AustLit
Notes
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The People's Choice Award was inaugurated in 2009. Judges from the New South Premier's Literary Awards select the titles they consider 'the best in new Australian fiction' and New South Wales residents are then invited to vote on their favourite.
Latest Winners / Recipients
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Year: 2021
winner y The Dictionary of Lost Words South Melbourne : Affirm Press , 2020 18575183 2020 single work novel historical fiction'Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the ‘Scriptorium’, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word ‘bondmaid’ flutters to the floor. Esme rescues the slip and stashes it in an old wooden case that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world.
'Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women’s experiences often go unrecorded. While she dedicates her life to the Oxford English Dictionary, secretly, she begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.' (Publication summary)
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Year: 2020
winner y The Yield Melbourne : Hamish Hamilton , 2019 15449866 2019 single work novel'After a decade in Europe August Gondiwindi returns to Australia for the funeral of her much-loved grandfather, Albert, at Prosperous House, her only real home and also a place of great grief and devastation.
'Leading up to his death Poppy Gondiwindi has been compiling a dictionary of the language he was forbidden from speaking after being sent to Prosperous House as a child. Poppy was the family storyteller and August is desperate to find the precious book that he had spent his last energies compiling.
'The Yield also tells the story of Reverend Greenleaf, who recalls founding the first mission at Prosperous House and recording the language of the first residents, before being interred as an enemy of the people, being German, during the First World War.
'The Yield, in exquisite prose, carefully and delicately wrestles with questions of environmental degradation, pre-white contact agriculture, theft of language and culture, water, religion and consumption within the realm of a family mourning the death of a beloved man.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
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Year: 2019
winner y Boy Swallows Universe Sydney South : Fourth Estate , 2018 13529833 2018 single work novel'Brisbane, 1983: A lost father, a mute brother, a mum in jail, a heroin dealer for a stepfather and a notorious crim for a babysitter. It's not as if Eli's life isn't complicated enough already. He's just trying to follow his heart, learning what it takes to be a good man, but life just keeps throwing obstacles in the way - not least of which is Tytus Broz, legendary Brisbane drug dealer.
'But if Eli's life is about to get a whole lot more serious. He's about to fall in love. And, oh yeah, he has to break into Boggo Road Gaol on Christmas Day, to save his mum.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
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Year: 2018
winner y The Book of Dirt Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2017 11521001 2017 single work novel historical fiction'They chose not to speak and now they are gone. What's left to fill the silence is no longer theirs. This is my story, woven from the threads of rumour and legend.'
'Jakub Rand flees his village for Prague, only to find himself trapped by the Nazi occupation. Deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, he is forced to sort through Jewish books for a so-called Museum of the Extinct Race. Hidden among the rare texts is a tattered prayer book, hollow inside, containing a small pile of dirt.
'Back in the city, Františka Roubíčková picks over the embers of her failed marriage, despairing of her conversion to Judaism. When the Nazis summon her two eldest daughters for transport, she must sacrifice everything to save the girls from certain death.
'Decades later, Bram Presser embarks on a quest to find the truth behind the stories his family built around these remarkable survivors.
'The Book of Dirt is a completely original novel about love, family secrets, and Jewish myths. And it is a heart-warming story about a grandson's devotion to the power of storytelling and his family's legacy.'
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Year: 2017
winner y Vancouver Carlton South : Inkerman and Blunt , 2016 9174371 2016 single work novellaThe story's narrator, Paul, remembers 'a giant who came to stay with his family when his father was trying to bring American football to Australia. The tall guy in question was a player called Knut Knudsen; as a small boy, our narrator sees him as the modern day equivalent of the Colossus of Rhodes. Knudsen has dreams of becoming of all things, a writer. And it turns out that when our narrator is all grown up, he himself has become a writer, and is on an author tour to a Canadian festival... As a side trip from his festival appearances, he reconnects with Knudsen, who has published several books and is now married and teaching creative writing at a university college' (Caroline Baum, Booktopia).
Works About this Award
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Undercover 2012 single work column
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 10-11 November 2012; (p. 29) A column canvassing current literary news including the projected annual appointment of a critic to the Australian Book Review periodical; announcement of the Big Fat Poetry Pig-Out event by Hampress, 2 December 2012; the winners of the Waverley Library Award for Literature, Alex Buzo Shortlist Prize, 2012; and the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, People's Choice Award shortlist. -
Bookmarks 2011 single work column
— Appears in: The Saturday Age , 21 May 2011; (p. 33) -
Undercover 2011 single work column
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 30 April - 1 May 2011; (p. 29) A column canvassing current literary news including a brief report on the establishment of the Victorian Prize for Literature. McEvoy also notes the final week for voting in the 2011 People's Choice Awards in the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards and the joint launch of Kate Forsyth's The Starkin Crown and Belinda Murrell's The Ivory Rose.