Patrick White Award celebrates Joan London’s ‘poetic prose’

Fremantle writer Joan London has won the $24,000 Patrick White Award for her lifetime’s achievement in literature.

Miles Franklin Award Finalist, Joan London, in Melbourne.

Fremantle writer Joan London capped a golden year yesterday when she was awarded the $24,000 Patrick White Award for her lifetime’s achievement in literature.

While the award recognises her body of work, London has been a regular on prize shortlists during the past 12 months for her novel The Golden Age, set in a children’s polio convalescent home in 1950s Perth.

The novel was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Stella Prize, the Christina Stead Prize and won the $30,000 Kibble Award for women’s literature.

London, 67, said she was deeply honoured to receive the award that White, Australia’s only Nobel laureate in literature, established using the proceeds.

“It’s a writer’s prize to a fellow writer, and I feel very moved in accepting it,’’ she said.

“It’s an award embodying, it seems to me, the deepest values of Patrick White himself, who knew all about the highs and lows of the writing life, the anxiety and doubts that only solid, daily hours of application can help overcome. He knew also of the advantage of a secure living that enables writers to experiment, take risks and give the necessary time and care to their work.’’

White stipulated the award be bestowed on a writer who had made a contribution to Australian literature but “may not have received due recognition’’.

The inaugural recipient in 1974 was Christina Stead and other winners include Randolph Stow, Bruce Dawe, Thea Astley, Elizabeth Harrower, Gerald Murnane, Janette Turner Hospital and Louis Nowra.

London’s best-known novel perhaps remains her 2001 debut Gilgamesh, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, longlisted for Britain’s Orange Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and named a New York Times “notable book” in 2003.

Academic Bernadette Brennan, speaking on behalf of the judges, said London’s “quiet, poetic prose opens up worlds, real and imagined, of travel, desire, loss and love’’.

“Her nomadic characters travel through space and time affirming through their relationships and varied histories a global humanity.’’