The NSW Premier’s Literary Awards were announced yesterday and J M Coetzee won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction for Summertime, Cate Kennedy the People’s Choice Award (I voted!) for The World Beneath and the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing for Fiction went to Andrew Croome for Document Z.
I’m happy to see Coetzee and Cate Kennedy up there, although the extent to which Coetzee’s fictionalised memoir is really a great novel is perhaps debatable. I base this judgement on Youth, the predecessor to Summertime, which I have read and enjoyed as a self-excoriating account of university days, first jobs and first excruciating sexual relationships – but a novel, fiction? In true form Coetzee didn’t turn up to collect the award in person.
I thought Andrew Croome’s Document Z a strange choice for best new writing. He probably got top marks for choosing a subject – politics and espionage – that is unusual for a first novel in this country. Document Z is about the Petrov Affair, and is mainly set in Canberra in the fifties. Croome’s book is closer to the genre end than the literary and was up against Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming and Karen Hitchcock’s very well reviewed Little White Slips, amongst others.
