A Pair of Ragged Claws Books

The ABC 702 Book Club is asking listeners to name their favourite Australian poems. That sounds like a great idea to me, as long as we can keep it clean. And by clean I don’t mean no dirty ditties, but no blood spilled among those who have strong views on what constitutes good poetry - or indeed on what constitutes poetry at all (and what doesn’t).

You can cast your vote at the ABC website here.

But before you do, please share your thoughts here on Ragged Claws.

I’ll get the ball rolling with three off the top of my head:

Les Murray‘s The Cows on Killing Day, which you can read on Clive James ‘s website here.

Peter Porter ‘s An Exequy, which I also found on Clive’s site here.

Kenneth Slessor‘s Five Bells, which you can read here.

I wanted to add a limerick, which I thought was one of Rolf Harris‘s: There was a young man from Sydney,/who drank til he ruined his kidney./He drank and drank/and shrank and shrank,/but he had fun doin’ it didn’t he?

But when I Googled that I found another limerick, attributed to the American humourist Don Marquis : There was a young fellow named Sydney,/Who drank ‘till he ruined his kidney./It shriveled and shrank/As he sat there and drank,/But he had a good time at it, didn’t he?

You learn something new every day.

And though it’s not Australian. I want to share this Dorothy Parker poem I found while looking for the Sydney/kidney one (forgive me if you’ve heard it before):

I wish I could drink like a lady.
I can take one or two at the most.
Three and I’m under the table.
Four and I’m under the host

SPEAKING OF LES MURRAY, terrific to see him get a long review in The New York Times this week, which you can read here.

This Thursday evening I am doing an event with American author David Vann at Sydney’s Gleebooks. As regular readers will know I’m a Vann fan, having reviewed his first work of fiction, Legend of a Suicide, and his first novel, Caribou Island, in the pages of The Australian.

I have written a bit about this in my print column today and you can read that here

Gleebooks is kindly offering 10 free tickets to Thursday’s event. To be in the running please email Gleebooks event manager Christopher Cyrill on with Vann/Romei in the subject line.

Look forward to seeing you there.

I’m a little late on this (as I tend to be on anything that “goes viral") but if you haven’t caught up with the story of how self-published author Jacqueline Howett responded to a not great online review of her novel, The Greek Seaman, then do so because it’s a doozy. I say not great because that’s one of the stranger aspects of this story: the review, on a book review website called Big Al’s Books and Pals, is not particularly negative. It’s the sort of review you might read any week in the books pages.

Yet Howett, pictured below, responded with such intensity that she ended up telling Big Al to “F..k off!”. And when other people (i.e. potential buyers of The Greek Seaman) who had been posting their thoughts on the site objected to this, the author told them to “F..k off!’’ too.

You can read a piece about the spat here.

And I recommend following the back and forth between Howett, Big Al and the readers here.

Now, I am sure a lot of writers have at various times wanted to tell a critic to “F..k off!” Indeed I know of cases where writers have wanted to beat up critics. But actually telling on to “F..k off!” in a public forum seems counterproductive to say the least.

Well, I got my wish (see the previous thread on the Man Booker International): David Malouf is on the 13-strong list of finalists.

However, Peter Carey is not, which seems odd to me.

The other 12 finalists, in alphabetical order, are:

Wang Anyi (China)
Juan Goytisolo (Spain)
James Kelman (UK)
John Le Carre (UK)
Amin Maalouf (Lebanon)
Dacia Maraini (Italy)
Rohinton Mistry (India/Canada)
Philip Pullman (UK)
Marilynne Robinson (US)
Philip Roth (US)
Su Tong (China)
Anne Tyler (US)

You can read about the finalists on the excellent Booker website here.

The judges immediately had some tricky news (or is it good news in the publicity sense?) when Le Carre informed them he did not enter literary prizes and therefore wanted his name removed from the list.

I have to say, his inclusion, at this juncture, is baffling anyway. UPDATE ON THURSDAY MORNING: I have written about this is today’s paper, and you can read the piece here.

I’ve just spoken to Malouf, who says he is surprised and delighted to be a finalist, and adds that the prize’s prestige is made by the list of previous winners. On that last point, it’s hard to argue. UPDATE ON THURSDAY MORNING: You can read my news report here.

