The shortlisted works for the 2008 Prime Minister's Literary Awards have been announced. These are the major literary awards (worth $100,000, tax free, in each of the Fiction and Non-Fiction categories) that were foreshadowed by the incoming Australian Government at the end of 2007. The major controversy about the awards being that the Prime Minister will supposedly make the final decision on the winners. Those winners will be announced in the coming months, but I can't seem to find an actual date on the website. Given this is the first year for these awards that's not such a bad thing. The administrators just have to pick a particular date that will be consistent in the years ahead.
The shortlisted works are:
Fiction
Burning In by Mireille Juchau
El Dorado by Dorothy Porter
Jamaica: A novel by Malcolm Knox
Sorry by Gail Jones
The Complete Stories by David Malouf
The Widow and Her Hero by Tom Keneally
The Zookeeper's War by Steven Conte
Non-Fiction
A History of Queensland by Raymond Evans
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time by Clive James
My Life as a Traitor by Zarah Ghahramani with Robert Hillman
Napoleon: The Path to Power, 1769-1799 by Philip Dwyer
Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers by Philip Jones
Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer
Vietnam: The Australian War by Paul Ham
