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‘The Daughters of Mars’ wins Colin Roderick Award 2013

The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally (Vintage) has won this year’s Colin Roderick Award.

Keneally, who previously won the Colin Roderick Award in 2004 for The Tyrant’s Novel (Doubleday), was announced as the winner of the award at a presentation dinner in Townsville on 17 October. He receives a cash prize of $10,000 and the H T Priestley Medal.

Keneally’s novel was selected from a shortlist of seven books. The other shortlisted books were: Toyo: A Memoir (Lily Chan, Black Inc.); The Two Frank Thrings (Peter Fitzpatrick, Monash University Publishing); The Meaning of Grace (Deborah Forster, Vintage); Nine Days (Toni Jordan, Text); True North: The Story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack (Brenda Niall, Text); and Ray Parkin’s Odyssey: Sailer, Artist, Writer, Prisoner of War (Pattie Wright, Macmillan).

The Daughters of Mars has been nominated for a number of literary awards this year, including the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards, and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in the UK.

The Colin Roderick Award is presented annually by the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies at James Cook University 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 include Gillian Mears for Foal’s Bread (A&U) in 2012, Karen Kissane for Worst of Days (Hachette) in 2011, and Michael Cathcart forThe 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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Category: Local news