PM’s Literary Award brings 48 hours’ relief from poet’s life of self-doubt

It’s not long ago that Amy Crutchfield would have been entering her poems for emerging-writers awards. Not any more. And she can dispense with any use of that emerging adjective after her first book, The Cyprian, won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry.

“Being a poet is like a life of self-doubt,” she said. “And I feel this will give me 48 hours, maybe even a week of rock-solid confidence. There have been a lot of other awards this year, none of which I got, and I think probably the safest thing is to apply the same approach to the ones that you get as the ones you don’t, which is ‘back to the desk’.”

Prime Minister’s Literary Award winners Andre Dao (left) and Amy Crutchfield at Parliament House in Canberra.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

There were six Prime Minister’s awards presented at the National Library in Canberra, with each winner receiving $80,000 tax-free. Other winners were:

• Fiction, André Dao, Anam;
• Non-fiction, Daniel Browning, Close to the Subject: Selected Works;
• Young-adult literature, Will Kostakis, We Could Be Something;
• Children’s literature, Violet Wadrill et al, Tamarra: A Story of Termites on Gurindji Country;
• Australian history, Ryan Cropp, Donald Horne: A life in the Lucky Country.

Our review said ABC broadcaster Browning’s cultural, personal and political essays revealed “storytelling to be the most expansive, all-embracing of forms”. We described Kostakis’ book as a “queer YA novel full of heart and humour”. The award judges said Tamarra was “a truly original story with beautiful artwork that takes readers on an educational and cultural journey”. And the review in this masthead said Donald Horne was “an impressive biography, impeccably researched and beautifully crafted. In its scope, detail, and fluency, it is comparable to the best biographies of George Orwell.”

The Prime Minister’s Literary Award winners at Parliament House: (from front left) Leah Leaman, Daniel Browning, Will Kostakis, Gregory Crocetti; (and from left) Ryan Cropp, Andre Dao, Cecelia Edwards, Penny Smith and Amy Crutchfield.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Crutchfield began the poems that became The Cyprian more than 10 years ago. She realised the overarching themes were love and death and the connection between them. She uses the figure of Aphrodite, the ancient Greek goddess of love and beauty, as a sort of framework for considering further questions of lust, misogyny, art and sex.

She wanted to look at love from functional and dysfunctional angles. “Some of them are quite twisted forms of love. There’s a kind of sexual violence and so obviously that’s not love in its normal sense, except that sometimes in those situations one person’s mind is so screwed up that it is a kind of love thing for them.”

But there are also poems about painters Pablo Picasso and Pierre Bonnard, and the former’s lovers Dora Maar and Marie-Therese Walter, and the latter’s obsession over more than 20 years with Young Women in the Garden, a painting that featured his lover, who took her own life, and his wife. Crutchfield also has a poem about the shooting down of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, which killed all 298 people on board, which she describes as being about a “more tenuous connection to love ... I have my own ideas about how that actually is about love, but they [the poems] connect with it in different ways”.

The judges said Crutchfield brought “a classicist’s range of reference to bear in The Cyprian, the poems are frank, lively and acerbic”.

André Dao’s Anam, which won the fiction prize, blends fiction, autofiction, memoir and family history in its account of a man trying to make sense of his past and the story of his grandfather, who spent 10 years in prison in Vietnam, and his grandmother who fled to Paris.

“The thing that I take away from an award like this is a sort of recognition of the sort of creative risk I took with Anam. It is a book that mixes, that is both Australian and not very Australian,” he said. “I think there’s something important in a book like this getting this sort of official recognition because I like to think that it does do a bit of that work of pushing the boundaries too.”

He spent 12 years working on the book and said among the risks he took was to reject the sense that there was a particular narrative arc he had to write into if he wanted to find a readership in Australia, one that “after adversity would end with some kind of happy gratitude”.

“That’s a narrative that exists, that one can fit a story into and be assured of a certain kind of reception. I think by writing a novel that was fragmented, that tried to engage with philosophy and be an intellectual work but also wanting to do something that would reflect intimate details of family life, that felt like a risk as well.”

Taking his time with the book may have meant that the publishing world was more receptive to its hybrid nature now than when he started.

“I’ve benefited from taking so long. I suspect it’s something about the times as well, something to do with the place that truth and fiction have in our political and public life. There’s something about how those received categories are mixed up .”

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