Inside the Australian and New Zealand book industry

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Arnold Zable wins literature fellowship for ‘outstanding, established artists’

Arnold Zable has been awarded the prestigious Australia Council Fellowship for literature, which is presented to ‘outstanding, established artists’ to support creative activity and professional development. Zable is the author of several memoirs, short story collections and novels, including Café Scheherazade, The Fig Tree, Sea of Many Returns, Violin Lessons and The Fighter (all Text Publishing).

Melissa Ashley’s novel The Birdman’s Wife (Affirm Press), a reimagining of the life of British artist Elizabeth Gould, and Cathy McLennan’s Saltwater (University of Queensland Press), the true story of a young lawyer’s fight for justice in the tropics, have won Queensland Literary Awards for fiction and nonfiction, respectively.

Elizabeth Tynan’s Atomic Thunder: The Maralinga Story (NewSouth Books) has won the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences’ (CHASS) Australia Book Prize, which aims to draw international attention to Australia’s achievements in the humanities, arts and social sciences. Tynan’s book is a comprehensive account of the secretive British atomic weapons testing in South Australia in the 1950s, which wreaked havoc on Indigenous communities and turned the area into a radioactive wasteland. The other titles shortlisted for the award were The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their Craft (Tom Griffiths, Black Inc.); From the Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories (Mark McKenna, Melbourne University Publishing); and Evatt: A Life (John Murphy, NewSouth Books).

 

Category: Think Australian awards