|
Banjo Award
The National Book Council Banjo Awards were presented by the National Book Council of Australia from 1974 to 1997 for works of fiction and non-fiction. The name commemorates the bush poet Andrew Barton Banjo Paterson. The Council has enjoyed notable leadership including Justice Michael Kirby and Professor Michael Fraser (1991–1998). Many notable Australian writers have been recipients for this award, including Peter Carey, Tim Winton, Alan Gould, Liam Davison, Sally Morrison, and Roger McDonald. In 1978 Helen Garner was the first woman to win the award for her novel Monkey Grip. The current Banjo Paterson Writing Award, established in 1991, is separate to the above awards, although similarly aims to commemorate the work of Banjo Paterson. Winners Source: Fiction * 1975 William Nagle for ''The Odd Angry Shot'' * 1978 Helen Garner for '' Monkey Grip'' * 1981 David Foster for ''Moonlight'' * 1982 Peter Carey for ''Bliss'' * 1985 Peter Carey for ''Illywhacker'' * 1988 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bush Poet
The bush ballad, bush song or bush poem is a style of poetry and folk music that depicts the life, character and scenery of the Australian bush. The typical bush ballad employs a straightforward rhyme structure to narrate a story, often one of action and adventure, and uses language that is colourful, colloquial and idiomatically Australian. Bush ballads range in tone from humorous to melancholic, and many explore themes of Australian folklore, including bushranger, bushranging, drover (Australian), droving, drought in Australia, droughts, floods in Australia, floods, life on the frontier, and relations between Indigenous Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. The tradition dates back to the beginnings of European settlement of Australia, European settlement when colonists, mostly British and Irish, brought with them the folk music of their homelands. Many early bush poems originated in convicts in Australia, Australia's convict system, and were transmitted orall ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Illywhacker
''Illywhacker'' is a novel by Australian writer Peter Carey. It was published in 1985 to commercial and critical success, winning a number of awards and being short-listed for the Booker Prize. Considered metafiction or magical realism, the novel is narrated by liar, trickster, and confidence man Herbert Badgery, the " illywhacker" of the title, and tells the story of his picaresque life in Australia between 1919 and the 1980s. Plot summary The novel is related in broad chronological order by the main protagonist, Herbert Badgery, but with frequent digressions that relate the circumstances and life history of Badgery himself, and of many of the characters he meets. The story begins in 1919 when the thirty-three-year-old Herbert lands his aeroplane in a field close to the wealthy former bullock-herder Jack McGrath. Herbert befriends Jack and persuades him to invest in the construction of an aeroplane factory. Herbert also becomes the lover of Jack's teenage daughter Phoeb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Matthew Condon
Matthew Condon (born 1962) is a prize-winning Australian writer and journalist. Biography Educated at the University of Queensland and the Goethe Institute, Bremen, Germany, he is the author of ten novels and short story collections, including ''The Lulu Magnet'', ''A Night at the Pink Poodle'', ''The Motorcycle Cafe'', and ''The Pillow Fight''. ''The Trout Opera'', an epic novel that took him more than ten years to write, examines the Australian character through its chief protagonist Wilfred Lampe, a rabbiter and farm hand who spends his entire life in the township of Dalgety, on the banks of the Snowy River. The Sydney Daily Telegraph described the novel as "an instant classic". In 2013, Condon published ''Three Crooked Kings'', the first part of a biography of former Queensland Police Commissioner Terry Lewis who was charged in 1989 and later jailed on multiple corruption charges. The book was based on Condon's extensive interviews with Lewis and others as well as arc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henry Reynolds (historian)
Henry Reynolds, (born 1 March 1938) is an Australian historian whose primary work has focused on the frontier conflict between European settlers in Australia and Indigenous Australians. Education and career Reynolds received a state school education in Hobart, Tasmania, from 1944 to 1954. Following this, he attended the University of Tasmania, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in History in 1960, later gaining a Master of Arts in 1964. He received an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from his alma mater, the University of Tasmania, in 1998 and another from James Cook University in 2015. He taught in secondary schools in Australia and England, later establishing the Australian History programme at Townsville University College, where he accepted a lectureship in 1965, later serving as an associate professor of History and Politics from 1982 until his retirement in 1998. He then took up an Australian Research Council post as a professorial fellow at th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hazel Rowley
Hazel Joan Rowley (16 November 1951 – 1 March 2011) was a British-born Australian author and biographer. Born in London, Rowley emigrated with her parents to Adelaide at the age of eight. She studied at the University of Adelaide, graduating with Honours in French and German. Later she acquired a PhD in French. She taught literary studies at Deakin University in Melbourne, before moving to the United States. Rowley's first published biography, of Australian novelist Christina Stead, was critically acclaimed and won the National Book Council's "Banjo" Award for non-fiction in 1994.Bennie, AngelaHazel Rowley: Intimate obsessions ''The Sydney Morning Herald'', 17 December 2005. It was shortlisted for the 1993 Colin Roderick Award. Her next biographical work was about the African American writer Richard Wright. Her best-known book, '' Tête-à-tête'' (2005), covers the lives of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (de Beauvoir had been the subject of Rowley's PhD thesis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A Fortunate Life
''A Fortunate Life'' is an autobiography by Albert Facey published in 1981, nine months before his death. It chronicles his early life in Western Australia, his experiences as a private during the Gallipoli campaign of World War I and his return to civilian life after the war. It also documents his extraordinary life of hardship, loss, friendship and love. During the initial days of its publication, Albert Facey became a nationwide celebrity. Notwithstanding the interest in it, Facey considered his life to be simple and "had no idea what all the fuss was about". When asked in an interview, where the name of the book originated, he replied, "I called it 'A Fortunate Life' because I truly believe that is what I had". It has become a classic piece of Australian literature and is one of Australia's most beloved books. it has, since its publication in 1981, sold over one million copies, becoming a primary account of the Australian experience during World War I. It is also featured in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Albert Facey
