Winners of the South Australian Premier’s Award for Literature announced
08 March 2006
Gail Jones has won the South Australian Premier’s Award for Literature with her novel, Sixty Lights, which also took out the Award for Fiction, giving Jones a total win of $25,000.
The win by Western Australian-based Jones, for her book which was long listed for the Man Booker Prize, was announced on 5 March at Adelaide Writers’ Week by SA Premier the Hon. Mike Rann, along with other categories in the 2006 Festival Awards for Literature.
Established in 1986, the national Festival Awards for Literature, valued at $130,000, are granted biennially to the best authors in Australian children’s literature, fiction, innovation, non-fiction and poetry. The awards, which judge the best works published in
Australia in the previous two years, are the nation’s most competitive literary awards with 563 entries submitted for 2006.
There are eight award categories – comprising six national awards, open to all Australians, and two specifically for SA writers. The
nationwide awards are - Children’s Literature ($15,000), Fiction ($15,000), Innovation ($10,000), Non-Fiction ($15,000), John Bray Poetry Award ($15,000) and the Premier’s Award ($10,000).
The Premier’s Award recognises the most outstanding published book submitted to the awards – in this case, the best book out of a field of 563 – no small feat according to Mr Rann.
“Gail Jones’ win, in the most competitive literary field in Australia, confirms her growing reputation as one of the best authors writing in Australia today,” Mr Rann said.
In the four other national award categories the winners were -
Barry Jonsberg (winner: Award for Children’s Literature) for his serious but riotously funny take on teenage life, It’s Not All About You, Calma!; MTC Cronin (winner: Award for Innovation) for the thematically ambitious and technically complex poetry collection,
dramatic memoir of her childhood, Velocity; and Luke Davies (winner: John Bray Poetry Award) for his rapturous
engagement with the environment in the masterful long poem, Totem.
Also announced yesterday were the two Festival Awards for Literature specifically for South Australian writers. The first - the Award for an Unpublished Manuscript by a South Australian emerging writer to be published by Wakefield Press, was won by
Rachel Hennessy for The Quakers - a fictionalised account of the life of Hennessey’s high school classmate Anu Singh, who was later convicted of the manslaughter of her
boyfriend, Joe Cinque. The second was the Jill Blewett Playwright’s Award for the creative development of a play script by a South Australian writer – which was won by 24 year old Finegan Kruckemeyer for his inventive This Uncharted Hour to
be produced by Brink Productions in conjunction with music group, The Firm.
Two leading South Australian writers were each awarded $15,000 fellowships to write their next books. The fellowship winners were Christine Harris, one of South Australia’s most hard working and prolific authors (winner: Carclew Fellowship) and one of the
state’s leading poets, Mike Ladd (winner: Barbara Hanrahan Fellowship) - who is also the producer and announcer of ABC Radio’s PoeticA program.
2006 marks the 20th year of the Festival Awards for Literature and in this time over $1million dollars has been distributed to Australia’s leading writers through its national categories as well as to up-coming South Australian writers through its Unpublished
Manuscript and Jill Blewett Playwright awards.
A full listing of the recipients follows.
2006 Festival Award for Literature – Full List of Winners
$10,000 South Australian Premier’s Award for Literature
Sixty Lights by Gail Jones (Vintage)
(Gail lives in Perth)
$15,000 Award for Children’s Literature
It’s Not All About You, Calma! by Barry Jonsberg (Allen & Unwin)
(Barry lives in Darwin)
$15,000 Award for Fiction
Sixty Lights by Gail Jones (Vintage)
(Gail lives in Perth)
$10,000 Award for Innovation
(Margie lives in Maleny, QLD)
$15,000 Award for Non-Fiction
Velocity by Mandy Sayer (Vintage)
(Mandy lives in Sydney)
$15,000 John Bray Poetry Award
Totem by Luke Davies (Allen and Unwin)
(Luke lives in Sydney)
$10,000 Jill Blewett Playwright’s Award for the Creative Development of a play script by a South Australian Writer
This Uncharted Hour by Finegan Kruckemeyer
(Currently residing in Tasmania)
$10,000 Award for an Unpublished Manuscript by a SA Emerging Writer to be Published by Wakefield Press
The Quakers by Rachel Hennessy
(Rachel lives in Adelaide)
$15,000 Barbara Hanrahan Fellowship
Mike Ladd
(Mike lives in Adelaide)
$15,000 Carclew Fellowship
Christine Harris
(Christine lives in Adelaide)
