For a published novel or a collection of short stories.
Prize: $15,000
144 nominations – Judges: Amanda Nettelbeck, Nick Prescott, Ruth Eckert
Winner
Ransom by David Malouf (Knopf/Random House)
In David Malouf’s famously lyrical manner, Ransom inhabits one of the great stories of the western literary tradition, re-imagining the events surrounding the siege of Troy and bringing to life the relationships between characters both central and peripheral to Homer’s The Iliad. This beautiful and resonant short novel tells a story of the experience of war, but it is also a story of fathers and sons, and of the profound links that tie one generation to the next. Ransom is told with a sublime simplicity which forms the essence of the best poetry and the most vivid narration. As he so successfully did in his award winning earlier novel An Imaginary Life, Malouf adapts a classical story to consider the still contemporary question of what kind of forces bind people to their worlds. In reflecting on the nature of our relationships within the world of men as well as to the world of the gods, Ransom is a memorable meditation on love, forgiveness, and ultimately mortality.
Shortlisted
The Bath Fugues by Brian Castro (Giramondo)
Brian Castro’s The Bath Fugues forms an intertwined trio of stories. Musical composition provides the inspiration of the novel’s structure, named for the contrapuntal structure of the fugue (perhaps in acknowledgement of the sense that the act of writing, like music, is fugue-like), and each part modelled on Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations. In wonderfully rich and impressionistic prose, Castro has created a novel that deserves to be regarded as a great work of the intellect, as well as a beautifully crafted work of fiction. Not a traditional realist narrative with a sustained plot, the novel rather forms an excursion into the history of ideas, an endeavour, as the narrator says towards the end of ‘Sarraute’s Surgery’, to get ‘beneath the surface of things’. Bach, the essayist Montaigne, the poet Baudelaire, the theorist Walter Benjamin: each, with their inheritances, inhabits the novel as a fertile motif, an enhanced fictional version of the real, a complex touchstone and inspiration. The Bath Fugues is a breathtaking work and an enriching reading experience.
Summertime by JM Coetzee (Knopf/Random House)
J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime is the third in Coetzee’s series of fictionalised memoirs, focusing on the writer’s life in South Africa in the years 1972 to 1977. Seemingly mocking Gershwin’s lyric ’summertime and the living is easy’, the novel evokes a world that is anything but. From its opening pages, life in apartheid South Africa is rendered, with its horrors, through the second-hand information of the newspaper, read in the drab house where the protagonist, John Coetzee, has returned to live with his ailing father. This is the phase of the writer’s life that his fictional biographer attempts to understand, after his subject’s death, through interviews with people who knew ‘Coetzee’ the writer. Yet the biographer’s subject is perpetually elusive, and fails to emerge as the great man he seeks. What he is given, instead, is a looking-glass world which fails to illuminate ‘the writer’ himself, but rather offers glimpses into the complex milieu of South Africa in the 1970s, the struggles between desire and duty, and the apathy produced by a society that needs to change. Summertime is as starkly confronting as it is seductive and mischievous, and is ultimately a humorous reminder of the precarious unreliability of the biographical subject.
The Séance: A Victorian Mystery by John Harwood (Vintage)
The Séance vividly demonstrates John Harwood’s masterly ability to inhabit and re-make the late-nineteenth century gothic literary tradition, a genre he first explored in his award winning debut novel The Ghost Writer. The Séance, Harwood’s second novel, pursues similar territory, but with even more spine-chilling effect. Set in a superbly imagined Victorian England, The Séance evokes elements of the great supernatural mystery writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle and M.R. James in particular – but in this sustained and suspenseful narrative a mystery unfolds that is far more than a pastiche of that tradition. Harwood is a master of the genre: through the traditionally embedded narrative structure of nineteenth century stories of the supernatural, Harwood opens to his readers an elegantly constructed world of family secrets, betrayed innocents, the uncertain line between science and the paranormal, and above all, the dark burdens of inheritance.
They Called me the Wildman: the prison diary of Henricke Nelsen by Robert Hollingworth (Pier 9/Murdoch Books)
In They Called me the Wildman, Robert Hollingworth has taken as his subject the historical figure of Henricke Nelsen, a Swedish immigrant who arrived in Australia in the 1860s and led an unusual and socially isolated life as itinerant worker, solitary mountain dweller, and finally prison inmate. Captured in the Tallarook Ranges, the historical Nelsen was incarcerated for vagrancy and theft but mainly, Hollingworth implies, for his unconventionality. Written as a prison diary, the novel draws upon available newspaper records of Nelsen’s life, but takes its shape through an imaginative apprehension of attachment to place. In Nelsen, Hollingworth has created the first-person voice of a most fascinating narrator, one at odds with the colonial endeavour unfolding around him. Secreted in the Tallarook Ranges, Nelsen adapts to the environment he lives within, observing the minute details of his adopted place, while on the plains below him, the colonial economy is busy producing a world of its own making. Inspired by Henry David Thoreau and the idealism of the Romantic tradition, They Called me the Wildman is at heart a quintessentially Australian story of the colonial experience.
Disquiet by Julia Leigh (Penguin Books)
Julia Leigh’s haunting novella Disquiet stands as one of the most memorable works of fiction to emerge from Australia in recent years. In perfectly judged prose, the novella follows Olivia, who after many years’ absence in Australia returns to her mother’s house in France with her small children, seeking respite from her difficult past. Yet the tightly managed world inside her mother’s house is not a refuge from the ambivalence of relationships within the family, or from the outside world which, carrying the past with it, threatens to impose. The refusal of Olivia’s sister in law to bury her dead baby provokes a crisis that threatens to unravel the precarious peace of the household. A story about impermanence in all its forms, Disquiet creates for the reader a narrative as beautiful as a remarkably vivid dream. Leigh’s wonderful talent lies in her eye for detail, and her capacity to render it with deft economy: the feeling and colour of light; the precise qualities of discomfort exchanged between people at their most vulnerable moments; the timbre of grief, felt but not articulated: these things unfold to the reader in beautiful, filmic perfection.
