The Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards were inaugurated by The Hon. John Cain, Premier of Victoria in 1985, to mark the centenary of the births of Vance and Nettie Palmer and to honour and reward literary achievement by Australian writers.
The awards have received bipartisan support since their inception. In 2010 the Awards have a total prize pool of $180,000.
The 2010 awards were presented at the Wheeler Centre on Tuesday September 28.
And the winners are...
The Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction ($30,000)
Truth, Peter Temple
Judge’s comments: Truth is a book on many levels: a crime novel, a morality tale, a dissection of power and corruption, a portrait of a heat-blighted city and its scorched environs, a journey into the heart of a hard man in a man’s world, and those he cannot help loving. Open the book anywhere and Temple’s prose is a marvel of compression where every word is weighted for maximum impact. Despite its density, the reader feels free to move around inside its world and come to their own conclusion about its characters. Savage, lyrical and tender, Truth is simultaneously a focussed view of contemporary Melbourne and a universal story.
Judge’s comments: Truth is a book on many levels: a crime novel, a morality tale, a dissection of power and corruption, a portrait of a heat-blighted city and its scorched environs, a journey into the heart of a hard man in a man’s world, and those he cannot help loving. Open the book anywhere and Temple’s prose is a marvel of compression where every word is weighted for maximum impact. Despite its density, the reader feels free to move around inside its world and come to their own conclusion about its characters. Savage, lyrical and tender, Truth is simultaneously a focussed view of contemporary Melbourne and a universal story.
The Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-fiction ($30,000)
Reading by Moonlight: How Books Saved a Life, Brenda Walker
Judge’s comments: Diagnosed with cancer, Brenda Walker contemplates which book will accompany her to hospital. Through surgery, chemotherapy, and the long haul to recovery, Walker continues to read and to ruminate on the relationship between books, bodies and the life of the mind. From Edgar Allen Poe to Patrick White via War and Peace and The Tale of Genji, Walker invites the reader to accompany her not only on her own arduous physical journey but also on a literary odyssey that is both thought-provoking and deeply moving. En route, Walker demonstrates her own considerable skill as a writer in prose that is both elegant and sharp. Reading by Moonlight is a beautiful book in every way.
The CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry (
$15,000)
$30,000)
Reading by Moonlight: How Books Saved a Life, Brenda Walker
Reading by Moonlight: How Books Saved a Life, Brenda Walker
Judge’s comments: Diagnosed with cancer, Brenda Walker contemplates which book will accompany her to hospital. Through surgery, chemotherapy, and the long haul to recovery, Walker continues to read and to ruminate on the relationship between books, bodies and the life of the mind. From Edgar Allen Poe to Patrick White via War and Peace and The Tale of Genji, Walker invites the reader to accompany her not only on her own arduous physical journey but also on a literary odyssey that is both thought-provoking and deeply moving. En route, Walker demonstrates her own considerable skill as a writer in prose that is both elegant and sharp. Reading by Moonlight is a beautiful book in every way.
Judge’s comments: Diagnosed with cancer, Brenda Walker contemplates which book will accompany her to hospital. Through surgery, chemotherapy, and the long haul to recovery, Walker continues to read and to ruminate on the relationship between books, bodies and the life of the mind. From Edgar Allen Poe to Patrick White via War and Peace and The Tale of Genji, Walker invites the reader to accompany her not only on her own arduous physical journey but also on a literary odyssey that is both thought-provoking and deeply moving. En route, Walker demonstrates her own considerable skill as a writer in prose that is both elegant and sharp. Reading by Moonlight is a beautiful book in every way.
Judge’s comments: Diagnosed with cancer, Brenda Walker contemplates which book will accompany her to hospital. Through surgery, chemotherapy, and the long haul to recovery, Walker continues to read and to ruminate on the relationship between books, bodies and the life of the mind. From Edgar Allen Poe to Patrick White via War and Peace and The Tale of Genji, Walker invites the reader to accompany her not only on her own arduous physical journey but also on a literary odyssey that is both thought-provoking and deeply moving. En route, Walker demonstrates her own considerable skill as a writer in prose that is both elegant and sharp. Reading by Moonlight is a beautiful book in every way.
