Shortlist embedded in reality and imagination
Jamaica-born, Sydney-based writer Sienna Brown has been shortlisted for the inaugural ARA Historical Novel Prize for her debut novel Master of My Fate.
For Sienna Brown, history is personal. The Jamaica-born, Sydney-based writer has been shortlisted for the inaugural ARA Historical Novel Prize, worth $50,000 to the winner, for her debut novel, Master of My Fate.
Brown’s novel is based on William Buchanan, a Jamaican slave, rebel and one of the small group of convicts from the West Indies, then part of the British Empire, transported to NSW.
The author, who was born in Kingston and grew up in Canada, became aware of Buchanan’s story only when she moved to Sydney and started working at the museum in Hyde Park Barracks.
She was struck by a sense of fate. She and Buchanan shared the same cultural background and the course of their lives displaced them from home. Buchanan escaped from the barracks in 1836. He was recaptured but eventually received a ticket of leave.
“It is terrific to be shortlisted for the prize,’’ Brown said. “This award recognises a hardworking genre that requires a great deal of research and the ability to create a story embedded in reality as much as the imagination.”
The other two writers in contention are Catherine Jinks for Shepherd, an adult historical thriller set in colonial NSW, and Brisbane writer Mirandi Riwoe for Stone Sky Cold Mountain, which centres on Chinese siblings who chance their hand on the north Queensland goldfields.
Riwoe said historical fiction explored aspects of our past “that still affect us today ... it can expose our wrongs and illuminate how far we have come”.
Blue Mountains-based Jinks said the shutdowns of COVID-19 made book prizes “staggeringly important” because “giving recently published books some publicity can make all the difference”.
The winner will be announced on November 10.
More Coverage
‘Get you good’: Murdered teen allegedly stabbed, abandoned in bushland
Jacob Greig has been refused bail after being charged with murder, with a court told he allegedly abandoned his teenage victim at the outskirts of a Nepean River campsite following a chance encounter.
Brisbane Olympics cost blowouts to surpass $500m
Cost blowouts to deliver the 2032 Brisbane Olympic and Paralympic Games could climb to $681m, with a major infrastructure project expected to run over budget by half a billion dollars.