The 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards shortlists have been announced! The following books were shortlisted in each award category:

Oscar & Friends congratulates all the shortlisted authors who receive $5000 tax-free. The winners in each of the categories will receive a tax-free cash prize of $80,000. The date of the winners announcement is yet to be announced.

American author A.M. Homes has won the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction with her sixth novel May We Be Forgiven (Granta).


Miranda Richardson, Chair of Judges, said: “Our 2013 shortlist was exceptionally strong and our judges’ meeting was long and passionately argued, but in the end we agreed that May we be Forgiven is a dazzling, original, viscerally funny black comedy – a subversion of the American dream. This is a book we want to read again and give to our friends.”


2013 marks the eighteenth year of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, known from 1996 to 2012 as the Orange Prize for Fiction, which celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing from throughout the world.

Launched in 1996, the Prize is awarded annually and celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing from throughout the world. The winner receives a cheque for £30,000 and a limited edition bronze known as a ‘Bessie’, created by the artist Grizel Niven. Both are anonymously endowed.

VOTE NOW FOR YOUR FAVOURITE CHILDREN’S BOOK & WIN A $200 GIFT VOUCHER!


Click here to vote online with Oscar & Friends or Visit us in either of our stores to enter in person!

You could win a prize – or see the book given a new cover by a leading Australian artist.

Are you a Roald Dahl fan? Or do you prefer Dr Seuss or Harry Potter? The Sydney Story Factory is compiling a list of our city’s favourite children’s books, and we want you to vote.

Your votes will be used to create a list of Sydney’s top 50 children’s books. This list will be given to leading artists, who will choose a book and create either a new cover for it, or an artwork inspired by it. The works will offer new perspectives on our best-loved children’s stories, and will be exhibited in Judge A Book, Buy its Cover at Depot II Gallery, Danks Street, Waterloo, from October 15 to 19, 2013. The artworks will be sold by silent auction, with all proceeds going to the Sydney Story Factory, a not-for-profit creative writing centre for young people in Redfern.

The list of the top 50 children’s books will be published on this website on Monday, June 17, 2013.

The exhibition follows the success of the first Judge A Book, Buy its Cover exhibition in November 2011, which focused on adult books. Jasper Knight reimagined The Great Gatsby; Jason Benjamin chose Cormac McCarthy’s The Road; Wendy Sharpe pickedJane Eyre, while Bronwyn Bancroft opted for Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. (View The Sydney Morning Herald story on the exhibition here.)

Voting opens Saturday 25th May and runs till Sunday 9th June, 2013. 

Vote at Oscar & Friends Booksellers, Surry Hills or Double Bay or online and go in the draw to win a $200 gift Voucher!
Surry Hills:  35/277 Crown Street, Surry Hills
Double Bay:  19-27 Cross Street, Double Bay.
Online: Vote with Oscar & Friends Online

Or you can Vote at the Sydney Story Factory, 176 Redfern Street, Redfern (look for The Martian Embassy), or by emailing myfavouritebook@sydneystoryfactory.org.au. These votes go in the draw to win a selection of classic children’s books donated by Random House Australia.

Christina Stead Prize for Fiction
Mateship with Birds by Carrie Tiffany
 
On the outskirts of an Australian country town in the 1950s, a lonely farmer trains his binoculars on a family of kookaburras that roost in a tree near his house. Harry observes the kookaburras through a year of feast, famine, birth, death, war, romance and song. As Harry watches the birds, his next door neighbour has her own set of binoculars trained on him. Ardent, hard-working Betty has escaped to the country with her two fatherless children. Betty is pleased that her son, Michael, wants to spend time with the gentle farmer next door. But when Harry decides to teach Michael about the opposite sex, perilous boundaries are crossed.

People’s Choice Award
Animal People by Charlotte Wood
 
The hilarious, tender and heartbreaking story of a watershed day in the life of Stephen - aimless, unhappy and unfulfilled, this stiflingly hot December day is the day he has decided to dump his girlfriend. A sharply observed, 24-hour urban love story.

'He could not find one single more word to say. I just want to be free. He could not say those words. They had already withered in his mind, turned to dust. He did not even know, he marvelled now, what the hell those words had meant.'

UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing
The Last Thread by Michael Sala
 
The Last Thread is Michael Sala?s fascinating life in fiction. From his early years in the Netherlands to growing up in Australia during the 1980s, Michael recalls the secret surrounding his estranged Greek father and how scandalous events from the past fractured his family. This is a moving chronicle of a boy?s turbulent relationship with his bullying stepfather, aloof older brother and adored mother, whose cheerful apathy has devastating consequences. As his life unfolds, Michael ? now a father ? must decide if he can free himself from the dark pull of the past.

Reminiscent of the great autobiographical novels of JM Coetzee and Michael Ondaatje, The Last Thread is a beautifully crafted work from an exceptional new writer.

Douglas Stewart Prize for Non‐Fiction
The Office: A Hardworking History by Gideon Haigh
 
A lively social and cultural history of the office, blending its birth, growth and emergence as a means of organising a company, an institution or a bureaucracy to the place in which most of us spend more time than any other.

The office: for many of us, it’s where we spend more time and expend greater effort than anywhere else. Yet how many of us have stopped to think about why?

In The Office: A Hard-Working History, Gideon Haigh traces it origins to today’s gleaming glass towers of New York.

Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry
Ruby Moonlight by Ali Cobby‐Eckermann
 
Book of the Year
Ruby Moonlight by Ali Cobby‐Eckermann

Ruby Moonlight, a novel of the impact of colonisation in mid north South Australia around 1880. The main character, Ruby, refugee of a massacre, shelters in the woods where she befriends an Irishman trapper. The poems convey how fear of discovery is overcome by the need for human contact, which, in a tense unravelling of events, is forcibly challenged by an Aboriginal lawman. The natural world is richly observed and Ruby¿s courtship is measured by the turning of the seasons

Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature
The Ghost of Miss Annabel Spoon by Aaron Blabey
 
No matter what hour, she lurked looking sour, be it midnight or mid-afternoon.Her dresses were shabby, her mood always crabby. Her name was Miss Annabel Spoon.

Life is cursed For The people of the village of Twee. The ghost of Miss Annabel Spoon haunts their every waking hour and they've had enough! But then one day, The brave and practical young Herbert Kettle has the most extraordinary idea . . .

Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature
A Corner of White by Jaclyn Moriarty
 
The first in a rousing, funny, genre-busting trilogy from bestseller Jaclyn Moriarty!

This is a tale of missing persons. Madeleine and her mother have run away from their former life, under mysterious circumstances, and settled in a rainy corner of Cambridge (in our world).

Elliot, on the other hand, is in search of his father, who disappeared on the night his uncle was found dead. The talk in the town of Bonfire (in the Kingdom of Cello) is that Elliot's dad may have killed his brother and run away with the Physics teacher. But Elliot refuses to believe it. And he is determined to find both his dad and the truth.

Community Relations Commission for a Multicultural NSW Award
Don’t Go Back to Where You Came From by Tim Soutphommasane
 
Tim Soutphommasane boldly stakes a claim for the overwhelming success of multiculturalism in Australia.
European governments are declaring multiculturalism a failure, with many conservatives in Australia hastening to agree. But is a multicultural approach to integration and diversity really as destructive as critics say? Have we been too quick to declare its demise?
Offering an unflinching and informed defence of cultural diversity, Soutphommasane shows that multiculturalism is more than laksa, kebabs or souvlaki and that it doesnt automatically spell cultural relativism, ethnic ghettos or reverse racism. In fact, multicultural Australia has been a national success story.

 Romy Ash - Floundering

Romy Ash is a Melbourne-based writer. She has written for GriffithREVIEW, the Big Issue and frankie magazine. She has a regular cooking column in Yen magazine and writes for the blog Trotski & Ash. The forthcoming Voracious: New Australian Food Writing features one of her essays. Floundering is her first novel.
 
Read more about Floundering and Romy Ash
  

Michelle de Kretser - Questions of Travel
  
Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka and emigrated to Australia when she was 14. Educated in Melbourne and Paris, Michelle has worked as a university tutor, an editor and a book reviewer. She is the author of The Rose Grower, The Hamilton Case, which won the Commonwealth Prize (SE Asia and Pacific region) and the UK Encore Prize.
 
Read more about Questions of Travel and Michelle de Kretser
  

Annah Faulkner - The Beloved
 
In 2011, The Beloved won the Queensland Premier's Literary Award for an Emerging Queensland author. Annah and her husband live on Queensland's Sunshine Coast and spend extended time in the South Island of New Zealand. She is presently working on her second novel.
  
Read more about The Beloved and Annah Faulkner
  

Drusilla Modjeska - The Mountain
  
Drusilla Modjeska is one of Australia's most acclaimed writers. She was born in England but lived in Papua before arriving in Australia in 1971. Her books include Exiles at Home; Poppy; Sisters, which she co-edited; the Nita B. Kibble, The Orchard. 
The Mountain is her first novel.
  
Read more about The Mountain and Drusilla Modjeska
  

Carrie Tiffany - Mateship with Birds
  
Carrie Tiffany's first novel, Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living (2005) was shortlisted for numerous awards including the Orange Prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Guardian First Book Award and the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, and won the Dobbie Award for Best First Book (2006) and the 2006 Western Australian Premier's Award for Fiction.
 
 Read more about Mateship with Birds and Carrie Tiffany
 

On the outskirts of an Australian country town in the 1950s, a lonely farmer trains his binoculars on a family of kookaburras that roost in a tree near his house. Harry observes the kookaburras through a year of feast, famine, birth, death, war, romance and song. As Harry watches the birds, his next door neighbour has her own set of binoculars trained on him. Ardent, hard-working Betty has escaped to the country with her two fatherless children. Betty is pleased that her son, Michael, wants to spend time with the gentle farmer next door. But when Harry decides to teach Michael about the opposite sex, perilous boundaries are crossed. Mateship with Birds is a novel about young lust and mature love. It is a hymn to the rhythm of country life - to vicious birds, virginal cows, adored dogs and ill-used sheep. On one small farm in a vast, ancient landscape, a collection of misfits question the nature of what a family can be.

Author Biography: Carrie Tiffany was born in West Yorkshire and grew up in Western Australia. She spent her early twenties working as a park ranger in the Red Centre and now lives in Melbourne, where she works as an agricultural journalist. Her first novel, Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living (2005) was shortlisted for numerous awards including the Orange Prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Guardian First Book Award and the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, and won the Dobbie Award for Best First Book (2006) and the 2006 Western Australian Premier's Award for Fiction. Mateship with Birds is her second novel.                                           

The Pulitzer Prize in fiction, announced Monday, has been awarded to Adam Johnson for his book set in North Korea, "The Orphan Master's Son." 

The committee described the book as "an exquisitely crafted novel that carries the reader on an adventuresome journey into the depths of totalitarian North Korea and into the most intimate spaces of the human heart."

Read more about The Orphan Master's Son...

In its nearly 100-year history, the Pulitzer Prize in fiction has been awarded to some of America's longest-lasting fiction novls: Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird," Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind," John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" and Toni Morrison's "Beloved."

Once again the shortlist for the 2013 Commonwealth Book Prize has been announced with a whopping 21 books up for the award. You can grab the details here