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Arts Queensland Steele Rudd Australian Short Story Award
Subcategory of Queensland Premier's Literary Awards
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Latest Winners / Recipients

Year: 2011

winner y separately published work icon Reading Madame Bovary Amanda Lohrey , Collingwood : Black Inc. , 2010 Z1722620 2010 selected work short story

'A woman finds her everyday life engulfed by vivid fantasies, a businessman explores new ways to deal with his rage, a young woman is stuck on a boat with a bunch of delinquents, a diary is discovered, a commune goes wrong ...

'In this captivating collection of short fiction, award-winning novelist Amanda Lohrey explores the dilemmas of modern life. Her characters find themselves caught between body and spirit, memory and desire, ambition and mortality - and they must transform themselves or be trapped.' (From the publisher's website.)

Year: 2009

winner y separately published work icon The Boat Nam Le , Camberwell : Hamish Hamilton , 2008 Z1495449 2008 selected work short story (taught in 42 units)

'In the magnificent opening story, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," a young writer is urged by his friends to mine his father's experiences in Vietnam - and what seems at first a satire on turning one's life into literary commerce becomes a transcendent exploration of homeland, and the ties between father and son. "Cartagena" provides a visceral glimpse of life in Colombia as it enters the mind of a fourteen-year-old hit man facing the ultimate test. In "Meeting Elise" an ageing New York painter mourns his body's decline as he prepares to meet his daughter on the eve of her Carnegie Hall debut. And with graceful symmetry, the final, title story returns to Vietnam, to a fishing trawler crowded with refugees where a young woman's bond with a mother and her small son forces both women to a shattering decision.' (From the author's website.)

Year: 2008

winner y separately published work icon Someone Else : Fictional Essays John Hughes , Artarmon : Writing and Society Research Centre Giramondo Publishing , 2007 Z1415040 2007 selected work essay '...Hughes pays homage to twenty-one artists, writers and musicians who have had a formative influence on his imagination. From Chekhov and Borges and Beckett, to proust, Rothko and Cage - each essay brings its subjuect to life in unexpected ways. Kafka writes the parable of Abraham and Isaac, with no one to stay Abraham's knife. Wittgenstein considers the relationship between turtles and time. Bob Dylan stars in a fantasy of travellers and deserts and women with knives and silver earrings. Just around the corner from where Hughes works, Dostoyevsky fries kidneys in the kitchen of his Stanley Street terrace...Someone Else uses the essay as a form of autobiography. Here, however, the essays are fictions. Or are they? Hughes tells the stories of the figures who live in his mind by making them tell his stories - and in doing so engages in an art of literary vantriloquism.' - back cover

Year: 2007

winner y separately published work icon Every Move You Make David Malouf , Sydney : Chatto and Windus , 2006 Z1302033 2006 selected work short story

'Bookish boys and taciturn men, strong women and wayward sons, fathers and daughters, lovers and husbands, a composer and his muse, a builder-architect and his legacy - here are their stories, whole lives brought vividly into focus and so powerfully rooted in the landscape that you can almost feel the heat and the dust. His canvas is the vast Australian continent from the mysterious, glittering Valley of Lagoons behind the Great Divide in Far North Queensland, to bohemian Balmain and the Centre at Uluru, but always there are enticing glimpses of a world beyond, and the stories are tender, subtle, unsettlingly intimate. A young man going off to war tries to make sense of his place in the world he is leaving; a composer's life plays itself out as a complex domestic cantata; an accident on a hunting trip speaks volumes, which its inarticulate victim never could; and, in the funniest, most surprising story of all, a down-to-earth woman stubbornly tries to keep her feet on the ground at Ayers Rock. Malouf's men and women are together but curiously alone, looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on, in life, puzzling over the space they'll leave behind when the waters close over them...'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

This award was known as the Steele Rudd Australian Short Story Award from 1988-2007.

Year: 2006

winner y separately published work icon A Funny Thing Happened at 27,000 Feet... Tales from Times of Terror Craig Cormick , Charnwood : Mockingbird , 2005 Z1232351 2005 selected work short story This award was known as the Steele Rudd Australian Short Story Award from 1988-2007.

Works About this Award

Short Tales on Shortlist 2011 single work column
— Appears in: Westside News , 7 September 2011; (p. 6)
For Author, Timing Proves Everything Gia Metherell , 2006 single work column
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 13 September 2006; (p. 3)
Brisbane Writers' Festival Shortlists 1999 single work column
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , October no. 215 1999; (p. 47)
Winning Stories from a Struggle Not to Write Rosemary Sorensen , 1998 single work biography
— Appears in: The Courier-Mail , 5 September 1998; (p. 9)
WA Wins Yet Again 1998 single work column
— Appears in: The West Australian , 4 September 1998; (p. 5)
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