‘A Guide to Berlin’ wins 2016 Colin Roderick Award

Gail Jones’ A Guide to Berlin (Vintage) has won the 2016 Colin Roderick Award and the HT Priestley Medal, administered by the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies at James Cook University.

Jones’ novel, which takes its title from a short story written by Vladimir Nabokov, follows a group of six international travelers who meet in empty apartments in Berlin to share stories and memories.

‘A Guide to Berlin is a very Australian book, but not one parochially so,’ said judge Victoria Kuttainen. ‘It reconnects the Australian story to the experience of travel, to displacement, to unsettlement, and to world literature which is also the shared Australian heritage.’

Jones’ novel was chosen from a shortlist of six.

The Colin Roderick Award and the HT Priestley Medal are presented to the title the judges determine is ‘the best book that is published in Australia in the previous calendar year, which deals with any aspect of Australian life’. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the award, the administrators doubled this year’s prize money to $20,000.

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Category: Local news