In the early passages of The Zookeeper’s War, Steven Conte’s heroine Vera is torn between her attachment to war-stricken Berlin, this ‘darkening city on the northern plain of Europe’, and her homesickness ‘for the chatter of rosellas on her mother’s veranda’ in Australia. Vera’s conflicted emotions reach a climax of sorts at a clandestine New Year’s Eve party where, intoxicated by high-spirited rebellion and liquor smuggled from Sweden, she dances:

Around her were swooping, frenzied bodies: young, middle-aged, truncated, whole. They were dancing like the possessed, on the rim of a crater, without heed or care or caution, and Vera knew with a fiery certainty that there was nowhere—not Sweden, not even Australia—that she would rather be at this moment than here.

Australia's most prestigious literary award would agree that that Vera belonged in Berlin. The Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia’s oldest and one of its richest, only recognises works that ‘portray Australian life’. But two literary prizes inaugurated in 2008 have begun to reshape our national literary culture. Both the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and the Western Australian Premier’s Australia–Asia Literary Award embrace a more expansive view of the literature that matters to Australia, redrawing the map that defines our literary culture. The inaugural winners of these fiction prizes, The Zookeeper’s War and David Malouf’s The Complete Stories, enlarge our view of what Australian literary awards should honour: writing about not only our history but also our region and our migrations. The broader scope of these awards also offers increased symbolic returns to those who bestow them: the Prime Minister and the Western Australian government. These awards have not just cultural but also political value.

Literary prizes are global phenomena, driven by the increased reach and influence of the media. Australia’s prize scene is developing along a path at variance with literary awards in other national spheres. The United Kingdom’s prizes, for example, are an increasingly corporate affair. Three of the main literary awards there are sponsored by businesses: the Man Booker Prize is underwritten by the Man Food Group, the Orange Prize is properly titled the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, and Costa Coffee has taken over sponsorship of the Costa (formerly Whitbread) Book of the Year. By contrast, literary prizes in the United States are the preserve of industry associations. Journalists judge the Pulitzer, critics judge the National Book Critics Circle Award and publishers organise the National Book Award.

In Australia, the potential for global attention to alight on literary awards has made them an attractive political proposition. Two new Australian prizes both dramatise the desire to combine economic capital with the symbolic capital of the arts, and transform it into a political asset. The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards offer $100,000 each for a work of non-fiction and a work of fiction—on any subject—by Australian citizens. The Western Australian Premier’s Australia–Asia Literary Award grants $110,000 to a novel by an author resident in Australia or Asia, or set in Australia or Asia. Both schemes use a large cash prize as a foundation to build a political vision: one, of an Australian government and nation with literary authority, and the other, of a vibrant, regional cultural centre. But what impact did they have in their first year?

Kevin Rudd’s announcement of the new Prime Minister’s Literary Awards came in November 2007, just before his election win. It was a statesman-like move, clearly designed to position Rudd as a national figure and a different sort of leader to John Howard. In this, the awards form part of a package of symbolic gestures. Rudd’s first year as prime minister saw him apologise to the stolen generations on 13 February 2008, a tremendously moving moment televised to watching crowds of indigenous and non-indigenous Australians around the nation. Rudd then went on to host the 2020 summit of Australia’s ‘best and brightest’ in April, an event celebrating creativity and new ideas, encapsulated for the public in the footage of new mother and Hollywood star Cate Blanchett at Rudd’s side. These acts had powerful emblematic dimensions. They fed hopes of a rejuvenated sense of openness and tolerance, freedom and creativity in public life.

The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards also carry symbolic heft as official endorsements of the value of literature in Australian society. As publisher Louise Adler commented, ‘to have the PM’s imprimatur couldn’t be more important and of more significance’. [1] Rudd reaffirmed this aspect of the prizes in the speech he made at the awards ceremony, saying to the writers and publishers in the audience, ‘We honour what you do—you’re part of the sinew and soul of our nation.’ The prize gives not only authority but also visibility to Australian literature. Gail Jones celebrated the prize’s potential to do this in a blog she wrote for the Guardian. She described Australia as comparatively ‘abashed, sceptical and ironic about its writers’ and noted that literary prizes in Australia ‘tend to raise little public attention’ compared with the ‘panoptical hyperbole of television or sport’. [2] As an institution, the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards redress this perceived invisibility and publicly recognise the importance of literary culture. The awards expand upon the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the oldest national literary prize in Australia, by extending eligibility to all novels written by Australian citizens, not just those portraying Australian life. Such framing exudes confidence in our writers and their artistic vision.

