Miles Franklin winner Michelle de Kretser, literary heavyweight Frank Moorhouse and award-winning SA young adult writer Vikki Wakefield are among authors shortlisted for the 2014 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature.
Announcing the shortlist yesterday, Premier Jay Weatherill said the biennial awards had attracted quality nominations in all five categories, with a total prize pool of $167,500 at stake.
“Overall, there were 639 nominations for the 2014 awards, with the lion’s share in the categories for always-popular genres of children’s literature and young adult fiction,” he said in a statement.
There was a significant increase in entries in the John Bray Poetry Award, which rose by 21 to 99 for 2014.
The Premier’s Award, selected from the winners of all national categories, has been increased by $10,000 to $25,000, while a new $15,000 fellowship has been introduced for South Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers.
Shortlisted in the fiction category are de Kretser’s Questions of Travel, which won the 2013 Miles Franklin Award; Moorhouse’s Cold Light, which was shortlisted for last year’s Miles Franklin and won the Queensland Literary Award; Steven Carroll’s A World of Other People; Brian Castro’s Street to Street; Amy Espeseth’s Sufficient Grace, and Gillian Mears’ Foal’s Bread, another 2012 Miles Franklin contender.
Adelaide Hills writer Vikki Wakefield, winner of the Young Adult Fiction Award in 2012, has been shortlisted again for 2014 with her second novel Friday Brown. Other finalists in this category are Alex As Well by Alyssa Brugman, The Ink Bridge by Neil Grant, Sea Hearts by Margo Lanagan, Into That Forest by Louis Nowra, and The Wrong Boy by Suzy Zail.
Other 2014 category shortlists are:
Children’s Literature
What the Raven Saw by Samantha-Ellen Bound
Herman and Rosie by Gus Gordon
Pookie Aleera is not my Boyfriend by Steven Herrick
A Very Unusual Pursuit by Catherine Jinks
My Life as an Alphabet by Barry Jonsberg
Lightning Jack by Glenda Millard
John Bray Poetry
Clear Brightness by Kim Cheng Boey
Ruby Moonlight by Ali Cobby Eckermann
Asymmetry by Aidan Coleman
The Sunlit Zone by Lisa Jacobson
Jam Tree Gully by John Kinsella
Non-Fiction
Exit Wounds: one Australian’s war on terror by Major General John Cantwell with Greg Bearup
On Warne by Gideon Haigh
Night Games: sex, power and sport by Anna Krien
The Australian Moment: how we were made for these times by George Megalogenis
Madness a memoir by Kate Richards
The Many Worlds of R.H. Mathews: in search of an Australian anthropologist by Martin Thomas
Wakefield Press Unpublished Manuscript
Black Dog by Simon Butters (young adult)
Here Where We Live by Cassie Flanagan-Willanski (short story collection)
Roundabout by Jill Jones (poetry)
Love at the Endings by Carol Lefevre (non-fiction)
Jill Blewett Playwright’s Award
Dreams in White by Duncan Graham (produced)
Replay by Phillip Kavanagh (un-produced)
As I Lay Dreaming by Catherine McKinnon (un-produced)
The View from Voskhod by Kate Mandalov (un-produced)
Winners will be announced on March 1, 2014, during Adelaide Writers’ Week.
