Australian prime minister picks debut novel for richest prize

Kevin Rudd exercises literary judgement to name surprise book prize winners
Alison Flood writing in guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday September 16 2008

A debut novel by a former cleaner has triumphed over literary heavyweights Thomas Keneally and David Malouf to take the inaugural Australian prime minister's literary award for fiction.

The awards were established by Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd to celebrate great Australian writing and they are the country's richest book prize, awarding a tax-free cheque of A$100,000 (£44,000) to both a fiction and non-fiction title. Rudd himself selected the winners from shortlists of seven titles, with recommendations from judges.

Fiction winner Steven Conte's The Zookeeper's War is set in a tense, war-battered 1943 Berlin, detailing the lives of an Australian woman and her German husband, the director of Berlin Zoo. Judges praised its "command of engrossing plot" and its "ethical seriousness", and heralded Conte as a new voice in Australian fiction.

Conte, 42, has supported his writing by working as a barman, life model, taxi driver, public servant and book reviewer, as well as taking jobs as a cleaner in Brussels and a waiter in Cornwall when hitchhiking around Europe.

The non-fiction award also saw an upset to the established pecking order, with an academic's study of the stories behind Aboriginal artifacts prevailing over Clive James's well-received Cultural Amnesia and Germaine Greer's critically acclaimed Shakespeare's Wife.

Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers is by historian Philip Jones, who was commended by judges for attempting "to unravel one of the most contentious social issues confronting modern Australia, that is understanding the complexities of first contact". They said his work was lifted above the rest of the shortlist by the originality of the concept of using artefacts as the way into discussion of aspects of the Australian frontier, and by "the depth and breadth of the analysis; and the simplicity and elegance of the prose".
Read the full Guardian report online.

And a review of The Zookeeper's War from The Age.