Albert Barnett Facey (31 August 1894 – 11 February 1982), publishing as A.B. Facey was an Australian writer and World War I veteran, whose main work was his autobiography, ''A Fortunate Life'', now considered a classic of Australian literature. it has sold over one million copies and was the subject of a television mini-series. Early life Facey was born in Maidstone, Victoria, the son of Joseph Facey and Mary Ann Facey, née Carr. His father died on the goldfields of Western Australia in 1896 of typhoid fever, when Albert was two years old. In 1898, Albert's mother departed for Western Australia to care for her older children, who had accompanied their father to the goldfields. She left her younger children, including Albert, to the care of their grandmother. When his grandfather died in 1898, the grandmother, Mrs Jane Carr, (née Barnett), moved with Albert and his siblings Roy (born 1890), Eric (born 1889) and Myra (born 1892) in 1899 from Barkers Creek near Castlemaine, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kevin Gilbert (author)
Kevin John Gilbert (10 July 1933 – 1 April 1993) was an Aboriginal Australian author, activist, artist, poet, playwright and printmaker. A Wiradjuri man, Gilbert was born on the banks of the Lachlan River in New South Wales. Gilbert was the first Aboriginal playwright and printmaker. He was an active human rights defender and was involved in the establishment of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in 1972 as well as various protests to advocate for Aboriginal Australian sovereignty. Gilbert won the 1978 National Book Council prize for writers, for ''Living Black: Blacks Talk to Kevin Gilbert'' (1977). Early life Gilbert was the youngest of eight children, born on 10 July 1933 to a Wiradjuri mother and an Irish/English father. _He_was_born__on_the_bank_of_the_Kalara/_Lachlan_River_just_outside_Condobolin.html" ;"title="/ref> He was born on the bank of the Kalara/ Lachlan River just outside Condobolin">/ref> He was born on the bank of the Kalara/ Lachlan River just outside Con ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brian Castro
Brian Albert Castro (born 16 January 1950) is an Australian novelist and essayist. Biography Castro was born in Hong Kong and has lived in Australia since 1961. He was Chair of Creative Writing (2008-2019) at the University of Adelaide and Director of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice. His publisher is Giramondo Publishing. Born in Hong Kong of Portuguese, Chinese and English parentage, Brian Castro was educated at St Joseph's College Hunter's Hill and the University of Sydney, after which he worked in Australia, France and Hong Kong as a teacher and writer. His first novel ''Birds Of Passage'' (1983) won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award. ''Double-Wolf'' (1991) won The Age Fiction Prize, the Vance Palmer Prize and the Innovative Writing Prize at the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. ''After China'' (1992) again won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award. His sixth novel, ''Stepper'' (1997), was awarded the National Book Council Prize for Fiction. ''Shanghai ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rod Jones (author)
Rod Jones (born 5 February 1953) is an Australian novelist. He was writer in residence at La Trobe University for four years, and has also been the Australia Council's writer in residence in Paris. He studied English and History at the University of Melbourne. Writing Rod Jones’ first novel, ''Julia Paradise'', won the Fiction Award in the South Australian Premier's Awards in 1988, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and was runner-up for the Femina Etranger Prize in Paris. It has been translated into ten languages and published throughout the world, most recently as a 2013 Text Classic, with an introduction by Emily Maguire. ''Julia Paradise'' was described by the New York Times as "... utterly original ... a remarkable accomplishment". The New York Times,Oct ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Elizabeth Jolley
Monica Elizabeth Jolley AO (4 June 1923 – 13 February 2007) was an English-born Australian writer who settled in Western Australia in the late 1950s and forged an illustrious literary career there. She was 53 when her first book was published, and she went on to publish fifteen novels (including an autobiographical trilogy), four short story collections and three non-fiction books, publishing well into her 70s and achieving significant critical acclaim. She was also a pioneer of creative writing teaching in Australia, counting many well-known writers such as Tim Winton among her students at Curtin University.Hacket (2007) Her novels explore "alienated characters and the nature of loneliness and entrapment." Life Jolley was born in Birmingham, England as Monica Elizabeth Knight, to an English father and Austrian-born mother who was the daughter of a high ranking Railways official. She grew up in the Black Country in the English industrial Midlands. She was educated privately ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cloudstreet
''Cloudstreet'' is a novel by Australian writer Tim Winton published in 1991. It chronicles the lives of two working-class families, the Pickles and the Lambs, who come to live together in a large house called Cloudstreet in Perth, Western Australia, over a period of twenty years, 1943 to 1963. The novel received several awards, including a Miles Franklin Award in 1992, and has been adapted into various forms, including a stage play and a television miniseries. In 2022, the novel was included on the "Big Jubilee Read" list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors, selected to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II. Plot summary In 1943, precipitated by separate personal tragedies, two poor families, the Lambs and the Pickles, flee their rural homes to share a large house called Cloudstreet in Perth, Western Australia. The Pickles include the father, Sam, the mother, Dolly, and their three children, Ted, Rose, and Chub. The Lambs are led by father, Lester, and mother, Ori ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
.JPG "Click for more on -> Albert Facey")
_sister_Madelaine_Winifred_reading%2C_ca._1927_(5432982516).jpg "Click for more on -> Elizabeth Jolley")