There are literary prizes and there are literary prizes. Melbournite Shaun Tan, fresh from his Oscar win for The Lost Thing, has just won the world’s richest children’s book prize, the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, worth about $760,000. No, I haven’t got one too many zeros there. You can read more on The Australian’s website. I can’t link just now as I’m out of the office. 

The Man Booker International - that’s the Booker Prize that Americans are allowed to win (not that any have yet) - comes to Sydney tomorrow for the announcement of the finalists for the 2011 prize.

The Man Booker International, worth a cool 60,000 pounds (sorry, I still can’t find the pounds symbol here), is awarded every two years and is for a writer’s body of work, a opposed to the Booker, which is for a single novel (and which is limited to citizens of Commonwealth countries and the Republic of Ireland).

It’s only been running since 2005 and the honour roll to date is:

2005: Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare.
2007: Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe.
2009: Canadian short story writer Alice Munro.

The 2011 finalists will be announced at an event at Sydney University tomorrow morning, at which the judges - book dealer and critic Rick Gekoski, publisher and writer Carmen Callil and novelist Justin Cartwright - will be present.

In previous years there have been 14 finalists, and you could assort a very impressive literary football team from those lists, headed by Nobel winners Vargas Llosa, Lessing (both of whom won the Nobel after not winning the Man Booker International), Naipaul, Marquez, Grass, Bellow and Mahfouz. 

I suspect there will be at least one Australian among this year’s finalists and if one is punting on who it’s hard to go past Peter Carey, who was a finalist in 2007 and 2009 and has since published a well-received book in Parrot and Olivier in America. It will be very interesting to see if there is more than one Australian on the list. Your suggestions happily entertained here. I reckon David Malouf should be on it, if there is any justice in the world.

If Carey does make the list, then he’d be trying to do a Munro (a writer he greatly admires), as she was a finalist in 2007 before winning in 2009.

However, you can never rule out the Booker’s knack for throwing up a surprise result (The Finkler Question anyone?) I mean, in 2005 they had five existing or future Nobel laureates on the short list and they gave it to Kadare (not to diminish his work).

It will also be interesting to see if certain writers who have dropped off the finalists list stay off it. Ian McEwan , for example, was a finalist in 2005 and 2007 but not in 2009. What happened? Solar anyone? Similarly, Salman Rushdie was a finalist in 2005 but not since. Does this mean his body of work, which has increased since 2005, has declined in quality?

The winner of the Man Booker International will be announced at the Sydney Writers Festival on May 18.

I love this literary horse race stuff. More tomorrow.

Do you have too many books in your life? Is your house filled with shelves of books that you have read once, will never read again, yet can not throw out? And what about the ones you haven’t read, and probably never will read? You know who they are.

I don’t know how many books I have at home, but if I had to take a stab I’d say upwards of 500. I have them very loosely arranged like this:

Australian fiction has a bookshelf to itself, arranged alphabetically by author. That bookshelf, though, is overcrowded, so there’’s a certain amount of mingling - Stead numping up a bit too close to Temple, say - that I can’t think about too much because it upsets my (over) tidy mind.

All other fiction - and lots of poetry, drama, biographies, memoir and so on - take up the main bookshelves in the house, again arranged alphabetically by author (though the fat hardback biographies of Koestler and the like have a section to themselves).

In the study/bar/cigar den/kids’ TV room (this fluctuates depending who is home on any given night), we have all the reference books: dictionaries, encyclopaedia, works of criticism, history, art, science, sport, etc, etc, etc, arranged more or less by size.

Beside my bed (on a smallish bookshelf and also on the floor, though neatly stacked) are the books I’m reading or supposed to be reading now, usually a couple of dozen. (So, yes, an emphasis on supposed to be ...)

My 5 1/2yo, Syd, has a bookshelf full of kids lit in his room, which I mention because I probably read as much of this library as anything else.

And then there’s the office, which is too depressing to go into detail about, but suffice it to say I have access to a room in which I can store all the books that don’t fit on my desk.

Don’t get me wrong, I like my job - but there are times when something I have loved all my life, books and reading, does become a bit of a burden. At such times, it’s good to know one is not alone.

And that brings me to the piece that sparked these thoughts, by Mark Medley at Canada’s National Post. Here’s his story, in brief:

… the problem, in my opinion, is not the number of books I own, but that I am unable to get rid of any of them. I own some terrible, terrible books — you wouldn’t believe how many crap books get published in this country — but cannot, for the life of me, part with a single one. 

