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Orange Prize for fiction shortlist

It must be the prize season:

  • Hillary Mantel, Wolf Hall
  • Rosie Alison, The Very Thought of You
  • Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna
  • Attica Locke, Black Water Rising
  • Lorrie Moore, Gate at the Stairs
  • Monique Roffey, The White Woman on the Green Bicycle
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Miles Franklin shortlist

Lovesong, by Alex Miller
The Bath Fugues, by Brian Castro
Jasper Jones, by Craig Silvey
The Book of Emmett, by Deborah Forster
Truth, by Peter Temple
Butterfly, by Sonya Hartnett

The Australian newspaper reports that Alex Miller let fly at the announcement do about the low profile of the Miles Franklin blaming Kevin Rudd for putting big money into the “Prime Ministers Award, which gets no publicity and will probably disappear when someone else becomes prime minister”.

He said the money should have been put into the Miles Franklin then Australia would have one premier award and not “a gaggle of prizes that people – and writers – would pay increasingly less attention to. Various Premier’s Literary Awards, for example, were essentially irrelevant”.

Miller seems to hold the Booker prize up as a role model. Whatever you think of the Booker it’s got publicity down to a fine art. But it also makes literature into a “winner takes all” roulette wager.

I agree the Miles Franklin Award has cache and should be promoted more (but, like the Booker, book sales here DO go up for the MF winner) but isn’t it also better to have a range of smaller (and regional) prizes to share the sunshine?

See the article in The Australian  and also the A Pair of Ragged Claws blog comment here. 

On another controversy, it’s good to see the women back (if only comprising 33%).

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Review – The Anatomy of Wings Karen Foxlee

UQP 288 pp

This novel is set in an unnamed mining town which we can take is based on Mount Isa where the author grew up. It’s the 1970s, Jenny Day is ten year’s old and something terrible has happened to her older sister, Beth. Jenny thinks the how and why of Beth’s death lies in a box of her belongings their mother has hidden away. Of course it’s not that simple and we follow Jenny’s childish attempts to make sense of things as she goes back over the last year of Beth’s life. Jenny is on the cusp between childhood and a more grown up view of the world and the author beautifully evokes Jenny’s love for her family and her sister, and her perplexity at what happens. She is torn between the fanciful romanticism of her grandmother and the prosaic reality of her mother, between her own safe world and the world of the ‘bad’ girls in town that Beth’s involved with. Some of what happens is confronting but the lyricism of Foxlee’s style and the wonderful character of Jenny make this an enjoyable book to read. The author beautifully recreates the poignancy of leaving the simplicity of childhood behind. She also has a marvellous eye for the details of small town life, as well as for the harsh beauty of the outback.

The Anatomy of Wings won the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (South East Asia and South Pacific Region) and the 2008 Dobbie Literary Award for first published woman writer.