The literary awards confer honour, though, in two directions. Just as the apology and the 2020 summit were gestures that redounded to Rudd’s political credit, cementing his place as the nation’s leader, the literary awards also establish Rudd’s credibility. They ensured his name was associated with literature across 2008, his first year as Prime Minister, with the call for entries appearing in February, the judges announced in March, the shortlist released in August and the winners declared in September. The prize is an effective strategy for building capital because it not only consecrates the winner; it anoints the giver as a patron of the arts.

Rudd’s glory doesn’t come just from association with the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, from the kudos of establishing the awards and bestowing naming rights. He’s also the final judge of the awards. The terms of the prizes mean that the judges give the Prime Minister a recommendation for a winner, which he or she can overrule. This structure sets the Prime Minister up as the ultimate consecrator of Australian writing. It is unusual for a literary prize, and it raised hackles.

The judges themselves weren’t impressed. Author and judge of the fiction award John Marsden declared, ‘I’d be extremely pissed off if our recommendations were not accepted.’ Chair of the fiction judges, Peter Pierce, pointed to the political dangers of the structure, saying, ‘I’d have thought that’s the sort of thing the previous prime minister did.’ [3] Pierce’s comment recalls the political taint that haunted John Howard’s $100,000 Prize for Australian History, which could too easily appear as a manipulation of our history and identity. In its inaugural year, 2007, the rumour mill suggested that Howard overruled the panel’s preference for Peter Cochrane’s Colonial Ambition, instead opting to divide the prize between Cochrane’s book and Les Carlyon’s The Great War. Critic Gideon Haigh described that move as one that ‘smacked of a PM over-eager to distribute the spoils of victory in the culture wars’. [4]

The discomfort caused by the judging structure of the literary awards was also expressed in the blog by shortlisted author Gail Jones. Writing from the Shanghai Writers Festival, Jones claimed a heightened awareness of the dangers of politicising writing, of becoming an ‘official writer’. She was firm in her view that literature should remain independent of politics, and that Rudd shouldn’t have a say in the judging process. The tensions that can arise between politics and the arts were spotlighted by the controversy in June 2008 over Bill Henson’s nude photographs of teenagers. Rudd’s negative response to Henson’s artworks tarnished his alliance with the artistic community. Critic Kerryn Goldsworthy explicitly connected the fracas with Rudd’s assumption of literary power: ‘the man who thinks Bill Henson’s beautiful, powerful, emotive photographs “absolutely revolting” will be having the last word on which books represent the country’s best literature.’ [5] The shifts and strategies engaged in by politicians are inconsistent with the demand for prize judges to be seen as concerned only with literary merit. The potential for political intervention risks undermining the literary credibility of awards.

This time Rudd refrained from exercising his power to affect the judging of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. More than that: he publicly admitted that he hadn’t read either winner. The terms of the awards created a conflict between Rudd the politician and Rudd the literary authority, and he chose to remain a politician. Foregoing the chance to forcibly stamp his literary authority on the prize, Rudd delivered statements at the time of the winner’s announcement that presented him not as a member of the literati but as an average Australian reader on the lookout for good new books. His speech at the awards ceremony lingered on his background as an average enthusiastic reader, describing being drawn into reading by his mother’s subscription to Reader’s Digest in country Queensland. Further, Rudd said that the government wanted to spark passion for books in others, connecting the prize with the uncontroversial social and educational goal of literacy. Rudd sacrificed some personal prestige, and framed the award as an element of government policy that would benefit all Australians.

Rudd’s speech highlights a friction that exists in all prizes between prestige and popular appeal. Both are necessary for the enduring success of the prize. Despite their symbolic weight, aspects of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, such as Rudd’s speech at the ceremony, emphasise popular appeal. There is a significant budget of $100,000 per year allocated to promotion, showing awareness of the importance of media profile for a prize. An email list keeping interested punters informed about prize developments is a strategic use of the internet to build public interest. The inaugural judges, too, were media-friendly: popular authors John Marsden and Sally Morgan were included, as were television and radio personalities John Doyle and Margaret Throsby. The prize also featured media management packs, with selected quotes from judges at the time of the announcement of the shortlist and the winner. Significantly, however, the prize did not feature its own website: the Booker Prize website, which is a home for discussion forums, interviews, newsbites and judges’ blogs, is a more advanced PR tool than any devised by the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. This is perhaps an oversight, linked with administrative mismanagement: Jason Steger in the Age called the awards ‘a bit of a shambles’, reporting that the judges were apparently dissatisfied with the three-month delay between their decision and the announcement, that they received the books late, and there were problems synchronising the appointment timetables of arts minister Peter Garrett and Rudd. [6] Fixing these teething problems may result in greater media impact for the award in future years.

