NSW Premiers Literary Awards 2009
In 1978 the New South Wales Government inaugurated the annual New South Wales Premiers Literary Awards to honour distinguished achievement by Australian writers. The Awards are announced during the Sydney Writers’ Festival. The NSW Premier’s Literary Awards are the richest literary awards in Australia.
The NSW Premiers Book of the Year for 2009 is ‘The Boat’ by Nam Le.
Nam Le was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia. He has previously received the Pushcart Prize, the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, and fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Phillips Exeter Academy. His fiction has appeared in venues including Zoetrope: All-Story, A Public Space, Conjunctions, One Story, NPR’s, Selected Shorts and the Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best New American Voices, Best Australian Stories, and Pushcart Prize anthologies. He is the fiction editor of the Harvard Review.
The Boat is a stunningly inventive, deeply moving fiction debut: stories that take the readers from the slums of Colombia to the streets of Tehran; from New York City to Iowa City; from a tiny fishing village in Australia to a foundering vessel in the South China Sea, in a masterful display of literary virtuosity and feeling. In the 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.
Full list of all the winners can be found here.
Tags: australian authors, nam le, NSW Premiers Literary Awards 2009, the boat, writing
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