Malouf's bracelet dazzles on a list of literary treasure
Matt BuchananNovember 22, 2008


David Malouf (left) … "captures human condition".Photo: Penny Stephens

DAVID MALOUF has won Australia's newest and richest literary prize for his short story collection The Complete Stories.
Malouf was presented with the inaugural Australia-Asia Literary Award in Perth last night.
The $110,000 award, which was created by the former Labor government in Western Australia, is worth $10,000 more than the next richest, the Prime Minister's Literary Award, and is given for fiction by writers resident in, or outside Australia, writing primarily about Australia or Asia.
Malouf, whose new short novel Ransom will be published in April, was "very pleased to be the first recipient". He welcomed the award, and praised it as unique among state literary prizes.

"It's unlike most of the other major Australia prizes because it's given by a state government, but it's not limited to Australia," he said.
"There is certainly no other literary prize where Australia is the initiator which takes in Asia like this does, so it's a very good thing that we're looking outwards rather than inwards as we tend to do" he said.
The Complete Stories won from a very strong shortlist, including The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize), The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser (longlisted for the Booker), Blood Kin by Ceridwen Dovey, and Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital.

Read the full report at the Sydney Morning Herald online.