News

Alan Wearne Honoured with Christopher Brennan Award

We are thrilled that Alan Wearne has been lauded with the FAW Christopher Brennan Award. The award celebrates lifetime achievement in poetry and recognises a poet who produces work of ‘sustained quality and distinction’.

Judges Jennifer Harrison and Philip Salom had this to say in their citation:

Alan Wearne has been involved with the Australian poetry scene since the late sixties. After publishing two poetry collections, Public Relations (1972) and New Devil, New Parish (1976), he played a pivotal role in introducing the verse novel to mainstream Australian poetry with Out Here (1976) and The Nightmarkets (1986). The Nightmarkets won the Banjo Award and was adapted for performance. Wearne wrote a satirical novel on Melbourne’s football (Kicking in Danger 1997) and hosted Conversations with a Dead Poet — a documentary film on his friend the late poet John Forbes — before his next verse novel was published. That verse novel, The Lovemakers (2001), was awarded the 2002 NSW Premier’s (Kenneth Slessor) Prize for Poetry, NSW Book of the Year and the Arts Queensland Judith Wright Calanthe Award. The Lovemakers, Book Two was the co-winner of the 2004 Foundation for Australian
Literary Studies’ Colin Roderick Award. Alan Wearne’s most recent works are Sarsparilla: a Calypso (2007), The Australian Popular Songbook (2008) and Prepare the Cabin for Landing (2012). He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Wollongong and publisher at Grand Parade Poets.

For a full list of winners and citations, click here.

Giramondo Titles Shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Award 2015

Giramondo is delighted to be well represented across three categories of the NSW Premier’s Literary Award 2015 shortlists.

In the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, Judith Beveridge’s Devadatta’s Poems and John Mateer’s Unbelievers or the Moor made the shortlist.

Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s The Tribe and Luke Carman’s An Elegant Young Man have been shortlisted for the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing.

A Million Windows by Gerald Murnane has been shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction.

For a full list of shortlisted authors, click here.

For the full citations of all the Giramondo titles, click here.

Felicity Castagna wins the Prime Minister’s Literary Award

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Brian Castro Wins Patrick White Award

We’re delighted that Brian Castro has won the Patrick White Literary Award. This award is for an author’s body of work and was founded by White with the proceeds of his Nobel Prize for Literature. Giramondo has published four of Castro’s works, Shanghai Dancing, The Garden Book, The Bath Fugues and Street to Street.

The judges praised Castro for his ‘outstanding contribution to Australian Literature, his continued willingness to take imaginative risks and be ‘blackly playful’, and his evident potential to produce more significant work…’

For the full judges’ citation, click here.

To read Castro’s acceptance speech, click here.

Felicity Castagna shortlisted for Prime Minister’s Award

We’re delighted that Felicity Castagna’s The Incredible Here and Now has been shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, Young Adult Fiction. (For the full shortlist, click here) This follows on from her shortlisting on the CBCA Award Older Reader category and the NSW Premier’s Literary Award, Young Adult category.

Michael Mohammed Ahmad and Luke Carman Shortlisted for Readings New Writing Award

We’re thrilled that Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s book The Tribe and Luke Carman’s An Elegant Young Man have been shortlisted for the inaugural Readings New Writing Award. A prize offered for a first or second book by an Australian author, the award ‘aims to increase the promotion and commercial success of books by Australian authors, earning them greater recognition from the wider community’.

Of The Tribe, the judges said:

Told from the point of view of a child called Bani, The Tribe introduces the members of a Muslim family who fled to Australia just before the civil war in Lebanon, and the narrative progresses through key moments of their multi-generational household.

Set largely in the western Sydney suburb of Lakemba, The Tribe comes to life through the simple, honest voice of its young narrator. The suburban narrative is given a vivid cultural specificity not often depicted in contemporary Australian fiction, and Michael Mohammed Ahmad cleverly ties pop-cultural references to myth and traditional stories, creating rifts of humour and warmth in the work.

