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Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction: Winner & Shortlist 2009
Judges: Peter Mews (convenor), Antoni Jach and Jane Sullivan
Judges' comments
There were 94 entries for this year's Vance Palmer Award, a testament to the vibrant state of fiction publishing in Australia. This is of great importance given the dangers to Australian publishing represented by the recent Productivity Commission Report on parallel importation of books. In making their final selection the judges were particularly attracted to novels that exhibited originality, energy and a distinctive voice.
Winner
The 2009 winner of the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction is:
- The Slap
Christos Tsiolkas (Allen & Unwin)
Shortlist
| The PagesMurray Bail
(Text Publishing)
From the start of the opening sentence ('At dawn – what a word: the beginning of the world all over again – the two women set out from Sydney in a small car') to the last sentence ('We are philosophers; we cannot help being.'), readers are positioned in familiar Bailian territory in this ironic, quizzical, meditative tale, full of autumnal drollery, about a Bush philosopher painstakingly writing his masterpiece. It is a stylishly written novel, which further pursues Bail's career-long preoccupations with language, Australianness and Otherness. The Pages is a delightful novel which is as dry as the Murray and as Australian as a 'hay-bail' baking in the sun. |
| Dog BoyEva Hornung
(Text Publishing)
An astonishingly sustained feat of imagination: a portrait from the inside of a four-year-old boy, abandoned by his family, who grows up with a pack of dogs and thinks of himself as a dog. Drawing from legend, the tradition of the Jungle Book and from contemporary stories of feral children in Moscow, Eva Hornung has created an altogether original and thrilling tale that explores how far a child can be drawn into a world of wholly alien sensibilities yet still remain human. Refusing to sentimentalise the dogs or demonise the humans, she challenges our most basic assumptions at every turn. |
| The Boat Nam Le
(Penguin Books)
Rarely do first short story collections appear with the range, versatility, power and mastery that are found in The Boat. In defiance of the old saw 'Write what you know', Nam Le brings us perspectives as various as an apprentice Colombian gangster; a boy uneasily coming of age in a coastal Australian town; the paranoia and wishful thinking of a young woman returning to Iran; and a girl in Hiroshima just before the bomb falls. In the bookending first and last stories, he depicts the Vietnamese 'boat people' experience with both an ironic, sly detachment and an engagement that wrenches the heart. |
| The Slap - WINNERChristos Tsiolkas
(Allen & Unwin)
The most controversial and the most talked-about book on this year’s list of entries, The Slap is a deeply Melbourne book which holds up a mirror to our multi-ethnic, fractured and complex society and reflects it back to us without the usual platitudes. While starting from the slightest of premises (a boy slapped at an iconic suburban barbecue), The Slap is an edgy, energetic and masterfully executed novel that emerges from the Zeitgeist and is not for the faint-hearted. Tsiolkas gets inside the consciousness of such a diverse range of characters with Balzacian verve and gusto; it is an urgent and necessary novel. |
| BreathTim Winton
(Penguin Books)
Ostensibly a coming of age story, Breath is also a meditation on the extremes of human experience. At its core is the story of two boys, Pikelet and Loonie, who discover the intoxicating and addictive thrill of surfing while being encouraged by an older surfer, Sando, to push the boundaries of physical and mental courage. Breath is also an elegy to the sea, allowing the reader to vividly inhabit the excitement and the danger of the waves. It is a beautifully written novel showcasing in particular Winton’s skill in the evocation of both landscape (the darkness and the beauty of the coast) and emotion – the joy and terror of the boys’ experience. | |
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