Victorian author Laura Jean McKay has won the top prize at the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards with her debut novel, which imagines a viral pandemic in Australia that gives humans the ability to understand animals.
McKay's novel The Animals In That Country won Australia's richest literary prize, the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature, as well as the $25,000 Fiction Award, announced as part of an online ceremony on Monday night.
McKay's book, which was published in April 2020 as coronavirus swept the world, imagines a possible near-future Australia where a 'zoo flu' sweeps the country, giving infected humans the ability to understand animals.
Our protagonist is alcoholic animal park worker and grandmother Jean, who teams up with a dingo called Sue on a road trip of survival.
In the fiction category, McKay's novel was up against The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan, Our Shadows by Gail Jones, and The Coconut Children by Vivian Pham.
Speaking to ABC from New Zealand, where she relocated in June 2019 for a university teaching job, McKay described the impact of the awards as "astronomical".
She said the prize money meant she and her partner (writer Tom Doig, a New Zealander by birth) might be able to "finally lay our hats down somewhere" and put a deposit on a home.
"That has just been completely unreachable [until now]," she said.
Other award winners include singer-songwriter Archie Roach, who won the Prize for Indigenous Writing for his memoir Tell Me Why: The Story of My Life and My Music; and journalist Paddy Manning, who won the Non-Fiction Prize for Body Count: How Climate Change is Killing Us.
The Prize for Drama was won by Victorian playwright Angus Cerini, for Wonnangatta: a Gothic two-hander set in Victoria's alpine high country in early 1918 — and inspired by a real-life double homicide that was never solved.
Wonnangatta premiered in September 2020 at Sydney Theatre Company — the first production since the statewide shutdown of live performance in March.
Accepting the award, from his property in the Strathbogie Ranges in Victoria's high country, Cerini said: "It really looked like last year my play Wonnangatta wouldn't get on — but it did."
"There was a change of venues, a change of dates, a quarantine in Darwin, a lot of Zoom. Sydney Theatre Company did everything they could to make it happen and I'm extremely grateful."
"What we [theatre makers] do is fantastic but it's tough — so this [the pandemic] has just been a whole extra level of tough right on top of that."
More to come.
Full list of winners
Victorian Prize for Literature:
The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay
Prize for Fiction:
The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay
Prize for Non-Fiction:
Body Count: How Climate Change is Killing Us by Paddy Manning
Prize for Indigenous Writing:
Tell Me Why: The Story of My Life and My Music by Archie Roach
Prize for Drama:
Wonnangatta by Angus Cerini
Prize for Poetry:
Case Notes by David Stavanger
Prize for Young Adult Writing:
Metal Fish, Falling Snow by Cath Moore
Unpublished Manuscript Award:
Anam by André Dao
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMibWh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIxLTAyLTAxL2xhdXJhLWplYW4tbWNrYXktcGFuZGVtaWMtZmljdGlvbi10aGUtYW5pbWFscy1pbi10aGF0LWNvdW50cnkvMTMxMDgyNjLSASdodHRwczovL2FtcC5hYmMubmV0LmF1L2FydGljbGUvMTMxMDgyNjI?oc=5
2021-02-01 07:45:00Z
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