‘Foal’s Bread’ wins Colin Roderick Award

12 November 2012 Books+Publishing

Foal’s Bread by Gillian Mears (A&U) has won this year’s Colin Roderick Award.

Deputy executive director of the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies at James Cook University Don Gallagher told Bookseller+Publisher that Mears’ sister Karin Pridgeon accepted the $10,000 award and the H T Priestley Medal on her behalf at a presentation dinner in Townsville in October, delivering a speech which ‘provided a fascinating background to the novel’.

Mears’ novel was selected from a shortlist of seven books. The other shortlisted books were: The Taste of River Water (Cate Kennedy, Scribe), An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark (Mark McKenna, Miegeunyah Press), Bite Your Tongue (Francesca Rendle-Short, Spinifex), End of the Night Girl (Amy Matthews, Wakefield Press), Alexander Macleay: from Scotland to Sydney (Derelie Cherry, Paradise Publishers) and The Sons of Clovis: Ern Malley, Adoré Floupette and a Secret History of Australian Poetry (David Brooks, UQP).

Foal’s Bread won this year’s Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, the Age Book of the Year fiction prize and the ALS Gold Medal. Mears’ novel was also shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Kibble Literary Award and the Barbara Jefferis Award.

The Colin Roderick Award is presented annually by the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies to ‘the best book published in Australia which deals with any aspect of Australian life’. The award is open to all fields, including fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Previous winners of the award include Karen Kissane for Worst of Days (Hachette) in 2011 and Michael Cathcart for The Water Dreamers: The Remarkable History of Our Dry Continent (Text) in 2010.

For more information about the award, visit the James Cook University website here.

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