News
Liquid Nitrogen Wins Victorian Prize for Literature
We’re delighted that Liquid Nitrogen by Jennifer Maiden was awarded the prize in the poetry category of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and also the overall prize, The Victorian Prize for Literature.
You can view the judges’ report here.
Read Gig Ryan’s in-depth review for the Sydney Review of Books here.
Jason Steger’s coverage of the prize for the Age can be found here.
Three Giramondo authors shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards
We are delighted to have three authors on the shortlist this year for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.
Fiction
The judges described The Swan Book as:
A work of metaphysical and metaphorical originality, Wright has created a world where communication flows between ghosts, animals and humans, but it’s also frighteningly realistic, holding a mirror to the nation, allowing fiction to speak a truth about Indigenous issues that many Australian find difficult to confront. For all its gravity, though, it is wickedly funny, mocking the ‘realms of public sector abstract dialogue’, and it deepens the reader’s understanding of this ancient continent.
Poetry
Autoethnographic, Michael Brennan
Of Autoethnographic the judges said:
Brennan’s poems skate over the narrator’s plural and imagined pasts in unpredictable tones, echoing and vital. As autoethnography itself places the personal in the wider politicised world, so Brennan creates an un-unified un-stabilised life rendered through many lives, a cubist portrait of self / selves in vivid excursions through a mythologised yet recognisably contemporary era.
Liquid Nitrogen, Jennifer Maiden
In their citation, the judges wrote:
This book is explorative, not didactic, and these long poetical essays are studded with interruptions, repetitions of motifs and characters, and tangential obsessions that create a distinct world and rhythm, where art and politics insistently coalesce in vibrant tableaux. A brilliantly fertile imagination creates poetry that interrogates and refines thought.
For the full citations and the complete shortlist, click here.
Liquid Nitrogen Shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize
We are thrilled that Jennifer Maiden’s Liquid Nitrogen has been shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize.
The full judge’s citation reads:
Jennifer Maiden’s Liquid Nitrogen may very well be the most contemporary collection of poetry you’ll ever read. Over the course of these dense, obsessive, and allegorical long poems, Maiden has created an absurdist theatre of global politics in which the spirits of public figures from across the last century share the stage with politicians, terrorists, dissidents and fictional creations from our continuous present. Combining a free-wheeling, meditative style with crisp, lucidly elegant lines, Maiden’s philosophical verse investigates the poetics of narrativity itself, not only as mediated by the news on TV, but by the no-less ethically charged realm of art as well. An extended meditation on the uses and abuses of power, the moral gravity of Liquid Nitrogen is buoyed throughout by Maiden’s self-effacing sense of humor and her tenderness towards her grown daughter, Katherine, who stands at the heart of this collection. Epic in its scope and utterly eccentric in its approach, Liquid Nitrogen is a work of rare passion and unprecedented poetic achievement from one of Australia’s most prominent living writers, ‘alert to the point of twitching,’ like the ox to whom she likens herself on page one, who nevertheless ‘still tramples through the difficult.’
Suzanne Buffam
The other shortlisted books are:
Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and Other Poems Fady Joudah, translated from the Arabic, written by Ghassan Zaqtan
Night of the Republic, Alan Shapiro
Our Andromeda Brenda Shaughnessy
For full details, visit the Griffin Prize website here.
Gig Ryan wins the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry
Gig Ryan’s New and Selected Poems was awarded the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for poetry. The judges described the collection as ‘uncompromising, intelligent and sophisticated’. For the full citation, click here.
John Mateer’s Southern Barbarians was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.
Jess Huon’s The Dark Wet was shortlisted in the inaugural Underrated Book of the Year Award.
Fiona Wright has been awarded the Dame Mary Gilmore Award for Knuckled. The decision was a unanimous verdict on the excellence of this collection. You can read the judges’ citation here.
We’re delighted that Gerald Murnane’s A History of Books and John Mateer’s Southern Barbarians have been shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards 2012.
In more good news, we’re thrilled that Kate Fagan has been shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year Awards for her collection First Light.
Earlier in 2012 we had two poetry collections nominated for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards 2012. Gig Ryan’s New and Selected Poems and John Mateer’s Southern Barbarians. For more information and the full shortlist, click here.
Giramondo eBooks available now
Selected Giramondo titles are now available as eBooks, and can be purchased through (in alphabetical order):
Amazon, Booki.sh, Fishpond, iBooks, Kobo, Ebooks.com, Ebrary, Netlibrary, Read How You Want, Overdrive, ReadCloud
The digital editions offered are:
Brian Castro’s Street to Street
Alike Melike Ülgezer’s The Memory of Salt
Jess Huon’s The Dark Wet
Gerald Murnane’s Barley Patch and A History of Books
Evelyn Juers’ House of Exile
Tom Cho’s Look Who’s Morphing
Sara Knox’s The Orphan Gunner
Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria
Mireille Juchau’s Burning In
Brian Castro’s The Garden Book
Nick Jose’s Original Face and
John Hughes’ The Idea of Home
We are developing our digital publishing program. If there are any titles you would like to read on your device, please email Alice, alicegATgiramondopublishingDOTcom.