2008 PMLA winners, shortlist and judges
The winners, shortlistees and judges of the 2008 Prime Minister's Literary Awards.
Judges 2009
Fiction panel
Professor Peter Pierce (Chair)
John Marsden
Margaret Throsby
Nonfiction panel
Professor Hilary Charlesworth (Chair)
Sally Morgan
John Doyle
Non-fiction
WINNER: Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers – Philip Jones
Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers
WINNER
Shortlist year: 2008
Shortlist category: Non-fiction
Published by: Wakefield Press
Winner
In the Flinders Ranges, a Kuyani man presents a cake of ochre to a European doctor, in earnest proof that the threatened ochre mine is ‘as important as the bible is to Christians’. As netted bags are exchanged for cloth south of Port Darwin, a surveyor’s linguistic hobby draws him close to Djerimanga people, near enough to become the unwitting candidate for a blood debt.
Ochre and Rust takes nine Aboriginal and colonial artefacts from their museum shelves, and positions them at the centre of these gripping, poignant tales set in the heart of Australia's frontier zone.
About the author
Philip Jones
Philip Jones is a curator and historian, based at the South Australian Museum.
He has published widely on the history of anthropology and collecting, and on the ethnography and history of the Aboriginal people of the eastern Lake Eyre region. He has also made detailed surveys of European collections of Aboriginal material, and has curated several exhibitions which have travelled to Europe, North America and Asia, including Australia: The Land, The People (2005–2006) and Boomerang (1996–2002) and the accompanying book Boomerang: Behind an Australian Icon.
Judges’ comments
The author sets himself the difficult task of extrapolating the implications of cultural contact between European and Aboriginal people through the examination of objects, most now in Australian museums. These disparate objects include a cake of red ochre, Aboriginal shields and Daisy Bates’ travelling suit.
The book is written with elegance, simplicity and outstanding clarity. The insights drawn are through a true historian’s eye and the work illuminates larger debates about encounters between the first Australians and the European settlers.
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time – Clive James
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time
Shortlist year: 2008
Shortlist category: Non-fiction
Published by: Pan MacMillan
An almanac combining a comprehensive survey of modern culture with an annotated index of who-was-who and what-was-what, Cultural Amnesia is Clive's unique take on the places and the faces that shaped the 20th-century. From Charles de Gaulle to Thomas Mann, from Hitler to Wittgenstein, from Argentina to Australia, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record – and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now.
About the author
Clive James
Clive James is the author of more than 20 books. As well as essays, he has published collections of literary and television criticism, travel writing, verse and novels, plus three volumes of autobiography.
In 1992 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia and in 2003 he was awarded the Philip Hodgins memorial medal for literature.
Judges’ comments
This book presents Clive James’ accounts of the lives, thoughts and legacies of an astonishing, and idiosyncratic, cast of characters, including Sir Thomas Browne, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Margaret Thatcher and Beatrix Potter. It is a glorious collision of style and substance. There is no attempt at objectivity; this is a chronicle of the author’s almost visceral connection with his own adventures in learning. This leads to great clarity of insight in many cases. Many chapters are crafted with extraordinary precision and invention, which are two of the hallmarks of literature.
My Life as a Traitor – Zarah Ghahramani, Robert Hillman
My Life as a Traitor
Shortlist year: 2008
Shortlist category: Non-fiction
Published by: Scribe Publications
Zarah Ghahramani was born in Tehran in 1981, two years after Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran to establish the Islamic Republic. Her life changed suddenly in 2001 when, after having taken part in student demonstrations, she was arrested and charged with ‘inciting crimes against the people of the Islamic Republic of Iran’.
My Life As a Traitor is a beautifully written memoir of Zarah’s life in Iran, revealing the human face behind the turmoil of the modern Middle East. Her descriptions of Persian culture, contemporary Iranian society, and radical Islamist politics are eye-opening, as is her account of the growing voice of dissent in Iran. But it is the story of Zarah’s struggle to survive the nightmare world of Iran’s oppressive regime that makes My Life As a Traitor an unforgettable testimony to the strength of the human spirit.
About the author
Zarah Ghahramani
Zarah Ghahramani was born in Tehran in 1981, two years after Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran to establish the Islamic Republic.
Her life changed suddenly in 2001 when, after having taken part in student demonstrations, she was arrested (literally snatched off the street by secret police) and charged with ‘inciting crimes against the people of the Islamic Republic of Iran’. While imprisoned in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison she faced brutal interrogation: her head was shaved and she was beaten.
