CATEGORIES

The Time We Have Taken by Steven Carroll (Fourth Estate) is the winner of this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award. Carroll receives the award, valued at $42,000, at a gala dinner held in Sydney this evening. ‘It’s an extraordinary thrill and honour,’ the author said of his win, but added that it was ‘also daunting [...]

Penguin is the 2008 publisher of the year, Scribe is small publisher of the year, Gleebooks the independent bookseller of the year and Dymocks Garden City Booragoon chain bookseller of the year, following the announcement of the Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIAs) at a gala dinner in Melbourne on Sunday night. Read more here: http://www.boomerangbooks.com/content/book-news/book-news-archive/abia-awards.shtml

Girl Stuff by Kaz Cooke (Viking) was named the winner of the Nielsen BookData 2008 Booksellers Choice Award at the 84th Annual Booksellers Dinner on Monday night. Read more here: http://www.boomerangbooks.com/content/book-news/book-news-archive/girl-stuff-wins-booksellers-choice-award.shtml

The Resurrectionist by Australian author James Bradley (Picador) and Addition by Australian author Toni Jordan are two of the eight titles that have been chosen for the influential Richard & Judy summer reads list in the UK. Read more here: http://www.boomerangbooks.com/content/book-news/book-news-archive/bradley-jordan-on-richard-judy-summer-picks-list.shtml

Books Alive ambassador Michael Robotham has been shortlisted for the £2000 (A$4100) CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for crime writing. Robotham was nominated for Shatter (Little Brown), which the judges described as ‘dark, deep and brooding; everything a psychological thriller should be’. Sometime Australian, the south-east Aisa-based author Colin Cotterill, is in contention for the £20,000 [...]

The finalists in the Romance Writers of Australia’s 2008 Romantic Book of the Year awards have been announced. The shortlisted titles in each category are: Long work: Claiming the Courtesan (Anna Campbell, Harper Collins Australia); Duet (Kimberley Freeman, Hachette Livre Australia); Tomorrow’s Promises (Anna Jacobs, Hodder); Ashblane’s Lady (Sophia James, Harlequin Quill); Serendipity (Melanie La’ [...]

We’ve got some great author interviews for you to check out: Interview with Alice Pung (pictured), author of Unpolished Gem and Growing Up Asian in Australia Interview with Debra Adelaide, author of The Household Guide to Dying Interview with Catherine Jinks, author of The Dark Mountain

We’re syndicating some more video content from The Monthly’s SlowTV on Boomerang Books.  There are interviews with Tim Winton, Deborah Robertson, David Marr, Robert Manne, Gideon Haigh and more. Take a look at them here – http://www.boomerangbooks.com/content/book-audio-video/index.shtml

The shortlist in the Kayell Australia Galley Club Awards for Excellence in Book and Magazine production have been announced. Awards are under the categories of Books: Sheetfed, Books: Webfed, Non-Standard Items, Periodicals, and Innovation. The shortlist is now available at the Galley Club website (click here). The winners will be announced at the 32nd annual [...]

The winners of this year’s Griffin Poetry Prize were announced at a colourful Caribbean-themed awards in Toronto on 4 June.   Notes From the Air: Selected Later Poems by John Ashberry (international) and The Holy Forest: Collected Poems by Robin Blaser (Canadian) were the 2008 winners. The C$1000,000 (A$103,000) prize, the richest in the world [...]

 The winners of the Wilderness Society’s annual Environment Awards for Children’s Literature have been announced. Going Bush (Nadia Wheatley & Ken Searle, A&U) took out best nonfiction picture book. Going Bush is based on a Harmony Project, a bush walk in inner Sydney taken with 16 children from nearby primary schools, and incorporates their art and [...]

The sixth annual Canberra Writers’ Festival will be held from 19 to 24 June. Guests include Garth Nix, David Malouf, Camilla Noli, Michael Robotham, Michelle Cahill and Alexis Fleming. There will be a seminar series for aspiring writers with tutors such as Mark Tredinnick (The Little Red Writing Book), Jeremy Fisher (president of the Australian [...]

MUP CEO Louise Adler and authors Peter Goldsworthy and J M Coetzee are among several ‘prominent figures’ who have writen an open letter to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and NSW Premier Morris Iemma, asking them to ‘rethink their comments’ about the work of Bill Henson, which was last week removed by police from a Sydney [...]

Sydney PEN has announced that Christopher Kremmer, Melissa Lucashenko and Anna Funder will be the next three writers commissioned for The 3 Writers Project, which last year featured Alexis Wright, Gideon Haigh and Christos Tsiolkas. Each author will write 10,000 words on ‘three big issues facing contemporary Australia’–Kremmer on ‘greed’, Lucashenko on ‘survival’ and Funder [...]

Research by author Kevin Morgan and used for his book Gun Alley: Murder, Lies and Failure of Justice (S&S) has led to the pardoning of a man who was wrongly convicted for murder and hung in 1922. Colin Ross, who was hung for the murder of 12-year-old Alma Tirtschke, was convicted after the jury was [...]

In an unusual move for an Australian publisher Fremantle Press has announced it will make e-book copies of Hal Spacejock 1 available free online from June. The e-book giveaway coincides with the release of the fourth book in the series by Simon Haynes, who believes the move will help to build his audience. ‘Science fiction [...]