The shortlists for the 2009 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards have been announced.
The shortlisted works are:
Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction
The Pages - Murray Bail (Text)
Dog Boy - Eva Hornung (Text)
The Boat - Nam Le (Penguin)
The Slap - Christos Tsiolkas (Allen & Unwin)
Breath - Tim Winton (Penguin)
Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-Fiction
The City's Outback - Gillian Cowlishaw (UNSW Press)
Arabesques - Robert Dessaix (Picador)
The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island - Chloe Hooper (Hamish Hamilton)
House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroger-Mann - Evelyn Juers (Giramondo)
Darwin's Armada - Iain McCalman (Viking)
C.J. Dennis Prize for Poetry
The Golden Bird - Robert Adamson (Black Inc)
Fishing in the Devonian - Carol Jenkins (Puncher and Wattman)
The Other Way Out - Bronwyn Lea (Giramondo)
Louis Esson Prize for Drama
Realism - Paul Galloway ((Melbourne Theatre Company/Currency Press)
Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd - Lally Katz (Malthouse Theatre)
The Modern International Dead - Damien Millar (Griffin Theatre Company/Currency Press)
The Prize for Young Adult Fiction
The Two Pearls of Wisdom - Alison Goodman (HarperCollins)
The Beginner's Guide to Living - Lia Hills (Text Publishing)
Something in the World Called Love - Sue Saliba (Penguin)
The Alfred Deakin Prize for an Essay Advancing Public Debate
Death in the Mountains - Lisa Clifford (Macmillan)
Neither Here Nor There: Italians and Swiss-Italians on the Walhalla Goldfield 1865-1915 - Annamaria Davine (Italian Australian Institute)
And Be Home Before Dark - Roland Rocchiccioli (Hardie Grant Books)
The John Curtin Prize for Journalism
The Guards' Story - Peter Cronau and Quentin McDermott (Four Corners, ABC Television)
The Penalty is Death: Inside Bali's Kerobokan Prison - Luke Davies (The Monthly)
A Week in Kinglake - Michael Vincent (ABC Radio)
The Prize for Best Music Theatre Script
Poor Boy - Matt Cameron and Tim Finn (Melbourne Theatre Company/Currency Press)
Shane Warne The Musical - Eddie Perfect (Token Events)
Metro Street - Matthew Robinson (Arts Asia Pacific, Power Arts and STCSA)
The Prize for Science Writing
Pasteur's Gambit - Stephen Dando-Collins (Vintage)
Climate Code Red: The Case for Emergency Action - David Spratt and Philip Sutton (Scribe)
The Rise of Animals: Evolution and Diversification of the Kingdom Animalia - Patricia Vickers-Rich (JHU Press)
The Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript by an Emerging Victorian Writer
Sufficient Grace - Amy Espeseth
Like Being a Wife - Catherine Harris
The Sunlit Zone - Lisa Jacobson
The awards presentation will be held on Tuesday September 1st.
Interesting the lack of overlap between the AGE shortlist and this one. The AGE novels in particular are testing the boundaries rather than going for the tried and tested. Lucy Sussex
Lucy's right. Some wonderful books here, but The Age shortlist is way more exciting!