After being released, she was forbidden to return to university and soon realised that she had no future in her native land. Robert Hillman, an Australian writer, met and befriended Zarah in Iran in 2003 and helped her to escape to Australia, where she now has permanent residency.
About the author
Robert Hillman
Robert Hillman’s first novel, A Life of Days, appeared in 1988. Since then, he has had four more novels published, and a number of works of non-fiction, including a memoir, The Boy in the Green Suit, which won the Australian National Biography Award.
His 2008 biography of an Afghani refugee, The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif, became a set text for VCE English students in 2010.
In 2008, Hillman co-authored, with Zarah Ghahramani, My Life as a Traitor, a young Iranian woman's account of the realities behind the turmoil of the modern Middle East.
His biography of blind indigenous singer, Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu was published in 2013.
Judges’ comments
This is the author’s account of her life in post-revolutionary Iran where she grew up. She was arrested when she was 20 for taking part in student demonstrations and then was imprisoned. It is a moving and beautifully written book, full of small details of life that widens out into a shocking story of political oppression.
The book also contains meditations on Persian culture and accounts of deep and warm family relationships that make it much more than simply a grim account of imprisonment and torture.
Napoleon: The Path to Power, 1769–1799 – Philip Dwyer
Napoleon: The Path to Power, 1769–1799
Shortlist year: 2008
Shortlist category: Non-fiction
Published by: Bloomsbury Publishing
Napoleon Bonaparte's rise to power was neither inevitable nor smooth; it was full of mistakes, wrong turns and pitfalls. During his formative years his identity was constantly shifting, his character ambiguous and his intentions often ill-defined. He was, however, highly ambitious, and it was this ruthless drive that advanced his career.
This book examines the extraordinary evolution of Napoleon's character and the means by which at the age of thirty he became head of the most powerful country in Europe and skilfully fashioned the image of himself that laid the foundation of the legend that endures to this day.
About the author
Philip Dwyer
Philip Dwyer studied in Perth, Berlin and Paris, where he was a student of France's pre-eminent Napoleonic scholar, Jean Tulard. He has published widely on the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, and is the editor of Napoleon and Europe, the author of Talleyrand, and has co-edited Napoleon and His Empire: Europe, 1804-1814.
He is currently a Senior Lecturer in Modern European History and is Director of the Centre for the History of Violence at the University of Newcastle, Australia.
Judges’ comments
This is a wonderfully engaging history of Napoleon’s first 30 years. It gives fascinating accounts of the murky world of Corsican politics, and also of Napoleon’s complex relationship with his wife Josephine.
The modern resonances of this book are remarkable. The challenges facing Napoleon in the Middle East echo through to today. As well, given Dwyer’s view, Napoleon may well have been the first of the modern politicians to use the media consciously to create an heroic image.
The book is meticulously researched, well written and is a work of significant merit.
Shakespeare’s Wife – Germaine Greer
Shakespeare's Wife
Shortlist year: 2008
Shortlist category: Non-fiction
Published by: Bloomsbury Publishing
Little is known of the wife of England's greatest playwright. In play after play Shakespeare presents the finding of a worthy wife as a triumphant denouement, yet scholars persist in believing that his own wife was resented and even hated by him.
Here Germaine Greer strives to re-embed the story of their marriage in its social context and presents new hypotheses about the life of the farmer's daughter who married our greatest poet. This is a daring, insightful book that asks new questions, opens new fields of investigation and research, and rights the wrongs done to Ann Shakespeare.
About the author
Germaine Greer
Germaine Greer gained her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1967 with a thesis on Shakespeare's early comedies and has taught Shakespeare at universities in Australia, Britain and the US.
In 1986 she was invited to contribute the volume on Shakespeare to the prestigious Past Masters series.
In 1989 she set up her own publishing imprint, Stump Cross Books, and went on to publish scholarly editions of Katherine Philips, Anne Wharton and Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea.
She lives on three acres in north-west Essex, with two dogs, thirteen geese and a fluctuating number of doves.
Judges’ comments
This book sets out to rehabilitate Ann Hathaway’s history, long dismissed as a minor detail in Shakespeare’s life.
