Winners of the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2020
Congratulations to all the winners of the 2020 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards!
The winner of the Fiction Award is Damascus by Christos Tsiolkas.
Damascus is a work of soaring ambition and achievement. Based around the gospels and letters of St Paul, and focusing on characters one and two generations on from the death of Christ, this is a historical novel of immense power and an unflinching dissection of doubt and faith, tyranny and revolution, and cruelty and sacrifice.
The winner of the Non-fiction Award is Sea People by Christina Thompson.
A masterful mix of history, geography, anthropology, and the science of navigation, Sea People combines the thrill of exploration with the drama of discovery in a vivid tour of one of the most captivating regions in the world. In its pages, author Christina Thompson explores the fascinating story of her Maori husband’s ancestors.
The winner of the Drama Award and the overall Victorian Prize for Literature is Counting and Cracking by S. Shakthidharan & Eamon Flack (associate writer).
On the banks of the Georges River, Radha and her son Siddhartha release the ashes of Radha’s mother – their final connection to the past, to Sri Lanka and its struggles. Now they are free to embrace their lives in Australia. Then a phone call from Colombo brings the past spinning back to life, and we are plunged into an epic story of love and political strife, of home and exile, of parents and children.
The winner of the Poetry Award is Nganajungu Yagu by Charmaine Papertalk Green.
Charmaine Papertalk Green is from the Wajarri, Badimaya and Southern Yamaji peoples of Mid West Western Australia. Inspired by her mother’s letters, Nganajungu Yagu is a moving and textured meditation on maternal love from someone whose people’s maternal lines were deliberately broken and erased by the state.
The winner of the Writing for Young Adults Award is How it Feels to Float by Helena Fox.
Biz knows how to float. She has her people, posse, her mum and the twins. She has Grace. And she has her dad, who tells her about the little kid she was, and who shouldn’t be here but is. So Biz doesn’t tell anyone anything. Not about her dark, runaway thoughts, not about kissing Grace or noticing Jasper, the new boy. And she doesn’t tell anyone about her dad. Because her dad died when she was seven. And Biz knows how to float, right there on the surface – normal okay regular fine.
The winner of the People’s Choice Award is The Girls by Chloe Higgins.
In 2005, Chloe Higgins was seventeen years old. She and her mother, Rhonda, stayed home so that she could revise for her exams while her two younger sisters Carlie and Lisa went skiing with their father. On the way back from their trip, their car veered off the highway, flipped on its side and burst into flames. Both her sisters were killed. Their father walked away from the accident with only minor injuries. This book is about what happened next.
The winner of the Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript is Hovering by Rhett Davis.
Hovering is an ambitious, kaleidoscopic novel that playfully but poignantly explores ideas around permanence, ownership, belonging, artistic integrity, and the sentience of nature. Ingeniously employing a dazzling variety of voices and postmodern narrative devices, or ‘interruptions’ – internet code, text messages, police reports, comments sections, diagrams – Hovering ultimately tells a gripping story about three people who are struggling to find meaning in their lives.
Find out more about the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards here.
