Ned Kelly Award winners 2009.

The Ned Kelly Awards for Australian crime writing were announced Friday night at the Melbourne Writers Festival.

And the winners are...

Fiction.
Deep water by Peter Corris
AND
Smoke & mirrors by Kel Robertson

Non-fiction.
The tall man by Chloe Hooper

First Fiction.
Ghostlines by Nick Gadd

The SD Harvey short story award.
Fidget's farewell by Scott McDermott

Lifetime achievement award.
Shane Maloney

Congratulations to all the winners.

To see a list of the nominations click here.

To check the library catalogue click here.

Kamila Shamsie at Melbourne Writer's Festival

Ros went to see Kamila Shamsie at the Writer's Festival. Here's what she reported.

Kamila talked mostly about her latest book Burnt Shadows which covers four significant epochs of time: Nagasaki and its bombing during World War II, Delhi on the eve of Partition, Pakistan during the 1980's during significant civil turmoil and New York post 9/11. The book follows two families and Kamila talks about how she used these momentous historical events to allow her characters come alive.

Kamila is among only a handful of Pakistani writers who have begun to be read internationally. She talked about some of the controversy surrounding the book including the claims that she is anti-western. To this she stated that she is more anti-violence than anything else and this is obvious is her main characters of Hiroko Tanaka; the quintessential pacifist.

Kamila is an intelligent women with a deep historical understanding of Pakistan and her writing reflects these things. She researches each books extensively. She talked about writing specific scenes of the book using Google Maps so that she had an idea of what they looked like.

You can hear the entire session from the writers' festival on the 3 September on ABC's Radio National 10am repeated 8pm Mon–Thu, 7pm Fri or get the podcast from their website.

Hawthorn Booktalk. 27 August 2009.

CRAIG

GLADWELL, Malcolm
Outliers: the story of success
158 GLA

YATES, Richard
The Easter parade
FIC YATES

BLAZEY, Clive
Growing your own heirloom vegetables
FOL 635 BLA

ROBYN

FALKINER, Suzanne
Joan in India
923.2547 FAL(F)

TOIBIN, Colm
Brooklyn
FIC TOIBI

MANTEL, Hilary
Wolf Hall
FIC MANTE

KEENAN, Brigid
Diplomatic baggage:the adventures of a trailing spouse
902.72 KEE

JUSTINE

PAGE, Katherine Hall
A body in the belfry
FIC PAGE

HAMILTON, Masha
The camel bookmobile
FIC HAMIL

GREENWOOD, Kerry
Earthly delights
FIC GREEN

Davitt Awards

Sisters in Crime have awarded the Davitt Award to the best crime novel written by a woman since 2001 in Australia. The award is named after Ellen Davitt (1812-1879) who wrote Force and Fraud in 1865.

Here are the winners for this year:

The best adult novel was awarded to A beautiful place to die, the debut novel by Malla Nunn.

The best young fiction book was awarded to Genius squad by Catherine Jinks.

The reader's choice award was given to the already much celebrated The tall man : death and life on Palm Island by Chloe Hooper.

They are all available on the library catalogue.

Sonya Hartnett at Melbourne Writer's Festival

Sue Gray saw Sonya Hartnett, a prolific fiction author who writes across all age ranges.

She hit the headlines earlier this year when the Swedish Arts Council announced that Hartnett was the 2008 recipient of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the world's biggest prize for children's and youth literature.

The Swedish Government-funded award, named after the creator of the Pippi Longstocking children's stories, is worth five million Swedish kronor, equivalent to $A880,687.

Hartnett, who was also nominated last year, joins a distinguished list of previous recipients, including Maurice Sendak and Philip Pullman.

She was very amusing , relating how she came home one afternoon to hear the news of her win and immediatley said to her dog ‘Shiloh, I think our lives are about to change dramatically’

It was intriguing to hear how she constructs a novel – it can take many months of planning but once she feels she has all the elements and structures she needs to create a novel, the writitng takes her a relativly short amount of time.

I have read the majority of Hartnett’s novels and can highly recommend all of them. Search the library catalogue to find them today.

The Age Book of the Year 2009

Steven Amsterdam was awarded The Age Book of the Year Prize for 2009 with his fiction work titled 'Things we didn't see coming'. The book is a well written debut with a dystopian, post-apocalytic theme. Check out Steven's webpage for more reviews.

The Indie Book award shortlist has also been announced. This is only the second year this award has been running. It awards books championed by independent booksellers and publishers in Australia. These are the books and categories for this year.

• Fiction – Jasper Jones, by Craig Silvey

• Debut Fiction – The Virtuoso by Sonia Orchard

• Non-Fiction – The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper

• Children’s Book – Pearl Verses the World by Sally Murphy, illustrated by Heather Potter.

The winner will be announced Monday 28 September 2009 and all are available on the library catalogue.
.