As an examination of life in Stratford in the 16th century it is superb, the detail extraordinary and the style engrossing. It is a work of considerable scholarship -- the amount of detail the author has recovered from tomb stones and forgotten records is impressive – as well as displaying great mastery of prose. Shakespeare’s plays are brilliantly used to shed light on his domestic relationships. The argument is lively and engaging.
Fiction
WINNER: The Zoo Keeper’s War – Steven Conte
The Zoo Keeper’s War
WINNER
Shortlist year: 2008
Shortlist category: Fiction
Published by: HarperCollins
Winner
In wartime Berlin, where foreign accents are a source of suspicion and where busybodies report the names of neighbours’ dinner guests to the Gestapo, embattled zookeeper Vera forms an unlikely bond with a forced labourer brought in to replace the staff members drafted into the war effort.
The Zookeeper's War is a powerful novel of a marriage, and of a city collapsing. It confronts not only the brutality of war but the possibility of heroism - and delivers an ending that is both shocking and deeply moving.
About the author
Steven Conte
Steven Conte was born in 1966 and raised in Guyra in rural New South Wales. After six years of boarding school he lived and worked in Europe, and his first published short stories drew on his experiences as a traveller.
He has lived in Sydney and Canberra and most recently in Melbourne.
Bank teller, waiter, barman, cleaner, life model, public servant, taxi driver, receptionist, university tutor, editor and book reviewer are some of the jobs with which he has supported his writing.
Judges’ comments
Judges noted Stephen Conte's The Zookeeper's War as a striking first novel that is imbued with the melancholy of a collapsing world—Nazi Germany in the last years of the Second World War. Vera, married to the keeper of the Berlin Zoo, struggles each day to survive Allied air raids and betrayal by neighbours.
All around are frightened people, some tenacious, some treacherous. While Conte's research is formidable, it is the breadth of his historical imagination that enriches this novel.
As characters negotiate intricate and destructive moral choices, the narrative drive is sustained to the satisfyingly uncertain ending.
Burning In – Mireille Juchau
Burning In
Shortlist year: 2008
Shortlist category: Fiction
Published by: Giramondo Publishing
In her late twenties, Martine Hartmann moves from Sydney to New York to pursue her career as a photographer, leaving behind her mother Lotte, a holocaust survivor.
Nine years later, Martine's daughter Ruby goes missing in Central Park. Ruby's disappearance throws Martine into an emotional struggle which threatens to overwhelm her, but which also, in time, brings her to understand Lotte's anxieties and inhibitions, and to discover the act of abandonment at their heart.
Burning In is a closely observed psychological novel with an extraordinary eye for detail, and an unerring instinct for the suppressed rhythms of thought and feeling. Structured around two mysteries and three generations of Jewish women, it is an extended meditation on loss and guilt, exploring the long shadows cast by the past on the present, and the relationship between parental love and the imperatives of survival.
About the author
Mireille Juchau
Mireille Juchau’s first novel Machines for Feeling was shortlisted for the 1999 Vogel/Australian Literary Award.
In 2002 her play, White Gifts, won the Perishable Theatre International Women’s Playwriting Competition and was performed and published in the US.
Known also for her arts essays and reviews, Juchau has received grants from the Ian Potter Foundation, Arts NSW and the Australia Council, and is a recipient of a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship.
Judges’ comments
Another lost child is at the heart of Mireille Juchau's Burning In (Giramondo Publishing). Martine, a Sydney photographer now based in New York, has to surmount personal grief to effect a reconstitution of her own life, but also of the lives of her family, shadowed as they are by the legacy of the Holocaust.
The novel ranges fluently across continents and generations. Its title metaphor - of photographic prints given extra exposure to darken some areas - indicates the sombre tone of an accomplished novel, yet one that reaches for the recovery of joy.
Sorry – Gail Jones
Sorry
Shortlist year: 2008
Shortlist category: Fiction
Published by: Penguin Random House
This is a story that can only be told in a whisper . . .
In the remote outback of Western Australia during the Second World War, English anthropologist Nicholas Keene and his wife, Stella, raise a lonely child, Perdita. Her upbringing is far from ordinary: in a shack in the wilderness, with a distant father burying himself in books and an unstable mother whose knowledge of Shakespeare forms the backbone of the girl's limited education.
Emotionally adrift, Perdita becomes friends with a deaf and mute boy, Billy, and an Aboriginal girl, Mary. Perdita and Mary come to call one another sister and to share a very special bond. They are content with life in this remote corner of the globe, until a terrible event lays waste to their lives.
