Melbourne Prize for Literature

HELEN GARNER has won the A$60,000 Melbourne Prize for Literature, Australia’s richest literary award, a prize awarded to a Victorian writer for a body of work that has made an outstanding contribution to Australian literature and to cultural and intellectual life. Other Victorian writers on the shortlist include John Marsden, Alex Miller, Dorothy Porter and Hannie Rayson.

An additional A$30,000 best-writing prize for a piece of published work in any genre, of outstanding clarity, originality and creativity by an author 40 years or under was given to novelist Christos Tsiolkas for his novel Dead Europe, which had won the 2006 Age Book of the Year Award.

Bibliography
GARNER Helen [1942-] Novelist, short-story writer. Born in Geelong, South Australia, Australia. Novels Cosmo Cosmolino (1992: shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award 1993); The Children’s Bach (1984: winner of the 1986 South Australia Premier’s Literary Award); Moving Out (1983); Monkey Grip (1977: winner of the 1978 National Book Council Award) Stories My Hard Heart: Selected Fictions (1998); Postcards from Surfers (1985: winner of the 1986 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award); Honor and Other People’s Children: Two Stories (1980) Nonfiction Joe Cinque’s Consolation: True Story of Death, Grief and the Law (2004); The Feel of Steel (2001); True Stories: Selected Non-Fiction (1996); The First Stone: Some Questions about Sex and Power (1995); La Mama, the Story of a Theatre (1988)

TSIOLKAS Christos [1965-] Novelist. Born in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Novels Dead Europe (2005: winner of the 2006 Age Book of the Year Award; shortlisted for the 2006 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award/Christina Stead Prize for Fiction); The Jesus Man (1999); Loaded (1995) Nonfiction The Devil’s Playground (2002)