The Australian-Vogel Literary Award shortlist long on talent
Many of the The Australian-Vogel Literary Award shortlisted manuscripts go on to be published as books.
The schoolgirl daughter of the justice minister becomes pen pals with an Australian on death row in Asia. A teen boy realises all is not well with his soldier brother, who is back from Afghanistan. An up-and-coming city journalist returns to the family farm to help his ailing father. A World War II history in which Diggers fight ... the French. And a surprising new take on Franz Kafka.
Such is the diversity of this year’s shortlist for the $20,000 The Australian-Vogel’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript by a writer under the age of 35, revealed here today.
On Wednesday night, the Vogel will add another name to an honour board that includes Tim Winton, Kate Grenville, Andrew McGahan, Mandy Sayer and, on a now notorious note, Helen Demidenko, who won the 1993 Vogel for The Hand that Signed the Paper, but was exposed as a hoaxer who had faked a Ukrainian ancestry.
This year’s Vogel shortlist also has an unusual contender: Richard James is in the running for a nonfiction book, Australia’s War With France: The Campaign is Syria and Lebanon, 1941.
The award, which started in 1980, has typically been won by works of fiction.
The other four finalists are there for would-be novels, and their range is characteristic of the Vogel’s open-mindedness.
Marija Pericic’s The Lost Papers is an intriguing exploration of Czech writer Franz Kafka, he of giant cockroach fame, and his dedicated friend (or is he?) Max Brod.
David Allan-Petale, Hayley Lawrence and Jarrah Dundler start closer to home, but also look well beyond Australia.
Allan-Petale’s Locust Summer is a sharp meditation on the separation of life from land, Dundler’s Tryst is a coming of age story that includes an Australian soldier while in Lawrence’s Inside the Tiger, a late teens girl befriends an Australian drug mule awaiting execution in Thailand. That her father is justice minister complicates matters.
The winning manuscript will be published next week by Allen & Unwin.
The award ceremony, hosted by writer and TV star Ben Law, will be held at A&U’s Sydney offices on Wednesday night.
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