Through this exquisite story of Perdita's troubled childhood, Gail Jones explores the values of friendship, loyalty and sacrifice with a brilliance that has already earned her numerous accolades for her previous novels, Dreams of Speaking and Sixty Lights.
About the author
Gail Jones
Gail Jones is the author of two short-story collections, a critical monograph, and the novels Black Mirror, Sixty Lights, Dreams of Speaking, Sorry and Five Bells.
Three times shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, her prizes include the WA Premier's Award for Fiction, the Nita B. Kibble Award, the Steele Rudd Award, the Age Book of the Year Award, the Adelaide Festival Award for Fiction and the ASAL Gold Medal.
She has also been shortlisted for international awards, including the IMPAC and the Prix Femina.
Her fiction has been translated into nine languages.
Judges’ comments
Set in outback Western Australia during the Second World War, Gail Jones's Sorry (Vintage) explores the strange, intense, deadly conformation of 'a ruined family'.
Perdita, whose name indicates that this is the story of a lost child, is forced to deal with loneliness, the obsessions of others and the false consolations of withdrawal from the world. Yet some around her are 'given to the marvel of things'; there is some prospect of reconciliation between individuals and races in this unusual, disturbing, highly-wrought fiction.
El Dorado – Dorothy Porter
El Dorado
Shortlist year: 2008
Shortlist category: Fiction
Published by: Pan Macmillan
There is a serial child killer stalking the streets of Melbourne. He kills his victims gently and places a gold mark on their head. The mark of El Dorado. He doesn't kill because he hates children, but because he loves them. He believes in Childhood Innocence, and he will kill to entomb them there...
This is a book about a friendship under siege, and about how jealousy and betrayal cast very long shadows - which can stalk you to the grave.
El Dorado is Dorothy Porter's finest verse novel to date. Unflinching and morally uncompromising, it is both a complex thriller and a completely unique, and compelling, reading experience from Australia's most maverick and versatile poet.
About the author
Dorothy Porter
Dorothy Porter is an acclaimed poet, lyricist and librettist.
Before Time Could Change Us, for which she wrote the lyrics (and Katie Noonan sang on the album), won an ARIA for Best Jazz Album 2005.
Her second opera, The Eternity Man, for which she wrote the libretto, is in pre-production with the UK's Channel Four for a film.
She is the author of the bestselling The Monkey's Mask, What a Piece of Work, and Wild Surmise, all of which have won numerous literary awards.
Dorothy passed away in December 2008 at the age of 54.
Judges’ comments
Dorothy Porter's fifth verse novel, El Dorado (Picador), centres on the fate of lost children, a sadness that has haunted the Australian imagination since the nineteenth century. Now the agent of harm is not the bush, but human predators, in this case a serial killer who murders but does not molest his victims in order for them to 'stay children forever'.
The poetry is edgy, taut, studded with unsettling images. This bravura performance confidently combines the demands of fiction with those of verse.
The Complete Stories – David Malouf
The Complete Stories
Shortlist year: 2008
Shortlist category: Fiction
Published by: Penguin Random House
Thirty-one epic stories from Australia's award-winning author David Malouf.
David Malouf’s imagination inhabits shocking violence, quick humour, appealing warmth and harsh cruelty with equal intensity. He shares tales of bookish boys, taciturn men and intimate stories of men and women looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on.
This is a comprehensive compilation of David’s shorter work. Stories are set in the stark and challenging Australian interior and the more lush and mysterious coastal enclaves; others are set in Australia's past.
The youthful dreams, physical desires and mental despair of Malouf's richly varied characters as they explore their place in the world are always moving and universal.
Readers won't want to skim a single page of the 31 stories in this epic collection, a few of which are novella length. Together, they represent a quarter-century of a formidable craftsman's career.
About the author
David Malouf
David Malouf is the internationally acclaimed author of novels including Ransom, The Great World (winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ prize and the Prix Femina Etranger), Remembering Babylon (winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), An Imaginary Life, Conversations at Curlow Creek, Dream Stuff, Every Move You Make and his autobiographical classic 12 Edmondstone Street. His Collected Stories won the 2008 Australia-Asia Literary Award.
His most recent books are A First Place, The Writing Life and Being There.
He was born in 1934 and was brought up in Brisbane.
Judges’ comments
David Malouf's The Complete Stories (Knopf) represents one of the finest achievements in short fiction in the national literature; this from a writer who is also a celebrated poet and novelist.
