NSW Premier’s History Awards 2014 shortlists announced

The shortlists for the 2014 New South Wales Premier’s History Awards have been announced.

The shortlisted titles in each category are:

Australian History Prize ($15,000)

• Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War (Joan Beaumont, A&U)
• The Aboriginal Story of Burke and Wills: Forgotten Narratives (ed by Ian Clark & Fred Cahir, CSIRO Publishing)
• The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (Clare Wright, Text)

General History Prize ($15,000)

• Encountering the Pacific in the Age of Enlightenment (John Gascoigne, Cambridge University Press)
• Antipodean America: Australasia and the Constitution of U.S. Literature (Paul Giles, Oxford University Press)
• Lamaze: An International History (Paula Michaels, Oxford University Press)

NSW Community and Regional History Prize ($15,000)

• The Wallpapered Manse: The Rescue of an Endangered House (Peter Freeman, The Watermark Press)
• Coast: A History of the New South Wales Edge (Ian Hoskins, NewSouth)
• Sydney Mechanic School of Arts: A History (Garry Wotherspoon, Sydney Mechanic School of Arts)

Young People’s History Prize ($15,000)

• The Road to Gundagai (Jackie French, HarperCollins)
• Yoko’s Diary (ed by Paul Ham, translated by Debbie Edwards, HarperCollins)
• Australians All (Nadia Wheatley, illus by Ken Searle, A&U)

Multimedia History Prize ($15,000)

• Public Intimacies: The 1974 Royal Commission on Human Relationships (Michelle Arrow, Catherine Freyne & Timothy Nicastri, ABC Radio National/Hindsight)
• Persons of Interest: Gary Foley (Ep 3) (Haydn Keenan, Smart Street Films)
• The Reef (www.the‐reef.com.au) (Ian McCalman, Penguin/Spring in Alaska).

Eight judges considered almost 150 entries across the five prize categories. The winner of the Australian Military History Prize—introduced this year to commemorate the centenary anniversary of World War I—will be chosen from the entries submitted for the Australian History Prize. Books nominated for all prizes must have been published between 1 April 2013 and 31 March 2014.

Award winners will be announced at the State Library of NSW on 5 September.

As previously reported by Books+Publishing, the winners of this year’s NSW Premier’s Literary Awards were announced during the Sydney Writers’ Festival in May.

For more information about the awards, visit the State Library of NSW website here.