The popular appeal of the prize is emergent, but the flip side of the coin is in place: the award already has literary credibility. The decisions made by the judging panels in 2008 showed audacity, contributing to the prestige of the prize. The shortlists were surprising and provocative. This is particularly evident in the fiction shortlist, which mixed genres to include poetry (Dorothy Porter’s El Dorado) and short stories (David Malouf’s Complete Stories). Most boldly, the winners of both awards were unexpected: debut author Steven Conte’s The Zookeeper’s War and Philip Jones’ Ochre and Rust. There was widespread approval of these winners. Even shortlisted author Tom Keneally said, ‘If I was God looking down at all this, I’d say, “Give it to the young’uns.” ’(Which was no doubt cheering for the older Jones.) And though Rudd abstained from participating in the judging process, the judges’ literary decisions have political ramifications for him. As Siobhain Ryan observed in the Australian [7] , there’s a certain symmetry to a new award from a new Prime Minister going to less- established authors. Rudd’s inaugural Prime Minister’s Literary Awards have made a strong start, weaving together credibility and a measure of public appeal to create a sense of renewal and invigoration for Australia’s literary culture, and contributing to the public approval of Rudd as a political leader.

Running parallel with the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, the inaugural Western Australian Premier’s Australia–Asia Literary Award also combines politics and culture. In this instance, it is not a particular politician who benefits from the award: Labor’s Alan Carpenter introduced the prize in late 2007, but was replaced as premier by Colin Barnett when the Liberal Party won government in September 2008. This award is aimed at bringing visibility to Western Australia. It makes it quite difficult to abbreviate the unwieldy title of the award: WAPAALA is inelegant, but my preferred handle, the Australia–Asia Literary Award, removes the state connection. I suppose I’ll have to put up with that contradiction; the official website of the prize does the same.

The Australia–Asia Literary Award is part of the Ignite package announced on 21 November 2007, which provides $73 million of funding for the arts over four years. In an interview with Radio Australia, academic and critic Paul Sharrad expressed gratitude that part of Western Australia’s mining boom was being distributed to cultural causes: ‘it’s nice to see some of that money going to the arts’. Certainly, the package aims to capitalise on resource wealth, as the Ignite launch booklet makes clear: ‘The state is riding a once-in-a-lifetime economic boom, creating new opportunities for people, government, business … and the arts.’ The role of the arts in this formula, dramatically placed after the drum roll of an ellipsis, is to enhance the symbolic capital—the cultural cred, the cool factor—of Perth and Western Australia. The state’s money is being spent in a way that builds its status; as Sharrad also commented of the literary award, ‘I guess some of it is an act of hubris.’ The launch materials hopefully describe Perth as ‘maturing into a vibrant, bustling metropolis eager for new experiences and a greater role in Australia’s economic and cultural life’. [8] Using the arts in this way is a common strategy; Queensland is following a similar path in rebranding Brisbane.

Efforts to ‘style’ a city not only reap symbolic rewards, but have a significant economic impact. Ahmad Abas, a Perth architectural designer and chair of the production company ARTRAGE, saw the Ignite package as developing the sort of culture that would attract new residents to Perth: ‘Good people don’t want to work in mono-dimensional cities with no culture, so “culture” and vibrancy are now tools to attract the global pool of upwardly mobile, skilled transient labour.’ The literary prize is specifically linked with the wider cultural and economic aims of Ignite. At its launch, Carpenter pitched the literary award as a promotion of Western Australia in the Asia–Pacific: ‘It’s about making a statement, to ourselves, about ourselves and to the world and to the region in which we live and operate... ensuring that we have a brilliant, vibrant future, beyond rocks and gas, a lot more than that.’

With this aim of ‘making a statement’ in mind, it is no surprise that the bulk of the Ignite package is dedicated to spectacular projects that draw national and international attention. Up to $51 million of the Ignite package is for new, one-off and capital initiatives. These tend to offer far greater visibility than funding for ongoing maintenance or staffing of arts facilities would generate. In the same spirit of achieving maximum symbolic bang for economic buck, the package is prize-heavy. Ignite takes advantage of the potential for prizes to be newsworthy and spectacular, and establishes the nation’s richest prize for indigenous art and a sculpture prize that will commission two major public artworks in addition to its literary prize. The Australia–Asia Literary Award trumps the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards by offering $110,000: a crucial $10,000 more than Rudd’s initiative, and a clear example of the one-upmanship that animates the prize economy.

The Australia–Asia Literary Award matches its large cash prize with an ambitious, outward-looking mandate. Whereas the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards aim to be the ultimate consecrator of our national literature, the Australia–Asia has an international focus. To be eligible, a work must be set in Australia or Asia, or written by an author resident in Australia or Asia. At the launch of the prize, chair of the judges Nury Vittachi described the awards as ‘something global, something massive, on the scale of the Booker, on the scale of the Pulitzer’. Vittachi’s excited vision combines two ambitions: the worldwide impact of the best-known literary prizes and an expanded sense of where literary talent can be found. ‘There are four billion people between Australia and Asia,’ he commented, adding: ‘Nearly all of the literature comes from the West and so that’s an anomaly and anomalies always fix themselves.’