The judges said that of  An Elegant Young Man:

Luke Carman’s collection of monologues and anecdotal stories hums with the cadence of Western Sydney – a creative mash-up of street talk and literature, swagger and trepidation, colloquialisms and poetry. The world of Fobs, Lebbos, Greek, Serbs, Grubby Boys and scumbag Aussies that forms the backdrop to these stories is ominously familiar; a place where racism is so entrenched in daily interactions as to be barely discernible.

Through his narrator, described as anything but an elegant young man, Carman brilliantly captures the mingling anxieties and misplaced confidences of youth with a feverish intensity.

For the full shortlist, click here.

Lisa Gorton Awarded Philip Hodgins Medal

At the Mildura Writers’ Festival this year, Lisa Gorton was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal, an annual prize given to an Australian writer whose work reflects the standards and literary accomplishments that Philip Hodgins. Gorton’s most recent book published by Giramondo is Hotel Hyperion which has been shortlisted for the WA Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry.

Alexis Wright wins the ALS Gold Medal

Alexis Wright has been awarded the 2014 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal for The Swan Book.

The judges’ citation said:

Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book is a novel of serious political intent concerning the migration of stories, peoples, imaginations and cultures. Wright’s remarkable third novel is rightfully angry, necessarily challenging, deeply personal, and universally damning. The central plot line of The Swan Book follows the story of Oblivion Ethyl(ene), or Oblivia, a mute teenage girl who is the victim of a gang rape in her displaced and army-controlled Indigenous community. The narrative style is an extension of Wright’s Carpentaria, blending many dimensions and registers simultaneously; The Swan Book is satirical, humorous, folkloric, mythical, magical and scathing, and combines the literal and the metaphoric with virtuosic skill. The logic with which Wright connects some of the most pressing political issues of our time – Indigenous rights, intervention, climate change, refugee policy – is compelling, and her projection of these issues into a dystopian future reveals both their messiness and their urgency.

Luke Carman’s An Elegant Young Man was also shortlisted for the 2014 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal.

The Recluse Shortlisted for the Magarey Medal

We’re delighted that The Recluse, Evelyn Juers, has been shortlisted for the Magarey Medal.

The Magarey Medal for biography is a biennial prize of at least $10,000. The prize is awarded to the female author who has published the work judged to be the best biographical writing on an Australian subject in the preceding two years. The awarding of the prize is administered and judged by a panel set up by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature and the Australian Historical Association. The prize is very generously donated by Professor Emerita Susan Magarey.

For the full shortlist, click here.

Luke Carman – 2014 Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist

We’re delighted that Luke Carman has been named one of the Sydney Morning Herald‘s Best Young Novelists in 2014 for An Elegant Young Man.

The judges said that ‘Carman’s prose blends literature and popular culture, punk and poetry, and transforms this rich seam of influence into his own contagious voice with an admirable disregard for the distinctions of high and low art.’

In her interview, Linda Morris uncovered that:

Originally Luke Carman’s An Elegant Young Man carried the title How to Be Gay, which was his neighbour’s suggested title when Carman first revealed he wanted to be a writer.

The mocking, says Carman, sums up the sharp edges of masculine culture in western Sydney and the fact that literature carries so little credibility in suburbia. Which was unfortunate for Carman as a nerdy kid with a head for books not boxing gloves. At six or seven he used to read as a form of self-defence to keep his night terrors at bay. Reading eventually gave him insomnia.

In this collection of short stories and monologues, Carman wanders the streets of Granville, Mount Pritchard and Liverpool, observing fist fights under street lights, showdowns at all-night kebab shops and girls who offer their love for the cheapest exchange.

For the full coverage, click here.

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Photo: Peter Rae, Fairfax

Congratulations Alexis Wright – The Swan Book shortlisted for the Miles Franklin

The Swan Book by Alexis Wright has been shortlisted for the 2014 Miles Franklin Awards. In their citation, the judges said

At some future date, in an Australia ravaged by the effects of climate change, the first Aboriginal Prime Minister, Warren Finch (aka ‘god’s gift’), takes his ‘promise wife’, Oblivia Ethylene, from her home in the far north to live in a tower in a flooded and lawless southern city. On this scaffolding Alexis Wright builds her extraordinary novel, an epic, mythic and satirical tale that is a worthy successor to her previous prize-winning Carpentaria (2006).