I hear you brother; I, too, find it very difficult to throw out books, even when I have more than one copy of the same title.

You can read Medley’s piece here.

I found Medley’s piece via a short article on The New Yorker that you can read here.

And that piece has a link to an interview with the co-owner of New York’s wonderful Strand bookstore (where I bought many books when I was there in the late 90s/early aughts, and of course I still have them all). You can read the interview here.

OK, that’s enough from me - I have a book to read. Over to you. Let’s hear your stories of bibliomania, and other book-related afflictions.

VALE JOE BAGEANT

The American journalist and author Joe Bageant, who visited Australia to promote Deer Hunting With Jesus, his successful 2007 book about class in America, has died after a short battle with cancer. His Australian publisher, Scribe, has put out the following statement:

“Joe Bageant, 1946-2011

Joe Bageant died on 26 March 2011, in Virginia in the United States, after having been struck down by cancer several months ago.

Joe Bageant was a well-loved political commentator, appearing frequently on US national public radio, the BBC, in documentary films and also writing for newspapers and magazines internationally. His book Deer Hunting with Jesus: dispatches from America’s class war was adapted for the theatre and is being developed as a dramatic television series in America. Originally from Virginia, Bageant spent much of each year in Belize and Mexico, where he wrote, and in which he sponsored small health-and-shelter development projects. His online column (http://www.joebageant.com) made him a cult hero among gonzo-journalism junkies and progressives.

Joe toured Australia twice to promote his books, the first trip was in late 2007 and his lastest trip was September last year.

Scribe Publisher Henry Rosenbloom says: ‘Joe was a terrific person, a good friend, and a very fine writer. Our family, our publishing house, and the world at large will all miss him. Our thoughts and love go to his family and friends in this time of their grief’.

Joe’s second book Rainbow Pie is released this week in the US, published by Scribe.”

As I’m sure you have heard by now, the American actress Elizabeth Taylor, she of the violet eyes, two Oscars, eight marriages and seven husbands, has died in Los Angeles, aged 79.

You can read The Australian ’s extensive coverage here

And you can read Taylor’s Wikipedia entry here.

Taylor won her Oscars for playing a hooker in Butterfield 8 (1960) and a harridan in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), and was nominated numerous other times.

She loved Monty Clift, I think, and didn’t the two of them look fabulous together:

Elizabeth Taylor was a bona fide star. If you’d like to share some thoughts about her life and career, please do so here. I’ll end with a still from the only film in which she was the second most beautiful person on set, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof:

Over to you.

At his best, Robert Hughes is one of the sharpest cultural critics going. I don’t think the piece I’ll link to in a tick is him at his best, but it’s still worth reading.  I like his anecdote on the birth of People magazine, and I like this bit about the “look at me, listen to me, friend me, Twitter Twitter generation and how they are reimagining the idea of privacy’’: The word now conjures up a very different meaning, one that could almost allude to being a “nobody” (quelle horreur!), anti-social, withholding, paranoid and other marketing un-friendly social disorders.

Hughes’s piece is from a new magazine, Port, the contributing editors of which include the (almost) impossibly handsome actor Daniel Day-Lewis. I’m not sure what Day-Lewis’s qualifications for the job are, aside from being so handsome and being the son of a poet laureate, but it does seem a savvy way to save money on your cover shoots.

Anyway, you can read Hughes’s piece here. Port but no cigar, I reckon.

There’s also an interesting piece on the changing nature of journalism by the foreign correspondent Jon Snow, which you can read here.

Here’s another SlowTV clip from the Perth Writers Festival, of my talk with the Scottish author and critic Andrew O’Hagan, whose latest novel is The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe (Faber).

As I’ve written here before, I think O’Hagan is one of the sharpest writer/critics around at the moment. One thing that comes across more in his critical writing than in his novels (with the recent exception of Maf) is that he’s also very funny. He made this session a pleasure, and it was good to get to know him a little during the festival.

Here’s the footage, with thanks again to the folk at SlowTV:

The good people at SlowTV, a spin-off from The Monthly magazine, filmed my session, Science is the New Art, with Annie Proulx and Tim Flannery at the recent Perth Writers Festival and it’s now online. They even showed me how to embed the clip here, which more or less doubled my technological know-how.

Annie Proulx’s new book is Bird Cloud (Fourth Estate), a memoir about building her dream house in the wilds of Wyoming, and Tim Flannery’s is Here on Earth (Text), a conditionally optimistic assessment of the future of the planet, and of our species.

