El Dorado
Shortlist year:
2008
Shortlist category:
Fiction
Published by:
Pan Macmillan
About the book
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, and 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.
About the author
Dorothy Porter
Dorothy Porter is an acclaimed poet, lyricist and librettist.
Before Time Could Change Us, for which she wrote the lyrics (and Katie Noonan sang on the album), won an ARIA for Best Jazz Album 2005.
Her second opera, The Eternity Man, 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, What a Piece of Work, and Wild Surmise, all of which have won numerous literary awards.
Dorothy passed away in December 2008 at the age of 54.
Judges’ comments
Dorothy Porter's fifth verse novel, El Dorado (Picador), 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, studded with unsettling images. This bravura performance confidently combines the demands of fiction with those of verse.