Judge’s comments: Diagnosed with cancer, Brenda Walker contemplates which book will accompany her to hospital. Through surgery, chemotherapy, and the long haul to recovery, Walker continues to read and to ruminate on the relationship between books, bodies and the life of the mind. From Edgar Allen Poe to Patrick White via War and Peace and The Tale of Genji, Walker invites the reader to accompany her not only on her own arduous physical journey but also on a literary odyssey that is both thought-provoking and deeply moving. En route, Walker demonstrates her own considerable skill as a writer in prose that is both elegant and sharp. Reading by Moonlight is a beautiful book in every way.
Judge’s comments: Diagnosed with cancer, Brenda Walker contemplates which book will accompany her to hospital. Through surgery, chemotherapy, and the long haul to recovery, Walker continues to read and to ruminate on the relationship between books, bodies and the life of the mind. From Edgar Allen Poe to Patrick White via War and Peace and The Tale of Genji, Walker invites the reader to accompany her not only on her own arduous physical journey but also on a literary odyssey that is both thought-provoking and deeply moving. En route, Walker demonstrates her own considerable skill as a writer in prose that is both elegant and sharp. Reading by Moonlight is a beautiful book in every way.
The CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry (
$15,000)
The CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry (
$15,000)
$15,000)
$15,000)
Possession, Anna Kerdijk Nicholson
Possession, Anna Kerdijk Nicholson
Possession, Anna Kerdijk Nicholson
Possession, Anna Kerdijk Nicholson
Possession, Anna Kerdijk Nicholson
Possession, Anna Kerdijk Nicholson
Possession, Anna Kerdijk Nicholson
Judge’s comments: Possession is a fascinating concept: a stylish and compact collection of poems juxtaposing the journeys (and words) of Cook (and Banks et al) in the southern oceans, to modern day Kangaroo Valley (NSW). Nicholson has managed a lyrical hence moving, and at the same time an historically and culturally convincing evocation of this formative subject matter with a consistent sharpness of language and craft of the highest quality.
The Louis Esson Prize for Drama
($15,000)
And No More Shall We Part, Tom Holloway, A Bit Of Argy Bargy
Judge’s comments: Holloway’s latest play tells a story of intimate tragedy via wonderfully restrained and sparse text. Bold but simple, the story shifts backwards and forwards through time, creating conflict through stillness, and evoking an entire world through the presence of its two conflicted but deeply loving characters.
The Prize for Young Adult Fiction
$15,000
Raw Blue, Kirsty Eagar
Judge’s comments: Raw Blue is a wonderfully assured novel that takes the reader from the stagnant aftermath of trauma to the subtle beginnings of recovery. Carly has dropped out of uni and works a monotonous kitchen job in order to devote the rest of her time to her real passion – surfing. Riding the bright skin of the ocean is where Carly belongs, and is the only place where she can begin to escape what happened to her two years ago at Schoolies. Raw Blue packs an unsentimental punch that is not easily forgotten.
The Alfred Deakin Prize for an Essay Advancing Public Debate
($15,000)
“Seeing Truganini”, David Hansen, Australian Book Review
Judge’s comments: In an age of media whistle blowing, here is a distinctively subtle, poised and refined specimen of the art, though no less bold for all that. Starting with a personal anecdote of his experience as an art curator, when confronted by the vexed question of the public representation of images of Aborigines, Hansen takes us through the whole history of this dilemma in a few deeply-packed but lucid paragraphs. These provide his ballast in taking on two groups or types of silencers on the issue, as it is played out today: those among his own profession (widening out to academia) who evade the issue through peripheral theorising; and those among certain representatives of indigenous communities who in effect bury the issue through their demands for complete suppression of the images concerned or highly selective access.
Hansen’s plea is to liberate these images from both parties into the arena of wider and ongoing public debate. (He’s not absolutist about this; there are some types of image, he recognises, that should properly remain sacrosanct.) This plea has important implications, as he eloquently attests, for the future of the whole reconciliation movement in Australia. It’s also a pertinent intervention in the debates over the role of historical study and empirically-based truth-seeking in any society.
