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Melbourne Prize for Literature finalists announced

The finalists for this year’s Melbourne Prize for Literature, the Best Writing Award and the Writers Prize have been announced.

The finalists for the $60,000 Melbourne Prize for Literature, presented to a Victorian author ‘whose body of published or produced work has made an outstanding contribution to Australian literature, as well as to cultural and intellectual life’, are:

  • Steven Carroll
  • Brenda Niall
  • Christos Tsiolkas
  • Chris Wallace-Crabbe
  • Alexis Wright

 

The finalists for the $30,000 Best Writing Award, presented for ‘a piece of published or produced work of outstanding clarity, originality and creativity by a Victorian writer’, are:

  • Speechless A year in my father’s business (James Button, MUP)
  • Savages (Patricia Cornelius, Playlab)
  • The Memory Trap (Andrea Goldsmith, Fourth Estate)
  • On Warne (Gideon Haigh, Penguin)
  • Mother (Daniel Keene, Currency Press)
  • Coal Creek (Alex Miller, A&U) 
  • Murder in Mississippi (John Safran, Penguin Books) 
  • The Double (Maria Takolander, Text)
  • Hot Little Hands (Abigail Ulman, Hamish Hamilton)
  • The Bush (Don Watson, Hamish Hamilton)

 

The finalists for the $20,000 Writers Prize, a one-off prize presented to an essay of between 10,000 and 20,000 words that includes Melbourne, Victoria or Australia as part of its subjects, are:  

  • Robyn Annear for ‘Places Without Poetry’
  • Nick Gadd for ‘The Unconscious of the city’
  • Kate Ryan for ‘Psychotherapy for Normal People’
  • David Sornig for ‘Jubilee: a hymn for Elsie Williams on Dudley Flats’
  • Maria Tumarkin for ‘No Skin’ 

 

The winners of this year’s awards will be announced on 11 November. Each of the finalists will also be eligible for the $5000 Civic Choice Award, which will be voted on by members of the public. Votes can be cast via the Melbourne Prize website or at a public exhibition showcasing each of the finalists, which will be held at Federation Square between 9 and 23 November.

This year’s finalists were selected by Readings owner Mark Rubbo, Melbourne Writers Festival CEO Lisa Dempster, writer Craig Sherborne and Wheeler Centre director Michael Williams.

For more information about the awards, click here.

 

Category: Local news