Christos Tsiolkas: A little bit fact, a little bit fiction – and a whole lot of brilliance

Is there anything more Melbourne than Christos Tsiolkas, a writer of unusual flair and emotion, who on Wednesday was presented with the $60,000 Melbourne Prize.

Christos Tsiolkas has won the $60,000 2021 Melbourne Prize for Literature.

Is there anything more Melbourne than the son of Greek ­immigrants?

Putting that another way, is there anything more Melbourne than Christos Tsiolkas, a writer of unusual flair and emotion, who on Wednesday night was presented with the $60,000 Melbourne Prize at a gala event in the City of Literature? He was thrilled, of course. He also didn’t know ­because in one of those old-­fashioned, lovely things, they didn’t tell him beforehand.

The prize is for a body of work by a Melbourne writer. It comes just as Tsiolkas releases his latest novel, 7½ (Allen & Unwin), which comes at what is surely only the midpoint of an already wonderful career, during which he has also developed a reputation for kindness, especially to young hopefuls.

Tsiolkas’s first novel, Loaded (1995), was about a gay Greek boy in Melbourne. Yes, it was a tiny bit autobiographical. It was made into a feature film, Head On (1998), starring another of Melbourne’s talented Greek boys, Alex Dimitriades.

He leapt from there into books that had the whole nation talking.

The Slap (2009) was about a feud that erupted among friends when a man slapped a bratty child who was not his own.

Tsiolkas imagined those lawyers at 10 paces. Such an outcome would today be guaranteed. Jail time, too, probably. The book ­became a miniseries in Australia, and the US, and won the 2009 Commonwealth Prize. It was long-listed for the Booker, short-listed for the Miles Franklin, and won the ALS Gold Medal.

Other books include Barracuda, about a young swim champion, and Damascus, about Christianity, which won the 2020 Victorian Premier’s Prize for ­Fiction.

The Melbourne Prize is special. It is awarded for literature only every three years. It recognises his “outstanding contribution to Australian literature and to ­cultural and intellectual life”.

Christos Tsiolkas’s latest novel.

Also during the ceremony, poet Evelyn Araluen received a $20,000 professional development award; and Eloise Grills won the $15,000 writer’s prize for a new essay. Judges included Dec­lan Fry, Alice Pung and Michael Williams, artistic director of the Sydney Writers Festival.

Now in its 17th year, the Melbourne Prize Trust seeks to ­reward talent, excellence and inspire creative development, and it is one of the most valuable arts prizes of its kind in Australia.

The trust dates back to aMagic Puddingsculpture commission, as part of a children’s garden ­concept at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Melbourne.

Tsiolkas’s new book came out of Covid: he was about to embark on a driving tour of the UK with his partner of three decades, Wayne van der Stelt, when the pandemic struck. Locked up in Melbourne, he set himself a task: to write 800 words a day.

Like Loaded, the new work is a little bit autobiography and a little bit fiction. “What worries me is memoir has replaced fiction,” he told The Australian recently.

“I know there’s a contradiction in what I’m saying as there’s a kind of a memoir (in his recent book.) But it’s almost as if we’ve forgotten the power of fiction.”

Not so, as this prize, to a novelist for literature, again reminds us.