Fully formed: 30 years of The Australian/Vogel Literary Award

As The Australian/Vogel Literary Award approaches 30, we survey the highs and lows of a prize that has launched the careers of many leading writers.

TIM Winton was just 21 and "from the wrong side of the country" when he won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for his coming-of-age novel An Open Swimmer.

It was 1981 and the unpublished author from Western Australia had never been on a plane. He reportedly borrowed a pair of flash, cuban-heeled boots before taking his first flight, from Perth to Sydney, to collect his prize.

On a spring night, in front of almost 100 guests including former South Australian premier Don Dunstan, a fresh-faced Winton thanked the award's key sponsor, businessman Niels Stevns, and his parents. "It must be hard to have a son who wants to be a writer," Winton said, sounding every bit the unformed young man he still was. "This award will show that their faith in me was justified."

More than justified, as it turns out. Winton is not only one of our most admired writers, he occupies a unique place in the Australian literary firmament: his work is insistently, audaciously literary yet consistently rivals the sales of mass-market genre authors. Since winning the Vogel he has snared a record four Miles Franklin awards and a Commonwealth Writers' Prize, while two of his novels, Dirt Music and The Riders, have been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Even so, the famously reclusive writer stopped attending awards ceremonies in 1984, after his second novel, Shallows, netted him his first Miles Franklin.

"I haven't been to an awards night since then, once I realised you don't actually have to go," he told The Australian in 2009. "I'm not good in a crowd."

This intensely private author is about to make a rare exception to his uncompromising, no-awards-night rule. This week he is to cross the Nullarbor to present The Australian/Vogel Literary Award in Sydney on Wednesday, an event that will mark the 30th awarding of this remarkable prize, the nation's most lucrative and prestigious award for an unpublished manuscript.

The Vogel, open to writers 35 or younger and co-sponsored by The Australian, clearly has a place in Winton's affections. He says of being a winner all those years ago: "The Vogel prize came along at the perfect time for me. I was writing fiction in earnest as a very young person and trying to publish it while living on the wrong side of the country and without literary connections."

An important aspect of the Vogel prize is that the winning manuscript is published by Allen & Unwin, thus turning aspiring authors into published writers. Winton reminisces on the A&U website: "Winning the prize gave me a huge morale boost and the impetus that only affirmation can produce . . . It set me on my way, and I lived on the $5000 for a year. Without the Vogel, I suspect things might have gone differently."

Winton shared the $10,000 prizemoney with a 27-year-old co-winner, Christopher Matthews, from South Australia. His manuscript, Al Jazzar, was an espionage story set around the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. While Winton evolved into a celebrated literary figure, Matthews's enduring passions proved to be painting and the Middle East: a keen student of that region, he has painted many landscapes with Middle Eastern backdrops. Winton is foremost among the stellar writing talents unearthed by the award since 1980. (Although the Vogel was established in that year, no prize was given in 1985, so 2011 marks the 30th awarding of the prize.) Through those three decades the award has also jump-started the careers of Kate Grenville, Andrew McGahan, Brian Castro, Mandy Sayer, Tom Flood and Eva Sallis (now Hornung). Between them, Vogel winners have gone on to take seven Miles Franklin awards, several Commonwealth Writers' prizes and a truckload of premier's literary awards and shortlistings.

Like Winton, Grenville is a Man Booker shortlistee. She also has won the Orange Prize for female writers and has said that securing the 1984 Vogel award for Lilian's Story showed her the value of writing "with my own true voice".

Hornung took out the 1997 award with her bestselling novel Hiam and last year hooked a lucrative literary fish -- the $100,000 Australian Prime Minister's Literary Award for fiction. Dog Boy, the Hornung novel that caught the PM's eye, has been translated into 16 languages. But the Vogel is not merely a springboard for other prizes: it has given many young writers what they want most -- recognition and the chance for that manuscript languishing in a drawer or on a computer hard drive to see the light of day. Melbourne author Lisa Lang was a joint winner of the 2009 prize and, for her, "it was a fantastic confidence boost, really". Lang's winning manuscript, Utopian Man, is a vivid, fictional biography of 19th-century Melbourne bookseller Edward Cole.