I was impressed with both writers - they made my job easy - and I hope you enjoy this clip. And you’ll soon see why I put birds in the title.

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Last night I saw a preview of Never Let Me Go , Mark Romanek‘s film of Kazuo Ishiguro‘s Booker shortlisted 2005 novel of the same name, a dystopian (though utopian for some) tale set in the 1970s to 1990s in which people are cloned for the sole purpose of becoming organ donors to non-clones (’’originals’’). The story follows the lives of three clones from their days in clone school (which is a typical English boarding school), Kathy (Cary Mulligan from An Education), Tommy (Alex Garland, who was so good in the first instalment of The Red Riding Trilogy) and Ruth (Keira Knightly).

I want to thank my friends at Allen & Unwin for inviting me to the preview. A&U is the local publisher of Ishiguro, one of the great prose stylists writing in English, IMO, and has released a film tie-in edition of Never Let me Go. The film came out last September in the US so I’m not sure why it’s taken so long to reach our shores, where the release date is March 31.

You can watch a trailer here.

My first reaction on seeing the film was that I disliked it a lot. I thought it was slow and dull and that the three lead actors were in a stunned mullet contest, trying to out stun mullet each other. But others at the screening argued that it was true to the book, and the pace of the film and the muted acted underscored the emotionally stunted lives of the clones. When I got home I took another look at the book and had to agree they had a point. There is more depth to the film that I first thought - and oddly enough I started thinking of it as a parable for factory farming, and as such it’s quite powerful. I hope this doesn’t suggest I care more about pigs than people.

My viewing partner suggested to me that I don’t like emotional, interior films, and she has a point up to a point. As I pointed out, two of the best films I’ve seen in the past decade or so are Brokeback Mountain and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the latter about as interior as you can get, given it’s about a bloke completely immobilised (save for one eye) by a stroke. But having sad that, I do tend to go to films for entertainment, and to novels for the interior life.

I still think never Let me Go is not a great or perhaps even good film. There are too many scenes that are shot for their cinematic effect, such as when Tommy runs towards a boat abandoned on a beach (you’ll know what I mean when you see it). However, I do think it’s a film that will make you think, and which you’ll talk about afterwards with your friends, and that’s a good enough reason to see it I reckon.

By the way, I though Romanek’s previous film, the psychological thriller One Hour Photo, starring a quietly creepy Robyn Williams, was excellent. His next project is a film adaptation of the vigilante comic strip Judge Dredd, and, yes, I’ll be lining up to see that one.

The long list for the Miles Franklin Literary Award was announced this morning. I have a piece about it in today’s paper and you can read the web version here.

The nine-novel long list is:

Jon Bauer for Rocks in the Belly (Scribe)
Honey Brown for The Good Daughter (Viking/Penguin)
Patrick Holland for The Mary Smokes Boys (Transit Longue)
Melina Marchetta for The Piper’s Son (Viking/Penguin)
Roger McDonald for When Colts Ran (Vintage/Random House)
Stephen Orr for Time’s Long Ruin (Wakefield Press)
Kim Scott for That Deadman Dance (Picador)
Kirsten Tranter for The Legacy (Fourth Estate)
Chris Womersley for Bereft (Scribe)

You can read more about the books and their authors here.

I think this is a good long list and The Trust Company, which administers the award, has made a good start on its promise to make Australia’s most prestigious literary prize more exciting and relevant. You’ll remember that at last year’s short list announcement two-time winner Alex Miller warned that the MF was in danger of losing relevance, not least because of the huge money on offer for the new Prime Minister’s Literary Award.

This year’s MF winner will pocket $50,000, a significant increase ffrom the $42,000 the prize has been worth for years. It may still be only half what the PM’s prize pays, but at least $50,000 is a satisfyingly round number; it has some heft to it - and of course winning the MF usually means a decent bump in sales, a factor not as evident in the PM’s award so far.

Also, blasting the MF out of Sydney - the award ceremony will be held at the State Library of Victoria - is a long-overdue move. This should be Australia’s national literary prize.

As for the books on the long list, I’ve read most of them and I’ve read about the few I haven’t, and I think all are very worthy candidates. Of course there are always books not on the list that could just as easily be there. Someone said to me yesterday that they were surprised Jeremy Chambers’s The Vintage and the Gleaning was omitted, for example.