Books from the Ashburton Booktalk

These are the books that were talked about and all of them are recommended for your reading pleasure:

Lee
Kingsolver, Barbara
Prodigal summer
FIC KINGS

London, Joan
The good parents
FIC LONDO

Ebershoff, David
The 19th wife : a novel
FIC EBERS

Adelaide, Debra
The household guide to dying
FIC ADELA

Jane
Groom, Linda
First fleet artist : George Raper's birds & plants of Australia
FOL 759.2 RAP ( G)

Pattrick, Jenny
Catching the current
FIC PATTR

Le Guin, Ursula K.
Lavinia
FIC LEGUI

Sadler, Michael
An Englishman amoureux : love in deepest France
944.54084 SAB

Ros
Gowdie, Cathy & Melville, Jacqui
Foxey's hangout : the story of one family's vineyard dream
926.3 GOW

Shamsie, Kamila
Burnt shadows
FIC SHAMS

Nesbo, Jo
Nemesis
FIC NESBO

Perry, Thomas
Runner
FIC PERRY

Find them on the library catalogue.

Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2009 - shortlist

More shortlists.

The winners will be announced on Spetember 1.

The Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction

* The Pages by Murray Bail
* Dog Boy by Eva Hornung
* The Boat by Nam Le
* Breath by Tim Winton
* The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

The Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-Fiction 2009 Shortlist

* The City's Outback by Gillian Cowlishaw
* Arabesques by Robert Dessaix
* The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island by Chloe Hooper
* House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroger-Mann by Evelyn Juers
* Darwin's Armada by Iain McCalman

The CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry 2009 Shortlist

* The Golden Bird by Robert Adamson
* Fishing in the Devonian by Carol Jenkins
* The Other Way Out by Bronwyn Lea

The Louis Esson Prize for Drama

* Realism by Paul Galloway
* Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd by Lally Katz
* The Modern International Dead by Damien Millar

The Prize for Young Adult Fiction

* The Two Pearls of Wisdom by Alison Goodman
* The Beginner's Guide to Living by Lia Hills
* Something in the World Called Love by Sue Saliba

The Alfred Deakin Prize for an Essay Advancing Public Debate

* 'We Have Still Not Lived Long Enough' by Tom Griffiths
* The Henson Case by David Marr
* 'Ratbags at the Gates' by Helen O'Neil (Griffith Review 23)

The Grollo Ruzzene Foundation Prize for Writing about Italians in Australia

* Death in the Mountains by Lisa Clifford
* Neither Here nor There: Italians and Swiss-Italians on the Walhalla goldfield 1865-1915 by Annamaria Davine
* And Be Home Before Dark by Roland Rocchiccioli

The John Curtin Prize for Journalism

* 'The Guards' Story' by Peter Cronau and Quentin McDermott (Four Corners)
* 'The Penalty is Death: Inside Bali's Kerobokan Prison' by Luke Davies (The Monthly)
* 'A Week in Kinglake' by Michael Vincent (ABC Radio)

The Prize for Best Music Theatre Script

* Poor Boy by Matt Cameron and Tim Finn
* Shane Warne The Musical by Eddie Perfect
* Metro Street by Matthew Robinson

The Prize for Science Writing

* Pasteur's Gambit by Stephen Dando-Collins
* Climate Code Red: The Case for Emergency Action by David Spratt and Philip Sutton
* The Rise of Animals: Evolution and Diversification of the Kingdom Animalia by Patricia Vickers-Rich

The Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript by an Emerging Victorian Writer

* Sufficient Grace by Amy Espeseth
* Like Being a Wife by Catherine Harris
* The Sunlit Zone by Lisa Jacobson

The Age Book of the Year 2009 - shortlist.

Fiction

* Look Who's Morphing by Tom Cho
* Butterfly by Sonya Hartnett
* Things We Didn't See Coming by Steven Amsterdam
* Cooee by Vivienne Kelly
* Ransom by David Malouf

Non-Fiction

* The Red Highway by Nicholas Rothwell
* The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper
* Down To The Crossroads: On The Trail Of The 2008 US Presidential Election by Guy Rundle
* Gough Whitlam: A Moment In History by Jenny Hocking
* Darwin's Armada: How Four Voyagers to Australasia Won the Battle for Evolution and Changed the World by Iain McCalman

Poetry

* Fire Season by Kate Middleton
* The Golden Bird by Robert Adamson
* Better Than God by Peter Porter
* Divine Comedy: Journeys Through A Regional Geography by John Kinsella
* True Thoughts by Pam Brown

The winners will be annouced on August 21.

Click here to search the libary catalogue.

Man Booker Longlist for 2009 announced

The Man Booker Prize longlist has been announced. Some very well known authors have been nominated, as well as a few dark horses. Here is the list:

The Children's Book - A.S. Byatt
Summertime - J.M. Coetzee
The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds
How to Paint a Dead Man - Sarah Hall
The Wilderness - Samantha Harvey
Me Cheeta : the autobiography - James Lever
Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel
The Glass Room - Simon Mawer
Not Untrue and Not Unkind - Ed O'Loughlin
Heliopolis - James Scudamore
Brooklyn : a novel - Colm Toibin
Love and Summer - William Trevor
The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters

Use the library catalogue to reserve something that takes your fancy.

The shortlist will be announced on Tuesday 8 September with the winner to be revealed on Tuesday 6 October. Click here to receive email updates from the Man Booker website.