Speakeasy

The Age Short Story Competition is open; if you’ve got an unpublished short story (less than 3,000 words long), have a go!

Entry details and more guidelines here, on The Age website.

The shortlists for the inagural Prime Minister’s Literary Awards have been announced by Arts Minister Peter Garrett.

Fiction:

Burning In by Mireille Juchau (Giramondo)
El Dorado by Dorothy Porter (Picador)
Jamaica by Malcolm Knox (Allen and Unwin)
Sorry by Gail Jones (Vintage)
The Complete Stories by David Malouf (Knopf)
The Widow and Her Hero by Tom Keneally (Doubleday)
The Zookeeper’s War by Steven Conte (Fourth Estate)

 Non-fiction:

A History of Queensland by Raymond Evans (Cambridge University Press)
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time by Clive James (Picador)
My Life as a Traitor by Zarah Ghahramani with Robert Hillman (Scribe)
Napoleon: The Path to Power, 1769–1799 by Philip Dwyer (Bloomsbury)
Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers by Philip Jones (Wakefield Press)
Shakespeare’s Wife by Germaine Greer (Bloomsbury)
Vietnam: The Australian War by Paul Ham (HarperCollins)

The Age Book of the Year shortlist has also been announced; more info here.

With 36% of the almost 8000 votes cast, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children was last night named the Best of the Booker in an award ceremony in London.

Currently touring in the US Rushdie was unable to attend in person, but sent a pre-recorded acceptance speech, saying: "Marvellous news! I’m absolutely delighted and would like to thank all those readers around the world who voted for Midnight’s Children."

The Best of the Booker celebrates the last 40 years of the Booker Prize. Midnight’s Children originally won in 1981, and then took the Booker of Bookers, (Best of 25 years) in 1993.

Comment and reaction at The Guardian UK.

Steven Carroll has been awarded the prestigious 2008 Miles Franklin Award for his novel Time We Have Taken, published by Harper Collins Australia.

Accepting the award Carroll said ‘It’s an extraordinary thrill and an honour - but it’s also daunting to be joining a long list of authors whom you’ve either studied or admired for years. The Miles Franklin comes with the gravitas of a whole literary tradition, and you feel that weight almost instantly.’

The Judging Panel praised the work as a ‘poised, philosophically profound exploration of the question, a stand-alone work that is moving and indelible in its evocation of the extraordinary in ordinary lives.’

Source and more information here.

Nominations have been announced for the 2008 AWGIE Awards. From the press release:

Multiple AWGIE winners Kym Goldsworthy, Greg Haddrick, Katherine Thomson and Noëlle Janaczewska have again received nominations this year for their writing excellence, with Noëlle nominated in both the Community and Youth Theatre and Radio Adaptation categories.

The scripts of four uniquely Australian films have been nominated in the Original Feature Film category: The Black Balloon by Elissa Down with Jimmy the Exploder; The Tender Hook by Jonathan Ogilvie; Cactus by Jasmine Yuen-Carrucan; and Acolytes by Shayne Armstrong with Jon Hewitt and Shane Krause.

The link has a complete list of the nominees.

Congratulations to the winners of the Australian Book Industry Awards, announced in Melbourne last night. Taking top honours was Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks who nabbed both the Australian Book of the Year award and the Literary Fiction Book of the Year award for her latest novel, People of the Book.

Other individual winners include David Malouf, Maggie Beer and Kaz Cooke.

More at The Sydney Morning Herald.

Congratulations to the winners of the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog took both the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and The Book of the Year Award. Other winners include Tom Griffith (Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction for Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica) and Thomas Keneally who won The Special Award. 

See Sydney Morning Herald for the full list.

He did it once in 1981, then took the ‘best of 25 years award’ in 1993 and now Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is being tipped to do a unique treble and win the Booker 40th Anniversary Award.

The other books on the shortlist are:

Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road
Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda
JM Coetzee’s Disgrace
JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur
Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist

Voting is open to the public worldwide so just click here to register your vote

Read more at The Sydney Morning Herald.

The longlist for the Miles Franklin Award has just been released. And the nominees are:

Landscape of Farewell by Alex Miller
Love Without Hope by Rodney Hall
Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital
Secrets of the Sea by Nicholas Shakespeare
Sorry by Gail Jones
The Fern Tattoo by David Brooks
The Memory Room by Christopher Koch
The Time We Have Taken by Steven Carroll
The Widow and her Hero by Tom Keneally

The shortlist will be announced on 17 April, and the winner (who receives $42,000) on 19 June.

Did you know there were annual awards for blogs??

The Bloggies, or The Annual Weblog Awards, pick out the best blogs from Aust/NZ, Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, Canada and America, with awards for Photography, Craft/Graphics, and in topics like Music blogs, Fashion, Gossip, etc. Speakeasy isn’t quite there yet, but it’s something to aspire to…