I’m particularly pleased - for the author and for the prize itself - to see Jon Bauer’s Rocks in the Belly on the long list. We are all familiar with the sporadic controversies that arise over the condition in Miles Franklin’s will that the winning book be of the highest litearry merit and present Australian life in any of its phases.

Bauer is English, though he’s lived in Australia for a decade, most recently as a permanent resident on a Distinguished Talent visa. he told me yesterday that he’d been accepted for citizenship.

Rocks in the Belly, his debut novel, is not obviously set in Australia and nor are its characters obviously Australian. When I read it - and it’s one of the best books I’ve read in the past 12 months, deeply unsettling and very funny in a way that reminded me of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho - I assumed the action took place in England, probably because I knew the author grew up there.

Yet when I talked to Bauer about this yesterday he pointed out that the book is in fact stripped of place. It could be set anywhere, he argues, and where it is set is where the reader sets it. “It is set in Australia in that it is set in a Western family, in childhood, and in pain and regret. That is the setting I wanted. And family and childhood and the struggle of adulthood is Australia in one of its phases,’’ he said.

Bauer also said that while he may have grown up English, he was an Australian writer and always would be. “This country is what gave me writing and I’ll always be loyal to it. Hence an award dedicated to Australiana meaning so so much to me.’’

I couldn’t agree more. I’ve argued here before for the broadest possible interpretation of the MF. If a writer is Australian, lives in Australia, then surely their literary sensibility is informed by this country. The work they produce is part of that, regardless of where it is set or what nationality the characters are. I think, for example, that David Malouf’s beautiful reimagining of part of the Illiad, Ransom, should have been eligible last year. I don’t know if it didn’t make the cut because it wasn’t “Australian’ enough, but I’m guessing that didn’t help its chances.

The Miles Franklin short list will be announced on April 19 and the winner will be announced on June 22. Congratulations and good luck to all the long listed writers.

Just when I was getting worried that the looming NSW election was holding up the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, the short lists have been announced.

The short list for the $40,000 fiction prize is:

Peter Carey - Parrot and Olivier In America
Stephen Daisley - Traitor
Lisa Lang - Utopian Man
Alex Miller - Lovesong
Kristel Thornell - Night Street
Ouyang Yu - The English Class

And for the $40,000 nonfiction prize:

Malcolm Fraser and Margaret Simons- Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs
Anna Krien - Into the Woods: The Battle for Tasmania’s Forests
Tony Moore - Death or Liberty: Rebels and Radicals Transported to Australia 1788-1868
Ranjana Srivastava - Tell Me The Truth: Conversations With My Patients About Life And Death
Maria Tumarkin - Otherland
Brenda Walker - Reading By Moonlight: How Books Saved a Life

It would be a hoot if Mal Fraser wins, and turns up to collect. And he won’t know in advance as this year the organisers will keep the winners secret - even from the winners - until they are announced at the awards ceremony on May 16.

Also good to see that there are plays in the drama category this year, after the judges last year decided there was no play worthy of putting on a shortlist.

You can read all the shortlists here.

Meanwhile, the long list for the beefed up (the prize is up to $50,000) Miles Franklin Literary Award will be announced tomorrow morning. I’ve had a peak at it and I think it’s a good list.

Clawsters, I did a bit of a catch-up with the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books last night and wanted to share some pieces that grabbed my attention. Forgive me if you’ve read any or all of them already.

First Judith Butler‘s long and fascinating piece in the LRB on the legal battle over the ownership of a treasure trove of Franz Kafka‘s original writings. If this court case wasn’t happening, Kafka would have had to make it up, complete with the suggestion that his work be valued by its weight (as in kilograms, not seriousness).

You can read the piece here.

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KEEF RICHARDS, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH

Over at the TLS, there is the first sighting (at least by my eyes) of a negative review of Keith Richards ‘s best-selling autobiography, Life. “For all its tales of narrow escapes and derring-do, of fortunes made and squandered, glamorous women, hit records, historic tours, honour paid and scores settled with the living and the dead,’’ writes Greil Marcus (who I believe is a Bob Dylan expert), Life is a dispiriting and finally tedious book.‘’

You can read the full review here.

