The Victorian premier Ted Baillieu announced the shortlists for the 2011 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards this morning at the Wheeler Centre.
In all, 21 books have been shortlisted across five categories. The winners of each category will receive $25,000 each, and the overall winner, chosen from among the five category winners, will win the Victorian Prize for Literature, which carries a purse of $100,000, making the overall prize Australia’s richest single literary prize. The winners will be announced at a ceremony on Tuesday, 6 September.
The $15,000 award for an Unpublished Manuscript will be presented to coincide with the Emerging Writers’ Festival in May 2012. The $20,000 biennial award for Indigenous Writing will be presented in September 2012 to coincide with Indigenous Literacy Day.
The shortlisted nominees are:
CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry
- Swallow, Claire Potter
- The Taste of River Water, Cate Kennedy
- This Floating World, Libby Hart
Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction
- Five Bells, Gail Jones
- When Colts Ran, Roger McDonald
- The Roving Party, Rohan Wilson
- Bright and Distant Shores, Dominic Smith
- The Amateur Science of Love, Craig Sherborne
- That Deadman Dance, Kim Scott
Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-Fiction
- A Private Empire, Stephen Foster
- Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine
- My Blood’s Country, Fiona Capp
- Into the Woods, Anna Krien
- Good Living Street, Tim Bonyhady
- An Eye for Eternity: The Life Of Manning Clark, Mark McKenna
Prize for Writing for Young Adults
- The Life of a Teenage Body-Snatcher, Doug MacLeod
- Graffiti Moon, Cath Crowley
- The Three Loves of Persimmon, Cassandra Golds
Louis Esson Prize for Drama
- Sappho…in 9 fragments, Jane Montgomery Griffiths
- Do not go gentle…, Patricia Cornelius
- Intimacy, Raimondo Cortese