ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

The shortlists for the 2019 Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prizes have been announced. Thanks to @BplusPNews for sharing this news:

Tasmania Book Prize for the best book with Tasmanian content in any genre ($25,000)

• Bridget Crack by Rachel Leary, (Allen & Unwin), see my review
• Flames by Robbie Arnott, (Text Publishing), see my review
• Island Story: Tasmania in object and text* by Danielle Wood and Ralph Crane, (Text Publishing), see the review at The Conversation
• Towards Light & Other Poems by Sarah Day, (Puncher & Wattmann), see the review at Australian Poetry Review

Margaret Scott Prize for the best book by a Tasmanian writer ($5000)

• Conglomerate by Ben Walter, (A Published Event)
• Flames by Robbie Arnott, (Text Publishing), see my review
• Star-crossed by Minnie Darke, (Michael Joseph) (I think this is actually by Danielle Wood, writing romance.  But I can’t open the paywalled newspaper article that just shows its opening lines from a Google search.  See Theresa Smith’s review).
• The Curious Life of Krill: A conservation story from the bottom of the world by Stephen Nicol, (Island Press), see the description at Island Press.

University of Tasmania Prize for the best unpublished literary work by an emerging Tasmanian writer ($5000)

• ‘The People’s Park’ by Stephenie Cahalan
• ‘The Signal Line’ by Brendan Colley
• ‘The Clinking’ by Susie Greenhill

Tasmanian young writer’s fellowship

• Priscilla Beck
• Sam George-Allen
• Hannah Warwarek.

Voting for the People’s Choice Awards is also now open.

True to form, this prize has unearthed some books that haven’t had much exposure.  So…

I’m posting the description of Island Story: Tasmania in object and text from Goodreads, because its title makes it sound like an academic text about postmodernism.  And it’s not that at all!

A handsome full-colour book pairing unique items from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery with selections of original writing about the southern island.
Indigenous dispossession, a cruel penal history, gay-rights battles; exceptional landscapes, unusual wildlife, environmental activism; colonial architecture, arts and crafts, a thriving creative scene—all are part of the story of Tasmania. And they find their expression in the unparalleled collection of Hobart’s TMAG.
In Island Story, Ralph Crane and Danielle Wood select almost sixty representative TMAG objects: from shell necklaces to a convict cowl, colonial scrimshaw to a thylacine pincushion, contemporary photography to a film star’s travelling case. Each is matched to texts old and new, by writers as diverse as Anthony Trollope, Marie Bjelke-Petersen, Helene Chung, Jim Everett, Heather Rose and Ben Walter.
This is the perfect gift for anyone interested in the island everyone is talking about.

PS I can’t find out anything about Conglomerate but I’ve contacted A Published Event for more information.  Update: Justy Phillips at A Published Event has sent the following description of Conglomerate:

A group of walkers battle with a question – how would their experience of the natural world change if one of them were killed in the bush? Conglomerate takes inspiration from the most piecemeal of Tasmanian rocks: a rock that gathers stones together, but also, one that can fall apart in your hands.

The book is a ‘fictiōnella’ which is part of a larger library of 40 books, Lost Rocks (2017–21), in which A Published Event have commissioned 40 artists from around the world to select and re-compose an absent mineral from a geological rock board found by us in Tasmania in 2015. We have so far published 24 of the commissioned 40 fictiōnellas (novellas drawn from lived experience).

You can buy Conglomerate from our website: http://www.apublishedevent.net/projects/lost-rocks/editions/conglomerate or from Fullers Bookshop in Hobart (they also do phone orders). Both places it’s $20. Fyi: I should also add that it’s a limited edition work so we will likely sell out of Conglomerate. Lost Rocks editions are printed in an edition of 300 copies.

The winners will be announced on 5 December.  For more information see their website.