Oblivia, who was gang raped as a child and cannot speak, is the guardian of the swans, which are the book’s presiding image of beauty and vulnerability. Oblivia’s guardians, in turn, are Aunty Bella Donna – a climate change refugee from Europe, who brings the girl to live with her, feeding her with swan stories from around the world – and an Aboriginal elder who calls himself the Harbourmaster.

The name of their dwelling place, Swan Lake, as well as the name of the Aboriginal elder’s pet monkey, Rigoletto, signal the witty mix of cultural icons that furnish Wright’s tale with global as well as local references. The narrative voice that Alexis Wright has crafted can span the languages of opera and popular song as well as rendering the rhythms and idioms of Aboriginal English – a complex, allusive narrative of speaking, singing, mourning and cracking jokes. The result is unlike anything we have heard before in Australian literature.

For the full citation, click here.

You can view the full shortlist here.

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Photo: Janie Barrett, Fairfax Media

Left to right: Cory Taylor, Fiona McFarlane, Alexis Wright

Judith Beveridge Honoured with the Christopher Brennan Award

Judith Beverdige has received the FAW CHRISTOPHER BRENNAN AWARD. It is an award to honour an Australian poet who has written work of sustained quality and distinction.

The FAW supplies a specially-cast bronze plaque designed by Michael Meszaros. Each year, the recipient is selected by a panel of judges appointed by the FAW. Previous winners include Giramondo poets Fay Zwicky and Jennifer Maiden.

Beveridge’s latest book of poetry is Devadatta’s Poems, available here.

NSW Premier’s Shortlist 2014 – Castagna, Middleton and Wright

We’re pleased to have three titles shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. You can read the judges’ comments below.

Ephemeral Waters, Kate Middleton

Judges’ comments:

This long documentary poem tracks the Colorado River, a system in ecological crisis, in its entirety, as a geographical site and as a self-sustaining historical text. Ambitious and epic in scope – and reminiscent of William Carlos Williams’ ‘Paterson’, Eleni Sikelianos’ ‘The California Poem’, and of Laurie Duggan’s ‘The Ash Range’ – it is a comprehensive work of research, a record of the poet’s actual journeys along the river’s course, and an inspiring act of imagination.

Ephemeral Waters stimulates questions about the local versus the global, and what a poem of this scope would achieve if it were about the Murray River. This book encourages a reader to ask what the future would be like if such river systems collapsed entirely. In this way a poem set in the US speaks directly to Australian readers without didacticism. Kate Middleton manages to balance the emotive connection of people to land, and the contestation over land use, with a language that is empirical and occasionally minimal. Elsewhere the poetry is wonderfully eccentric in its cascading lineation. Its vocabulary is organic and analytic in its weaving of local American vernaculars, scientific nomenclature, and lyric phrasing. The book achieves a rich synthesis of the literary and mythological with the empirical matter-of-factness of the surveyor’s documents, observations and explorations of science and history, both natural and human. Kate Middleton’s very accomplished second book is a major tribute to an important river that so many depend upon.

The Incredible Here and Now, Felicity Castagna

Judges’ comments:

The Incredible Here and Now might be a book about the demonised and the stereotyped, about powerlessness and the hidden injuries of class. It might be a book about protest masculinity and the senseless, foolish, sometimes dangerous things young men do to compensate for the experience of marginalization. It might be a book about death and grief, or a book about the excruciating and exhilarating awkwardness of first love. In fact, The Incredible Here and Now is about all these things.

