenty-first. In their masterful overview of the prejudices of the wider world Lake and Reynolds help us see White Australia more clearly. This book on history has urgent relevance.
Shortlists
Fiction
- The Pages by Murray Bail
- People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
- Wanting by Richard Flanagan
- Everything I Knew by Peter Goldsworthy
- One Foot Wrong by Sofie Laguna
- The Boat by Nam Le
- The Good Parents by Joan London
Non-fiction
- Van Diemen's Land by James Boyce
- Doing Life: A Biography of Elizabeth Jolley by Brian Dibble
- Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History by Jenny Hocking
- The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island by Chloe Hooper
- House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann by Evelyn Juers
- Drawing the Global Colour Line by Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds
- The Henson Case by David Marr
- American Journeys by Don Watson
Judges
Fiction panel
- Professor Peter Pierce, chair
- Professor John A. Hay AC
- Dr Lyn Gallacher
Non-fiction panel
- Phillip Adams AO, chair
- Peter Rose
- Professor Joan Beaumont FASSA