For published books which depart from the conventional use of genre by borrowing elements from a number of genres such as fiction, non-fiction, biography, autobiography, poetry or cultural criticism.
Prize: $15,000
Winner
Barley Patch by Gerald Murnane (Giramondo)
Gerald Murnane’s Barley Patch is a mesmerizing writing experiment conducted with consummate skill. Inviting, wondering, sometimes a little ironic and knowing, Barley Patch is a paradoxical delight, at once intimate and expansive, exploring the questions “must I write” and “why had I written”? Murnane playfully tests our assumed relationships to what we are reading, whether to story, character or the idea of the author. The exploration of an “image repertoire” creates landscapes at once paper-thin and vast; fictive lives partially open to view. The novel entices the reader with a skillful interplay between equally illusory “surface” and “depth”. Murnane’s novel delicately balances the anxiety and pleasure of sustaining something precious (as writer, as reader). In this beautifully realized, even obsessive work, the narrator seems forever poised to tell us why, “in the early autumn of 1991,…on a bustling afternoon…I myself gave up writing fiction.”
Shortlisted
Fragments from a Paper Witch by Marion May Campbell (Salt Publishing)
Fragments from a Paper Witch gathers a rich collection of Marion Campbell’s writing: essays, poems, stories and a short play. Campbell is seriously playful with language, big on puns, intense with intent. Her collection belongs in a literary tradition sometimes modernist, sometimes post-modernist, but always feminist. Campbell is not afraid to take intellectual risks and her collection records a deep fascination with the politics of language and its use. Perhaps the most successful of these “fragments” paradoxically catch out “language at play” at the same time as they worry at the complexity and contradictions of “lived experience”.
Squeezing Desire Through a Sieve: micro-essays on judgment and justice by MTC Cronin (Publisher: Puncher and Wattmann)
M.T.C. Cronin’s Squeezing Desire Through a Sieve: micro-essays on judgement and justice asks new questions about the relationship between literature and law, essaying the interplay of wit and judgement to often paradoxical effect. Occasionally satiric, sometimes surreal, Campbell’s highly engaging narratives, combining poetics and jurisprudence, are like genre-testing morality tales.
The Summer Exercises by Ross Gibson (The University of Western Australia Press)
The interplay of anonymous image and apparently fictional text in Ross Gibson’s The Summer Exercises, creates a precise, intimate and sensuous portrait of Sydney, a city emerging from the traumas of WWII. Ross Gibson’s imaginative riffing on an extensive collection of forensic photographs from the post-war period testifies to the shadow side of Sydney’s history. This is an impressive outcome from Gibson’s sponsored access to an official photographic archive. The Summer Exercises is a convincingly sustained and beautifully rendered work.
Joe in the Andamans and other fictocritical stories by Prof Stephen Muecke (Local Consumptions Publications)
Stephen Muecke’s Joe in the Andamans demonstrates how fictocriticism might “tell a story” and “make an argument at the same time”. This collection shows what might happen, for example, as their author sets off on exploratory acts of intellectual and self-estrangement. In doing so, Muecke takes ideas on a refreshingly bold itinerary, walking out of the classroom, boarding a tram, or a bus, or a plane, variously transporting the essay beyond the familiar gestures of philosophy, criticism, theory, analysis and self-writing.
