Thanks to tweets from Booksellers and Publishers magazines, here is the latest news about the 2011 New South Wales Premier’s Awards:
Grand Obsessions: The Life and Work of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin by Alasdair McGregor has won the $20,000 National Biography Award. I am reading this book at the moment – but my review is going to take a while. The book weighs 1.9kg so it’s not one that I’m taking to read in bed, just reading it over breakfast in the mornings!) It’s a lavish publication by Lantern Books, a division of Penguin. (The significance of this book, (if you are a non-Aussie reader of this blog), is that the Griffins were the architects who designed our national capital, Canberra.)
Ouyang Yu has won the Community relations Commission for a Multicultural Australia award for English Class, see my review. Congratulations to Transit Lounge Publishing and the author – who you can meet in my Meet an Aussie Author series here.
The winner of the UTS Glenda Adams award for New Writing for Fiction is Stephen Daisley for Traitor published by Text. Well done, Text!
Emily Maguire has won the NSW Fellowship worth $30,000 …. and the Kenneth Slessor prize for poetry was awarded to Jennifer Maiden for Pirate Rain published by Giramondo… and Ian Johnston is winner of the ‘anonymous’ translation prize (I don’t know what book this award was for – and would be very grateful if any reader could enlighten me, because translators should get more credit than they do.)
I think that’s it for tonight. I’m off to watch QandA…
Hi Lisa
Thanks for the winners list of the NSW Premiers Awards. It was the only place I could find the results of the translation prize. Ian Johnston’s prize for anonymous would have included Waiting for the Owl: poems and songs from Ancient China, a collection that included anonymous poems http://www.pardalote.com.au
Ian also recently translated the entire works of Mozi. That bilingual edition is published by China University Press and Stanford University Press. An earlier poetry collection, Singing of Scented Grass:verses from the Chinese, is also published by Pardalote Press.
By: Lyn Reeves on May 17, 2011
at 8:14 am
Hello Lyn, really the thanks should go to Booksellers and Publishers magazine, it can’t be easy to be at an awards ceremony and keep focussed on sharing the awards news, and I’m very grateful to whoever it was who kept the info flowing.
I’ve followed your link through to Pardalote, and although I have to confess that poetry is not really my thing, I am very impressed by Ian Johnstone’s work. How wonderful it is that people like him are willing to spend years learning a difficult language so that great works of the past can be accessed. I have ‘learned’ a few languages as an adult so that I can chat with people when I travel, and I know how difficult it is and how much work it is. I am so pleased that this wonderful man has been acknowledged with the award in this way, and congratulations to you too, for publshing his work.
By: Lisa Hill on May 17, 2011
at 6:06 pm
Hi Lisa
Thanks so much for your good wishes. I am very proud to have published Ian’s work. He is an amazing man and also translates ancient Greek as well as Chinese. It was a great experience working with him.
It was lovely to find your blog, and I’m now a subscriber. I am just discovering the blogosphere as I had to create one for a university assignment. It’s a whole new world. – best, Lyn
By: Lyn on May 17, 2011
at 6:50 pm
Hello again, Lyn – I am enchanted by the little fortyspot bird on your blog!
Lisa
By: Lisa Hill on May 17, 2011
at 7:00 pm