Traversing a quarter century of his career, the stories insinuate us into the consciousness of individuals at points of crisis, muted or violent. The prose is eloquent, resonant, measured.
The settings transport us across countries, languages and different ways of reckoning the world with a cosmopolitan ease matched by few Australian writers.
Jamaica: A Novel – Malcolm Knox
Jamaica: A Novel
Shortlist year: 2008
Shortlist category: Fiction
Published by: Allen & Unwin
A group of six friends converge on the fabled island of Jamaica to compete in a marathon relay swim across treacherous water. Most have known each other since school, scions of wealth, breeding and privilege and members of the upper echelon of supposedly classless Sydney.
The odd man out is new money Jeremy Hutchison (Hut), who's tolerated by the group because of the fortune he's made, but never really accepted.
It is a group of people on the edge of crisis, none more so than Hut, who is guarding a terrible truth. As the sleazy charms of Jamaica insinuate themselves onto the group, things fall apart in predictable and surprising ways, and the secrets of the past must be addressed.
About the author
Malcolm Knox
Malcolm Knox is the author of two previous novels, Summerland and A Private Man. Formerly literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, Malcolm broke the Norma Khouri hoax, for which he was awarded a Walkley Award.
He is also the author of Secrets of the Jury Room.
He lives in Sydney.
Judges’ comments
No recent Australian novelist has probed the nation's masculinity more acridly, yet sympathetically, than Malcolm Knox. Nor has any contemporary writer more subtly dissected the role of sport in male self-definition and self-deception.
Jamaica: A novel (Allen & Unwin), 'dedicated to the facts that got out of the way of a good story', explores the desires and expectations of rich men whose excesses find more flagrant and damaging expression when they rampage abroad. Knox is perhaps the foremost analyst of the nihilism that is disturbingly familiar in Australian life.
The Widow and her Hero – Tom Keneally
The Widow and her Hero
Shortlist year: 2008
Shortlist category: Fiction
Published by: Penguin Random House
To be a hero's wife in times supposedly suited to the heroic caused a woman to swallow doubt.
I knew in general terms I was marrying a hero. The burden lay lightly on Leo, and to be a hero's wife in times supposedly suited to the heroic caused a woman to swallow doubt . . . The Japanese had barely been turned away. It was heresy and unlucky to undermine young men at such a supreme hour.
When Grace married the genial and handsome Captain Leo Waterhouse in Australia in 1943, they were young, in love—and at war. Like many other young men and women, they were ready, willing and able to put the war effort first. They never seriously doubted that they would come through unscathed.
But Leo never returned from a commando mission masterminded by his own hero figure, an eccentric and charismatic man who inspired total loyalty from those under his command. The world moved on to new alliances, leaving Grace, like so many widows, to bear the pain of losing the love of her life and wonder what it had all been for.
Sixty years on, Grace is still haunted by the tragedy of her doomed hero when the real story of his ill-fated secret mission is at last unearthed. As new fragments of her hero's story emerge, Grace is forced to keep revising her picture of what happened to Leo and his fellow commandoes—until she learns about the final piece in the jigsaw, and the ultimate betrayal.
About the author
Tom Keneally
Tom Keneally won the Booker Prize in 1982 with Schindler's Ark, later made into the Steven Spielberg Academy Award-winning film Schindler's List.
His non-fiction includes the memoir Searching for Schindler and Three Famines, an LA Times Book of the Year, and the histories The Commonwealth of Thieves, The Great Shame and American Scoundrel.
His fiction includes Shame and the Captives, The Daughters of Mars, The Widow and Her Hero (shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award), An Angel in Australia and Bettany's Book.
His novels The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest, and Confederates were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize, while Bring Larks and Heroes and Three Cheers for the Paraclete won the Miles Franklin Award. The People's Train was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, South East Asia division.
Judges’ comments
In the fifth decade of his career, Thomas Keneally's powers of renewal and his unflagging appetite for story-telling distinguish his latest novel, The Widow and her Hero (Doubleday).
He turns to his favoured historical period—the Second World War (setting of a number of his works and of several of the short-listed novels here) - and in particular to the Australian commando raids against Japanese shipping at Singapore in 1943 and 1944.
This master-class in fiction is also an interrogation of the nature of heroism, perhaps unproblematic for men in action, but of deep ambivalence for the women left behind.