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NOT CRAZY ABOUT MAD MEN

While we are on negative reviews of wildly popular entertainments, in the NYRB Daniel Mendelsohn, who some think is the best critic in the world, gets stuck into the television series Mad Men , which he compares unfavourably with the shows he considers the greats of this “new golden age of television”, which include The Sopranos, The Wire, Battlestar Galactica and Friday Nights Live (ok, ok, I now will have to check it out). Mendelsohn writes:

“With these standouts (and there are many more), Mad Men shares virtually no significant qualities except its design. The writing is extremely weak, the plotting haphazard and often preposterous, the characterizations shallow and sometimes incoherent; its attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is unattractively smug; the acting is, almost without exception, bland and sometimes amateurish.

Worst of all—in a drama with aspirations to treating social and historical “issues"—the show is melodramatic rather than dramatic. By this I mean that it proceeds, for the most part, like a soap opera, serially (and often unbelievably) generating, and then resolving, successive personal crises (adulteries, abortions, premarital pregnancies, interracial affairs, alcoholism and drug addiction, etc.), rather than exploring, by means of believable conflicts between personality and situation, the contemporary social and cultural phenomena it regards with such fascination: sexism, misogyny, social hypocrisy, racism, the counterculture, and so forth.

That a soap opera decked out in high-end clothes (and concepts) should have received so much acclaim and is taken so seriously reminds you that fads depend as much on the willingness of the public to believe as on the cleverness of the people who invent them; as with many fads that take the form of infatuations with certain moments in the past, the Mad Men craze tells us far more about today than it does about yesterday.”

I enjoyed Mendelsohn’s piece but at the end of it I remained unmoved in my belief that Mad Men is the best television drama made in the past decade or so. I also think Mendelsohn’s criticism of the show is at least partly a means for him to deliver the genuine insight he has at the end, about the role of the children in Mad Men .

Read it for yourself here.

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WHO DID NOT COLLABORATE?

Also in the NYRB, the always stimulating Ian Buruma has a stimulating review of Alan Riding’s book about French intellectuals in Nazi occupied Paris, And the Show Went On. I laughed out loud at this explanation as to why Celine, savage anti-Semite that he was, was not a collaborator:
“Celine was indisputably a great writer who subscribed to vicious Nazi views, but he was too self-obsessed to actively collaborate with anyone, including the Germans.’’

You can read the piece here.

Over to you on the above. Please deluge me with your defence (or otherwise) of Mad Men, or Keith Richards, and your thoughts on who should own Kafka.

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MR SHEEN

I’VE been wanting to post something about Charlie Sheen, and here it is: Bret Easton Ellis‘s defence (or sorts) of Sheen on The Daily Beast. I’m no great fan of Two-and-a-Half Man but I admire Sheen’s recent take-no-prisoners attitude to “the suits”, and I like his inventive language. Here’s a bit from BEE’s piece:

“Sheen doesn’t care what you think of him anymore, and he scoffs at the idea of PR. “Hey, suits, I don’t give a shit.” That’s his only commandment. Sheen blows open the myth that if men try hard enough, they will outgrow the adolescent pursuit of pleasure and a life without rules or responsibilities. We’ve come a long way in the last two weeks: Sheen is the new reality, bitch, and anyone who’s a hater can go back and hang out with the rest of the trolls in the graveyard of Empire. No one knew it in 1986, but Charlie Sheen was actually Ferris Bueller’s dark little brother all along.”

You can read the full piece here.

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INDIE AWARDS

Australia’s independent booksellers have voted Anh Do ‘s memoir, The Happiest Refugee, which has been a big seller for Allen & Unwin, their Book of the Year. It was also named Best Non-Fiction Book.
The Best Fiction and Best Debut Fiction prizes went to two writers I have written about lately, and with whom I shared a stage at the recent Perth Writers festival: Chris Womersley for his second novel, Bereft, and Jon Bauer for Rocks in the Belly, both published by Scribe. Congratulations to all the winners. You can read more about the Indie awards here.

THE BARBARA JEFFRIS AWARD
The shortlist for this $35,000 prize, for “the best novel written by an Australian author that depicts women and girls in a positive way or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in society” is:

.• Honey Brown The Good Daughter (Penguin/Viking)
• Catherine Harris Like Being A Wife (Random House/Vintage)
• Simone Lazaroo Sustenance (UWA Publishing)
• Fiona McGregor Indelible Ink (Scribe)
• G.L. Osborne Come Inside (Clouds of Magellan)

The winner will be announced on Saturday April 9. Last year’s winner was Kristina Olsson for The China Garden (UQP).