Lang, 35, says that writing her historical novel "sort of felt like I had this imaginary friend for about five years". She recalls people would nod knowingly when she spoke about this. "Yes, you've got this friend," they would say, as if talking to a toddler with an over-heated imagination. She says: "It was nice to get acknowledgment [through the prize] that I was on the right track and that people were interested in what I was trying to do. It is great, that sort of outward acknowledgment."

When we speak by telephone, Lang is basking in the glow of further acknowledgment: she has just learned that Utopian Man has been shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize, the main fiction prize in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards. "I think I am still in shock about that one, I really wasn't expecting it," she says, observing that Peter Carey and Alex Miller are also on that shortlist. Interestingly, Night Street, the novel by Lang's Vogel co-winner Kristel Thornell, also has been shortlisted for the Christina Stead prize. The double shortlisting vindicates the Vogel judges' decision -- criticised by some bloggers -- to split the 2009 prize between these talented writers.

Geordie Williamson, chief literary critic for The Australian and a Vogel judge this year, believes the award is a pivotal feature of Australia's prize culture because it answers the question: "Who's coming next?" He says: "Whatever happens in the wider field of Australian letters, that sense of urgency, of reinventing the line-up, is crucial. Otherwise you have the same names, year after year, names who deserve their space but not all the space, all the time." Allen & Unwin chairman Patrick Gallagher says the award has made a significant contribution to Australian literature: "It has given many, many young Australians writers their first break, basically. It gives them a publisher and money to keep writing."

The 2011 shortlistees are announced today, exclusively in The Australian. They are Jade Maitre (for A Short Death), Rohan Wilson (The Roving Party) and Romy Ash (Floundering). Maitre is a 32-year-old journalist, photographer and mother of two who splits her time between Sydney and France. She describes her shortlisting as "a shock, yeah. The Vogel has always seemed like a really exciting way to be introduced as a new writer, especially with a book like mine that takes quite a lot of risks". Her novel, written in the second person, was inspired by a murder that occurred while she was visiting a beach in Brazil in 2005.

Ash, 29, is a creative writing teacher at the University of Melbourne. She says The Floundering is "kind of a kidnapping story but in this case the kidnapper is the mother".

Wilson, 34, is from Tasmania, and his entry, The Roving Party, excavates the often bloody world of settler-Aboriginal relations in Van Diemen's Land in the early 1800s. The PhD student and father of one's delight at being a Vogel finalist is palpable.

"It is one of the most exciting things that has ever happened to me," he says. "It's nice just thinking about the possibility of winning it. It would be a life-changing thing if I could get there. It was a shot in the dark for me that I would ever get to the shortlist. I am over the moon."

This week's announcement of the winner will usher in what many say is an overdue reform. From this year the Vogel winner will be announced at the same time their novel is released. (Previously, the winning novel was published several months after the winner was revealed.) This means those who read about the award-winning book can buy it immediately.

Gallagher says of this reform: "I think it's a really good, new step. It always seemed a pity to try to split the publicity [between the award's announcement and the winning novel's release]."

The story of this influential prize begins with a Danish bread salesman who had made Australia his home. Stevns, the owner of Vogel bread in Australia, wanted to make a contribution to his adopted country and approached The Australian about collaborating on a prize targeted at young writers. Allen & Unwin came on board, and the first The Australian/Vogel Literary Award was launched in 1980, offering prizemoney of $10,000 (since boosted to $20,000 and to $30,000 for the 30th anniversary year).

Stevns has since died and his son, Alan, carries on the family's commitment to the prize, seeing it as a lasting memorial to his father.

The award's inaugural winner was an archetypal battler, shop storeman Paul Radley, who had left school at 15 and apparently written a novel called Jack Rivers and Me. Sixteen years later Radley returned his award after admitting his uncle had written the book, along with two other novels attributed to him. Radley confessed to the deception after telling his psychologist he was worn out pretending he was someone he wasn't. "Almost half my life I've been living a double life," he told The Australian. "He [his uncle] has used me in the most horrible way."

