Mark's Say, May 2016
We won The Bookstore of the Year Award last month at London Book Fair’s International Excellence Awards! We won it for our ‘community outreach, support of Australian authors and [our] help for non-profit organisations working on literacy initiatives’. It’s the first time the award has been presented, but there have been awards in other areas. In 2014, Australia’s Indigenous Literacy Foundation won the inaugural Education Initiatives Award. An email from a journalist friend with a curt note, ‘FYI’, alerted me to the award. So we entered. Our marketing manager, Nina Kenwood, and designer, Cat Matteson, produced a beautiful and compelling application. The Melbourne City of Literature office also nominated us.
Even so, there are some damned good bookshops around the world and, privately, I considered it unlikely that we’d get a nod. It was with some surprise that we learned that we had been shortlisted for the prize, along with Hoepli (Italy), Rahva Raamat (Estonia), and Sanlian Bookstore (China). It was fortunate that our irrepressible events manager, Chris Gordon, had applied for, and received, a City of Literature grant to attend the LBF. There were lots of jokes about Chris preparing her acceptance speech and, coincidentally, our music buyer, Dave Clarke, has relocated to London for three months so he was roped in too. I don’t think any of us believed we would win, but it was fun to speculate. I was pretty certain that the stylish bookshop from Milan was a shoo-in. When Dave sent me a tweet – ‘We won’ – from the LBF at 4.30 in the morning, I couldn’t believe it; it was a bit like getting one of those perfect ATAR scores. It is a bit of a mystery to us as to how the winner was chosen, and how many shops entered, but we have accepted the award with great enthusiasm – certainly Chris and Dave did in London! – and so too have our customers, judging by all the kind messages you’ve been sending us.
The Victorian Creative Industries Minister, Martin Foley, has just announced a new $115 million strategy for Victoria’s creative industries. It includes increased support for individual artists, organisations, and infrastructure. State Library Victoria will be a major beneficiary, and of course we hope that writers will be among the artists who benefit. I also hope that there may be more funding for the Melbourne Writers Festival. The MWF has to rely on box office sales to a much greater degree than equivalent festivals in other states and consequently fewer of the events are free.
April was a big month for prizes, with one of my favourites, The Stella Prize, being taken out by Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was awarded to Viet Thanh Nguyen for his first novel, The Sympathizer, which is set in Vietnam and the US. Nguyen has just published a nonfiction book, Nothing Ever Dies – Vietnam and the Memory of War. The Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography went to one of my favourites, Barbarian Days by The New Yorker writer William Finnegan. It’s a book about an obsession, surfing, but it’s much, much more than that. It is worth noting that in the last 20 years only five women have won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; it looks like the US needs a Stella Prize!