The Prize for a First Book of History
($15,000)
Becoming African Americans: Black Public Life in Harlem, 1919-1939, Clare Corbould
Judge’s comments: Becoming African Americans presents an original and important argument about the ways in which the descendants of freed slaves in the United States, in the early decades of the twentieth century, redefined their identity in terms of their African heritage and history. Widely researched and engagingly written, Becoming African Americans is a multi-layered work, enriched by attention to gender dynamics, local politics and transnational history. Corbould’s fresh and original approach to the formation of modern African American identity in the 1920s and 1930s, especially during the creative ferment of the Harlem Renaissance, renders their history not only ‘closer to their hearts’ desire but also closer to the facts.
The Prize for Indigenous Writing
($15,000)
Legacy, Larissa Behrendt
Judge’s comments: Legacy is an educative social document and a universal story about reconciliation and the power of forgiveness. The author gives insight to a world that is seldom explored – that of contemporary urban Aboriginal family, and in particular the complex relationship between a lawyer daughter and her activist father. Serious themes are canvassed; what is Aboriginal sovereignty, the ‘rights agenda’ versus ‘practical reconciliation’, self-determination and the stolen generations, but it is the tensions within the interpersonal relationships that carry the thrust of the narrative. The father is an influential and revered activist, a charismatic man, yet seen through his daughter’s eyes, he is also deeply flawed. Behrendt captures the mood of a daughter’s love as she struggles to understand her father’s infidelity. Legacy is at once personal and political; Behrendt rings true.
The John Curtain Prize for Journalism
($15,000)
Who Killed Mr Ward?, Janine Cohen and Liz Jackson, Four Corners, ABC Television
Judge’s comments: Legacy is an educative social document and a universal story about reconciliation and the power of forgiveness. The author gives insight to a world that is seldom explored – that of contemporary urban Aboriginal family, and in particular the complex relationship between a lawyer daughter and her activist father. Serious themes are canvassed; what is Aboriginal sovereignty, the ‘rights agenda’ versus ‘practical reconciliation’, self-determination and the stolen generations, but it is the tensions within the interpersonal relationships that carry the thrust of the narrative. The father is an influential and revered activist, a charismatic man, yet seen through his daughter’s eyes, he is also deeply flawed. Behrendt captures the mood of a daughter’s love as she struggles to understand her father’s infidelity. Legacy is at once personal and political; Behrendt rings true.
The Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript by an Emerging Victorian Writer (
$15,000)
House of Sticks, Peggy Frew
Judge’s comments: A tightly crafted novel, House of Sticks is a revealing portrait of domestic life. Bonnie is a musician whose career has been interrupted by the burdens of motherhood. Her almost happy life is threatened by the intrusion of a character from her husband’s past, whose unsettling presence provides the catalyst for this very suspenseful novel. A thread of paranoia and disquiet is woven through the narrative, drawing the reader forward to its surprising conclusion.
Judge’s comments: Possession is a fascinating concept: a stylish and compact collection of poems juxtaposing the journeys (and words) of Cook (and Banks et al) in the southern oceans, to modern day Kangaroo Valley (NSW). Nicholson has managed a lyrical hence moving, and at the same time an historically and culturally convincing evocation of this formative subject matter with a consistent sharpness of language and craft of the highest quality.
The Louis Esson Prize for Drama
($15,000)
And No More Shall We Part, Tom Holloway, A Bit Of Argy Bargy
Judge’s comments: Holloway’s latest play tells a story of intimate tragedy via wonderfully restrained and sparse text. Bold but simple, the story shifts backwards and forwards through time, creating conflict through stillness, and evoking an entire world through the presence of its two conflicted but deeply loving characters.
The Prize for Young Adult Fiction
$15,000
Raw Blue, Kirsty Eagar
Judge’s comments: Raw Blue is a wonderfully assured novel that takes the reader from the stagnant aftermath of trauma to the subtle beginnings of recovery. Carly has dropped out of uni and works a monotonous kitchen job in order to devote the rest of her time to her real passion – surfing. Riding the bright skin of the ocean is where Carly belongs, and is the only place where she can begin to escape what happened to her two years ago at Schoolies. Raw Blue packs an unsentimental punch that is not easily forgotten.
