Australia-Asia Literary Award

“There’s a huge change coming very fast and this prize is giving a glimpse of that future.” Nury Vittachi, judge and founding board member of the Asia-Pacific Writing Partnership.

(article below adapted from the Sydney Morning Herald, November 22, 2008)

DAVID MALOUF has won the inaugural Australia-Asia Literary Award for his short story collection The Complete Stories.

The AU$110,000 award, which was created by the former Labor government in Western Australia, is worth AU$10,000 more than the next richest, the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, and is given for fiction by writers resident in, or outside Australia, writing primarily about Australia or Asia.

Malouf was “very pleased to be the first recipient”. He welcomed the award, and praised it as unique among state literary prizes.

“There is certainly no other literary prize where Australia is the initiator which takes in Asia like this does, so it’s a very good thing that we’re looking outwards rather than inwards as we tend to do” he said.

The Complete Stories won from a very strong shortlist, including The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize), The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser (longlisted for the Booker), Blood Kin by Ceridwen Dovey, and Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital.

The longlist, culled from 111 entries, also had plenty of dazzle, including the Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee (Diary Of A Bad Year), Haruki Murakami (After Dark), Rodney Hall (Love Without Hope) and Alex Miller (Landscape Of Farewell).

“It’s a wonderful piece of writing, a combination of decades of work, and it captures the human condition in such a deep and intense way,” said Nury Vittachi, a member of the judging panel, along with the Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie, and the Australian critic Peter Craven. Vittachi is also a founding board member of the Asia-Pacific Writing Partnership.

“His characters are very ordinary people and he captures the intense joys and sadness of ordinary life.”

Vittachi agreed the decision to award the prize to a book of short stories was unusual.

“It might usually go to a novel. But there’s an ancient story form called a bracelet, where you have a sequence of stand-alone stories which when read together have as much power as a single, united novel. We thought this book worked as just such a bracelet.”

Vittachi sees the award as a means to divine the region’s literary future.

“This award is special as it has a focus on a particular region, a region where there are 4 billion people,” Vittachi said.

“The future of our cultural entertainment will be here. We’re looking for a new Asia-Pacific flavour, as that is a good pointer to what the new literature will be. There’s a huge change coming very fast and this prize is giving a glimpse of that future.”

Malouf said he hoped “booksellers, publishers and the media get behind the prize in the way they do for the Miles Franklin Award”.

Australia-Asia Literary Award Shortlist
Michelle DE KRETSER   The Lost Dog   Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Mohsin HAMID   The Reluctant Fundamentalist   Publisher: Penguin
David MALOUF     The Complete Stories     Publisher: Random House
Ceridwen DOVEY Blood Kin   Publisher: Atlantic Books
Janette TURNER HOSPITAL   Orpheus Lost   Publisher: HarperCollins

Australia-Asia Literary Award Longlist
J.M. COETZEE     Diary of a Bad Year     Publisher: Random House Group Ltd
Matthew CONDON   The Trout Opera   Publisher: Random House (Vintage)
Michelle DE KRETSER   The Lost Dog   Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Ceridwen DOVEY Blood Kin   Publisher: Atlantic Books
Rodney HALL Love without Hope   Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Mohsin HAMID   The Reluctant Fundamentalist   Publisher: Penguin
Mireille JUCHAU     Burning In     Giramondo Publishing
David MALOUF     The Complete Stories     Publisher: Random House
Alex MILLER   Landscape of Farewell   Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Haruki MURAKAMI   After Dark     Translator: Jay Rubin     Publisher: Random House Group
Indra SINHA   Animal’s People   Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
Janette TURNER HOSPITAL   Orpheus Lost   Publisher: HarperCollins

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