Bible history on Scott Morrison’s reading list

Scott Morrison has presented the PM’s history prize to scholar Meredith Lake for The Bible in Australia: A Cultural History.

Scholar Meredith Lake, winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for history, in Canberra on Wednesday. Picture: Kym Smith

He may not agree with every word in the winning book, but Scott Morrison was all smiles at the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards on Wednesday as he presented the history prize to scholar Meredith Lake for The Bible in Australia: A Cultural History.

“You are on my reading list for Christmas,” Mr Morrison, who is Australia’s first Pentecostal prime minister, told the author.

Lake’s book won the history category in the awards, which are worth a total of $600,000. Each of the six category winners receives $80,000, tax-free, while each shortlisted writer receives $5000.

Before the announcement, Lake said she was astonished to be on the shortlist because she thought her book was “not one that will make the PM comfortable”. “So I’ve either done my dash,’’ she said, “or he is braver than I thought.”

Mr Morrison, who has said the Bible is “not a policy handbook’’, said the shortlists highlight “the diversity of our great country’’.

The Bible in Australia by Meredith Lake.

“I encourage Australians of all ages to pick up a copy of one of this year’s excellent entries,” he said.

The judges said Lake’s “vast and sweeping” account added “an extra dimension to our understanding of Australian religious and cultural history and addresses a significant gap in our collective knowledge’’.

The fiction prize was a welcome relief for Sydney writer Gail Jones, who missed out on the Miles Franklin for the fourth time this year. She won for her novel The Death of Noah Glass, turning the tables on Miles Franklin winner Melissa Lucashenko, who was shortlisted for Too Much Lip.

Sydney-based Jones was not at the awards in Canberra as she is travelling in Britain and Ireland. Speaking from Dublin, she said she didn’t see her win as an “about time” award. “I don’t take anything for granted. We have a rich and diverse literary culture and it’s a pleasure simply to be noticed.”

The judges said Jones’s novel was about “the unknowability of others, even those closest to us, and the consolations of art’’.

The non-fiction prize went to Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell for Half the Perfect World: Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra, 1955-1964, which focuses on Australian literary exiles George Johnston and Charmian Clift but also includes their friend Leonard Cohen. Michael Gerard Bauer won the young adult literature prize for The Things That Will Not Stand and Emily Rodda took home the children’s book prize for His Name Was Walter.