The Alfred Deakin Prize for an Essay Advancing Public Debate
($15,000)
“Seeing Truganini”, David Hansen, Australian Book Review
Judge’s comments: In an age of media whistle blowing, here is a distinctively subtle, poised and refined specimen of the art, though no less bold for all that. Starting with a personal anecdote of his experience as an art curator, when confronted by the vexed question of the public representation of images of Aborigines, Hansen takes us through the whole history of this dilemma in a few deeply-packed but lucid paragraphs. These provide his ballast in taking on two groups or types of silencers on the issue, as it is played out today: those among his own profession (widening out to academia) who evade the issue through peripheral theorising; and those among certain representatives of indigenous communities who in effect bury the issue through their demands for complete suppression of the images concerned or highly selective access.
Hansen’s plea is to liberate these images from both parties into the arena of wider and ongoing public debate. (He’s not absolutist about this; there are some types of image, he recognises, that should properly remain sacrosanct.) This plea has important implications, as he eloquently attests, for the future of the whole reconciliation movement in Australia. It’s also a pertinent intervention in the debates over the role of historical study and empirically-based truth-seeking in any society.
The Prize for a First Book of History
($15,000)
Becoming African Americans: Black Public Life in Harlem, 1919-1939, Clare Corbould
Judge’s comments: Becoming African Americans presents an original and important argument about the ways in which the descendants of freed slaves in the United States, in the early decades of the twentieth century, redefined their identity in terms of their African heritage and history. Widely researched and engagingly written, Becoming African Americans is a multi-layered work, enriched by attention to gender dynamics, local politics and transnational history. Corbould’s fresh and original approach to the formation of modern African American identity in the 1920s and 1930s, especially during the creative ferment of the Harlem Renaissance, renders their history not only ‘closer to their hearts’ desire but also closer to the facts.
The Prize for Indigenous Writing
($15,000)
Legacy, Larissa Behrendt
Judge’s comments: Legacy is an educative social document and a universal story about reconciliation and the power of forgiveness. The author gives insight to a world that is seldom explored – that of contemporary urban Aboriginal family, and in particular the complex relationship between a lawyer daughter and her activist father. Serious themes are canvassed; what is Aboriginal sovereignty, the ‘rights agenda’ versus ‘practical reconciliation’, self-determination and the stolen generations, but it is the tensions within the interpersonal relationships that carry the thrust of the narrative. The father is an influential and revered activist, a charismatic man, yet seen through his daughter’s eyes, he is also deeply flawed. Behrendt captures the mood of a daughter’s love as she struggles to understand her father’s infidelity. Legacy is at once personal and political; Behrendt rings true.
The John Curtain Prize for Journalism
($15,000)
Who Killed Mr Ward?, Janine Cohen and Liz Jackson, Four Corners, ABC Television
Judge’s comments: Legacy is an educative social document and a universal story about reconciliation and the power of forgiveness. The author gives insight to a world that is seldom explored – that of contemporary urban Aboriginal family, and in particular the complex relationship between a lawyer daughter and her activist father. Serious themes are canvassed; what is Aboriginal sovereignty, the ‘rights agenda’ versus ‘practical reconciliation’, self-determination and the stolen generations, but it is the tensions within the interpersonal relationships that carry the thrust of the narrative. The father is an influential and revered activist, a charismatic man, yet seen through his daughter’s eyes, he is also deeply flawed. Behrendt captures the mood of a daughter’s love as she struggles to understand her father’s infidelity. Legacy is at once personal and political; Behrendt rings true.
The Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript by an Emerging Victorian Writer (
$15,000)
House of Sticks, Peggy Frew
Judge’s comments: A tightly crafted novel, House of Sticks is a revealing portrait of domestic life. Bonnie is a musician whose career has been interrupted by the burdens of motherhood. Her almost happy life is threatened by the intrusion of a character from her husband’s past, whose unsettling presence provides the catalyst for this very suspenseful novel. A thread of paranoia and disquiet is woven through the narrative, drawing the reader forward to its surprising conclusion.
Judge’s comments: Possession is a fascinating concept: a stylish and compact collection of poems juxtaposing the journeys (and words) of Cook (and Banks et al) in the southern oceans, to modern day Kangaroo Valley (NSW). Nicholson has managed a lyrical hence moving, and at the same time an historically and culturally convincing evocation of this formative subject matter with a consistent sharpness of language and craft of the highest quality.
