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Australia's richest literary award ($A100,000) - the Prime Minister's Literary Prize – has been established by current PM, Kevin Rudd, with the inaugural winners announced in early September.
Unlike the Miles Franklin award (the country's longest standing and most prestigious), which demands that shortlisted books must be about Australian life, the Prime Minister's award for fiction is awarded to the novel which, according to the judges, is the best of the year written by an Australian author. The inaugural award for fiction was awarded to debut novelist Steven Conte and The Zookeeper's War. It is a story of passion and sacrifice in a city battered by war. It is 1943 and each night in a bomb shelter beneath the Berlin Zoo an Australian woman, Vera, shelters with her German husband, Axel, the zoo's director. As tensions mount in the closing days of the war, nothing, and no one, it seems, can be trusted. The Zookeeper's War is a powerful novel of a marriage, and of a city collapsing. It confronts not only the brutality of war but the possibility of heroism.
A second prize (also worth $A100,000) is that of best non-fiction. This has been awarded to Philip Jones and Ochre and Rust, which takes Aboriginal artefacts from their museum shelves and traces their stories, revealing charged and nuanced moments of encounter in Australia's frontier history. Philip Jones positions them at the centre of these gripping, poignant tales, transporting the reader into the heart of Australia's frontier zone. Ochre and Rust builds incrementally, resulting in a convincing new insight into Australia's frontier past and the motives of its characters.
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