The Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction: Winner 2003

Judges report

Shanghai Dancing by Brian Castro (Giramondo)

The frame for Brian Castro's 'fictional autobiography', Shanghai Dancing, is the decision by Antonio Castro, a writer, to recover his sense of a homeland by returning to China. This is a story about family life - about unfaithful husbands, unyielding wives, duplicitous siblings and the ties that bind uncles with nephews. A sense of life's irony and unpredictability is handed down by Isaac de Castro who was burnt at the stake for refusing to convert to Catholicism in the 17th century, to Antonio Castro who, in the late 20th century, is determined to be a writer in the midst of a family of more and less kosher businessmen.

Shanghai Dancing breaks all the rules. Chronology is subverted as the novel moves across the centuries from the 17th century through to the late 20th century. Locations include Macau, Shanghai, Sydney and Brazil. Momentous events in history are observed through Castro's lens - from the Inquisition through to the Japanese invasion of China. As the narrator's father reminds us, 'the only use for the past is to get a future out of it'.

This is a novel full of riches - there are gorgeously entertaining exegetical digressions on the origin of the term 'ladies' man', the definition of a bastard, an uncle's obsession with calligraphy and disquisitions by Nigerians on the nature of civilization.

Brian Castro is the quintessential post-colonial writer as intellectual: writing from Australia, across history and culture, a refusenik of the parochial and the insular.