This was not the only scandal associated with the Vogel. The most notorious was that involving Helen Demidenko, the 1993 winner, who had claimed that her winning manuscript, The Hand that Signed the Paper -- which went on to win the Miles Franklin -- was based on her Ukrainian family history. In fact, Demidenko was Helen Darville, daughter of English migrants from Scunthorpe. Her novel, written from the perspective of Ukrainians who aligned themselves with Nazis during World War II, was accused of being fake, historically ignorant, and anti-Semitic.

Barry Oakley, The Australian's literary editor at that time, has cheerfully admitted he was duped by Demidenko when he interviewed her after she won the Vogel. He told me in 2005 that "she had this spectacular blouse on that she said was decorated with Ukrainian folk motifs. She then did a kind of folk dance for me. It was brilliant . . . I was totally taken in by it."

Gallagher, on the other hand, says the Demidenko affair "took years off my life and I am not sure if I regained them". But he also believes scandals enhance public awareness of literary awards: "I really think that for an award to be worth its salt, it has to have controversy."

Each year the Vogel attracts about 200 entries, which several judges winnow to a shortlist. Past judges have included Helen Garner, Tom Keneally, Roger McDonald and Robert Drewe. Drewe was one of the prize's first judges and has said he is "immodestly pleased to have ushered Tim Winton and Brian Castro into the literary world". He has also said this award "has brought us some of the nation's best writers. It has never smacked of the hometown decision or the coterie". This fearless objectivity was evident in 1985 when a judging panel comprising Garner, McDonald and Ian Moffitt announced they would not award any prize because the standard of entries that year was too low.

Williamson says culling the entries to a shortlist of three was "a huge task". He says he and fellow judges Cate Kennedy and Margo Lanagan took the job very seriously, and that "once the pile gets near the end there is a real intensity about how you address that last half-dozen". Williamson believes overall "the quality of the best [entries] is as good as ever and the quality of the remainder is variable". He says the judges are seeing more entries from young writers who want to write books but don't read them. "What you are getting now is kids who don't read books but who get their narratives from elsewhere on the cultural spectrum," explains Williamson.

He gives such writers this pithy advice: "Get a job counting bonobos in a rainforest. Help build a village in Malawi. Do anything that exposes you to reality in forms more various than the several blocks of inner-city cafes and pubs that currently circumscribe your world. And when you go, take an iPad loaded to its digital gunwales with the best books or a backpack filled with paperbacks. Because a real writer is just a reader with a pen in their hand, twitching to reply."

For many authors, winning the Vogel early in their careers is an achievement that stays with them. Andrew McGahan was at high school when his mother brought home Winton's An Open Swimmer. McGahan's mother hoped this novel by the then-youthful author might inspire her son, who also wanted to become a writer. It did. From then on, recalls McGahan, "it was always in my head that the Vogel existed".

McGahan was 25 and out of work when he entered the 1991 Vogel. Praise, his manuscript about being young, adrift and in thrall to drugs, sex and booze, won. "This was everything you would have hoped for at the time," says the author, now 44 and living in Melbourne. He says of the $15,000 prizemoney: "It seemed like a fortune at the time."

Praise became a bestseller and was turned into a feature film. McGahan, now working on a young adult fantasy series, wrote the screenplay and picked up an AFI award. His most highly decorated novel, The White Earth, was published in 2004 and won the Miles Franklin, a Commonwealth Writers' prize and The Age and The Courier-Mail books of the year: a rare quadrella.

For 2007 winner Stefan Laszczuk (I Dream of Magda), the knowledge he has a Vogel under his belt helps him get through the down times in the wee, small hours. He says on A&U's website: "Probably the most satisfying thing about winning the Vogel is that on those late, lonely nights when I am staring at my computer screen, wondering why I've been dumped yet again, wondering when I will start losing weight . . . I can turn off the computer, turn off the lights, crawl into bed and say to myself 'well, at least I won the f. . .ing Vogel.' You can't buy that."