Judge’s comments: Possession is a fascinating concept: a stylish and compact collection of poems juxtaposing the journeys (and words) of Cook (and Banks et al) in the southern oceans, to modern day Kangaroo Valley (NSW). Nicholson has managed a lyrical hence moving, and at the same time an historically and culturally convincing evocation of this formative subject matter with a consistent sharpness of language and craft of the highest quality.
Judge’s comments: Possession is a fascinating concept: a stylish and compact collection of poems juxtaposing the journeys (and words) of Cook (and Banks et al) in the southern oceans, to modern day Kangaroo Valley (NSW). Nicholson has managed a lyrical hence moving, and at the same time an historically and culturally convincing evocation of this formative subject matter with a consistent sharpness of language and craft of the highest quality.
Judge’s comments: Possession is a fascinating concept: a stylish and compact collection of poems juxtaposing the journeys (and words) of Cook (and Banks et al) in the southern oceans, to modern day Kangaroo Valley (NSW). Nicholson has managed a lyrical hence moving, and at the same time an historically and culturally convincing evocation of this formative subject matter with a consistent sharpness of language and craft of the highest quality.
($15,000)
($15,000)
And No More Shall We Part, Tom Holloway, A Bit Of Argy Bargy
And No More Shall We Part, Tom Holloway, A Bit Of Argy Bargy
And No More Shall We Part, Tom Holloway, A Bit Of Argy Bargy
And No More Shall We Part, Tom Holloway, A Bit Of Argy Bargy
And No More Shall We Part, Tom Holloway, A Bit Of Argy Bargy
And No More Shall We Part, Tom Holloway, A Bit Of Argy Bargy
And No More Shall We Part, Tom Holloway, A Bit Of Argy Bargy
And No More Shall We Part, Tom Holloway, A Bit Of Argy Bargy
And No More Shall We Part, Tom Holloway, A Bit Of Argy Bargy
And No More Shall We Part, Tom Holloway, A Bit Of Argy Bargy
And No More Shall We Part, Tom Holloway, A Bit Of Argy Bargy
And No More Shall We Part, Tom Holloway, A Bit Of Argy Bargy
And No More Shall We Part, Tom Holloway, A Bit Of Argy Bargy
And No More Shall We Part, Tom Holloway, A Bit Of Argy Bargy
Judge’s comments: Holloway’s latest play tells a story of intimate tragedy via wonderfully restrained and sparse text. Bold but simple, the story shifts backwards and forwards through time, creating conflict through stillness, and evoking an entire world through the presence of its two conflicted but deeply loving characters.
Judge’s comments: Holloway’s latest play tells a story of intimate tragedy via wonderfully restrained and sparse text. Bold but simple, the story shifts backwards and forwards through time, creating conflict through stillness, and evoking an entire world through the presence of its two conflicted but deeply loving characters.
The Prize for Young Adult Fiction
The Prize for Young Adult Fiction
Raw Blue, Kirsty Eagar
Judge’s comments: Raw Blue is a wonderfully assured novel that takes the reader from the stagnant aftermath of trauma to the subtle beginnings of recovery. Carly has dropped out of uni and works a monotonous kitchen job in order to devote the rest of her time to her real passion – surfing. Riding the bright skin of the ocean is where Carly belongs, and is the only place where she can begin to escape what happened to her two years ago at Schoolies. Raw Blue packs an unsentimental punch that is not easily forgotten.
Judge’s comments: Raw Blue is a wonderfully assured novel that takes the reader from the stagnant aftermath of trauma to the subtle beginnings of recovery. Carly has dropped out of uni and works a monotonous kitchen job in order to devote the rest of her time to her real passion – surfing. Riding the bright skin of the ocean is where Carly belongs, and is the only place where she can begin to escape what happened to her two years ago at Schoolies. Raw Blue packs an unsentimental punch that is not easily forgotten.
($15,000)
($15,000)
“Seeing Truganini”, David Hansen, Australian Book Review
($15,000)
($15,000)
Becoming African Americans: Black Public Life in Harlem, 1919-1939, Clare Corbould
($15,000)
($15,000)
Legacy, Larissa Behrendt
($15,000)
($15,000)
Who Killed Mr Ward?, Janine Cohen and Liz Jackson, Four Corners, ABC Television
$15,000)
$15,000)
House of Sticks, Peggy Frew
House of Sticks, Peggy Frew
House of Sticks, Peggy Frew
House of Sticks, Peggy Frew
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