Chandran wins Miles Franklin, Wright honoured for Lifetime Achievement
Tamil Australian author Shankari Chandran won Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, the $60,000 Miles Franklin Literary Award, for her third novel, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens (Ultimo). The book explores how the family behind the fictional Cinnamon Gardens Nursing Home came to be in Sydney, through five different perspectives and an ensemble of supporting characters.
Waanyi (First Nations) author Alexis Wright was honoured with Creative Australia’s Lifetime Achievement in Literature award, which ‘acknowledges the achievements of eminent literary writers over the age of 60 who have made an outstanding and lifelong contribution to Australian literature’. Wright’s previous awards include the Miles Franklin Literary Award for her novel Carpentaria (Giramondo) in 2007, and the 2018 Stella Prize for the collective memoir Tracker (Giramondo). Wright’s most recent book, Praiseworthy (Giramondo), won the fiction category at the 2023 Queensland Literary Awards.
Also among the Queensland Literary Award winners was another First Nations author, Gudanji/Wakaja woman Debra Dank, who won the nonfiction category for We Come With This Place (Echo); and Sarah Holland-Batt, for her poetry collection The Jaguar (UQP), which won the Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance, and previously won the Stella Prize. At the NSW Premier’s History Awards, Elizabeth and John (Alan Atkinson, NewSouth) won the Australian history prize and Under Empire (Michael Laffan, Columbia University) won the general history prize.
Hayley Scrivenor has been recognised overseas, winning a UK Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) 2023 Dagger Award for her novel Dirt Town (Macmillan). Scrivenor’s novel was also among the winners of the Sisters in Crime Australia’s 2023 Davitt Awards, along with other crime novels including All That’s Left Unsaid (Tracey Lien, HQ Fiction) and Seven Days (Fleur Ferris, Puffin). Also in crime writing are the winners of the 2023 Ned Kelly Awards, which included crime fiction novels Wake (Shelley Burr, Hachette), Exiles (Jane Harper, Macmillan) and Betrayed (Sandi Logan, Hachette).
In children’s book awards, the Children’s Book Council of Australia announced the winners of the prestigious Book of the Year Awards, as well as the Shadow Judging Book of the Year Awards, chosen by groups of young people; and the Wilderness Society revealed the winners of the 2023 Environment Award for Children’s Literature and the Karajia Award for First Nations children’s storytelling.
Category: Think Australian awards
