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Border Districts

192 pages
Paperback, 19.7 x 13 cm
Published November 2017
ISBN 9781925336542
Epdf ISBN 9781925336573
Epub ISBN 9781925336580

Border Districts

Gerald Murnane

Winner, Prime Minister’s Literary Award

Conceived as Gerald Murnane’s last work of fiction, Border Districts was written after the author moved from Melbourne to a small town on the western edge of the Wimmera plains, near the border with South Australia. The narrator of this fiction has made a similar move, from a capital city to a remote town in the border country, where he intends to spend the last years of his life. it is a time for exploring the enduring elements of his experience, as these exist in his mind, not as an integral landscape now, but as image-fragments; so that there is an urgency in his attempts to gather them together. Often it is the way the light falls that makes the image memorable. At the end of the work, Murnane quotes the poet Shelley, ‘Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,/ Stains the white radiance of Eternity’. But if Border Districts suggests the border land between life and death, it also refers to the narrator’s discovery of someone else who might share his world, though she enters it from another direction, across the distance which separates them as human beings.

Giramondo’s publication of Gerald Murnane’s new work of fiction comes at a time of heightened international interest in this highly regarded author. Border Districts and Murnane’s Collected Short Fiction will be released in the United States by distinguished New York publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux in early 2018.

a genius on the level of Beckett Teju Cole

The emotional conviction…is so intense, the somber lyricism so moving, the intelligence behind the chiseled sentences so undeniable, that we suspend all disbelief. J.M. Coetzee

About the Author

Gerald Murnane

Gerald Murnane is a recipient of an Emeritus Fellowship from the Australia Council, the Patrick White Literary Award, the Melbourne Prize for Literature, the Adelaide Festival Literature Award for Innovation and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. His last work of fiction, Border Districts, received the the 2018 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, was shortlisted for the 2018 Miles Franklin Literary Award.

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Awards

Winner, Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction 2018

Shortlisted, Miles Franklin Literary Award 2018

Longlisted, Voss Literary Prize 2018

Shortlisted, ALS Gold Medal 2018

New Statesman – ‘The navel-gazing fictions of Gerald Murnane’

The Irish Times – ‘Gerald Murnane’s strange, unique, uncategorisable novels’

Financial Times – ‘Tamarisk Row and Border Districts by Gerald Murnane — Australia’s dark horse’

Music and Literature – profile of Gerald Murnane

ABC – ‘Australian author, Nobel candidate Gerald Murnane on having career upswing at 80 then quitting publishing’

Related News

Gerald Murnane and Brian Castro win 2018 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards

Gerald Murnane won the Fiction category with his ‘perfectly formed short work’, Border Districts, and Castro won the Poetry category with his verse novel, Blindness and Rage: a Phantasmagoria, described by the judges as ‘notable for its mordant wit, its rich allusiveness and the invigorating fluency of its verse’.

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