In the summer he turns 15, Michael’s world threatens to implode when his “invincible” older brother dies. Grief-stricken, bored, aimless and confused, Michael seeks refuge in the streets, sites and people of his home, Western Sydney. It would have been easy to stray into melodrama or sentimentality, but The Incredible Here and Now pulls back just enough to allow Castagna to deliver a confident and well-controlled story. Elegantly crafted as a series of vignettes, Castagna’s writing is bold, compassionate and visceral. Her characters are real and flawed, and linger long after one has turned the final page – from the charming and exuberant Dom, to “the last man on earth” Shadi, to the tyrannical Mr Alloshi. But it is Western Sydney that perhaps leaves the most memorable impression on the reader. Vividly portrayed – “an everywhere-people kind of place” – Castagna humanises a place where “those who don’t know any better drive through the neighbourhood and lock their doors”. It is in the West where Michael ultimately finds hope, resilience and love, learning that “you can’t go back. There’s only moving forward”.

The Swan Book, Alexis Wright.

Judges’ comments:

Set in the future in a post-climate-change apocalypse, The Swan Book is the story of a mute Aboriginal girl, Oblivion Ethyl(ene). Hauled from her burrow in the roots of a tree as a child, traumatised by rape, Oblivia is saved by the European émigré-crone, Bella Donna of the Champions. Driven from her own land by environmental catastrophe, Bella Donna fills Oblivia’s mind with epic legends of migratory swans, and soon the foetid swamp of their home begins to bristle with the arrival of thousands of black swans, drawn inexorably towards Oblivia. Then comes another emissary from distant lands: Warren Finch, soon to be Australia’s first Aboriginal president, come to claim Oblivia as his promised wife.

This wildly adventurous, operatic hallucination of a novel encompasses indigenous politics, climate change, European history, global migration, displacement and grief. It is a savage critique of contemporary government approaches to indigenous culture, achieved through its telescopic imagination, sly humour and soaring poetry. Sweeping through history, across continents and cultures – yet never losing touch with the grit of raw experience – The Swan Book is a work of thrilling ambition.

You can view the full list of shortlisted titles here.

As a special offer, you can purchase all three shortlisted titles for the amazing price $60, including postage in Australia.

CBCA Shortlist – The Incredible Here and Now

We are delighted that The Incredible Here and Now by Felicity Castagna has been shortlisted for the Children’s Book Council of Australia Awards in the Older Readers category.

Teacher resources and reading group notes can be found here.

To view all of the shortlisted titles, click here.

The Swan Book – Longlisted for the Miles Franklin, Shortlisted for the Stella

The Swan Book continues to attract critical acclaim as it has been longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2014.

For the full list of longlisted titles, click here.

The Swan Book has also been shortlisted for the Stella Prize. The judges said:

A hundred years into the future, when climate change has irreparably damaged the earth, a refugee from the frozen northern hemisphere called Bella Donna finds a mute teenage girl she names Oblivia and takes her to live with her on an old derelict warship in a dry, polluted swamp in northern Australia. Three new figures appear: a black swan, an Aboriginal elder who looks like Mick Jagger, and an archangel in a white Commodore. These five creatures anchor Alexis Wright’s brilliantly surreal and inventive novel about imagination and the power of story. It’s a  treasure chest of stories, fables, songs, myths and poems, containing a wealth of cultural references from across the globe. The Swan Book is also a furious and impassioned political fable, linking the fate of Aboriginal Australia to the trajectory of unstoppable global warming and employing the fathomless complexity of the living Aboriginal relationship to country as a way of exploring humanity’s connection to the earth.

If Wright’s last novel Carpentaria – the winner of the 2007 Miles Franklin Literary Award – was operatic in its scope and language, then The Swan Bookis even more so. Rich and deep in its imagery, fearless in its linguistic acrobatics and sweeping in its imaginative power, The Swan Book is at once a futuristic dystopia, a gorgeous artifact, and an urgent call to action.

For the full shortlist, click here.

To buy your copy, and find reading group notes and reviews, click here.

Alexis Wright and Luke Carman shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal

We’re thrilled to have two titles shortlisted for the 2013 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal.

Alexis Wright, The Swan Book
Luke Carman, An Elegant Young Man

The ALS Gold Medal is awarded annually for an outstanding literary work in the preceding calendar year. The medal was inaugurated in the 1920s by the Australian Literature Society, which was founded in Melbourne in 1899.