The large scope of the Australia–Asia Literary Award places it in a field of international awards for novels, including the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Man Asia Literary Prize, the Man Booker International Prize, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. These awards differ across a range of axes. The Nobel and the Man Booker International recognise a writer for their career, while the others focus on particular novels. The Man Asia is only concerned with novels unpublished in English; conversely, the others are open only to works translated into English. Although the IMPAC is co-sponsored through the Dublin City Council, the Australia–Asia Literary Award is the only international prize to be solely sponsored by a government. In this respect, the Western Australian award is a clear example of a new sort of use to which literary prizes can be put: as a kind of cultural tourism campaign in a global market.

Another key difference between the internationally minded awards is the way in which the judging panels are structured. The Nobel is judged only by the Swedish Academy; by contrast, the six judges of the IMPAC seem chosen to provide maximum global representation, including in 2008 judges from Spain, Nigeria, Jamaica, Pakistan and Ireland. The two Man-sponsored international prizes defer to British and American literary authority: the Man Booker International favours judges from the United Kingdom and the United States, and, most conspicuously, the judges for the inaugural 2007 Man Asia Literary Prize—for a novel not written in English—were Australian, American and Canadian. Against this tendency, administrators of the Australia–Asia Literary Award selected a majority of the judges from Asian countries. In its first year, the judging panel included Australian literary critic Peter Craven, Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie and Sri Lankan–born, Hong Kong–based author, critic and journalist Vittachi. While the judging may constitute a less visible aspect of the prize than the winning title, it is tremendously influential in establishing the symbolic credibility of the prize. And in this case, insisting upon Asian judges makes a dramatic statement. It constitutes a realignment of the literary field. Historically, Australia has been culturally linked with the United Kingdom and its Commonwealth. The Australia–Asia Literary Award severs this connection, and forges a new one with Asia, a structure that clearly positions Australia—specifically, Western Australia—as a regional leader. Cultural initiatives can have strong political reverberations.

In addition to its reframed (postcolonial?) global outlook, the Australia–Asia Literary Award is outward looking in its definition of literature. Unlike the Prime Minister’s Literary Award and most other literary prizes, it is open to works published electronically. This caused some excitement in the online world: Website Connect described the Australia–Asia Literary Award as ‘hi-tech’ and ‘revolutionary’, ‘open to cutting-edge novels designed to be read on mobile phones and computers, as well as traditional books’. [9] The Australia–Asia Literary Award’s embrace of new media is bold and strategic, positioning it as a prize for the twenty-first century.

In tandem with its openness to electronic publishing, the prize has made gestures towards web-based publicity. Vittachi, particularly, displays some savviness concerning the internet’s potential to raise awareness of the prize. He has used his personal blog to describe the judging process in humorous, but always positive, terms. He laughs at the ‘novella-length’ name of the award, and writes a brief diary of his reading activities: ‘Day 13: the pile of books is now shorter than I am. This is a huge psychological boost. I have defeated my literary K2!’ His grumbles are embedded in enthusiasm for the prize: ‘Day 23: I realize just how important this prize is. Stories of the eastern hemisphere are way more interesting than those of the western one. My brain is on fire.’ [10] Vittachi’s strategy recalls the thorough web presence of the Booker Prize; few other prizes have exploited the potential of the internet.

These potentially controversial aspects of the prize indicate an awareness on the part of organisers of the importance of grabbing public attention in the establishment of a successful literary award. In the same spirit, the award includes a longlist. The longlist is a fairly recent phenomenon that extends the season of the prize and fosters more speculation in the lead-up to the announcement of the winner. Further, the longlist is where judges can take risks. However, the particular longlist selected in the 2008 failed to engage with the innovative aspects of the prize’s brief. No work on the longlist had been published electronically. The longlist included only one translated work, Haruki Murakami’s After Dark, and only two other titles were by Asian authors: nine of the twelve longlisted works were by Australians, suggesting that the global aspirations of the prize have been reined in by the judging process. Westerly editor, poet and academic Dennis Haskell commented that ‘it’s striking how many Australian books are on the list’, and in addition to noticing the lack of Asian authors, was also surprised at the lack of emerging writers on the list. [11]

The conservatism of the judges is most apparent in the fact that the majority of selections had already been nominated for other awards. This suggests that the judges adopted a cautious approach by recognising books already acknowledged as having literary merit, and casts the Australia–Asia Literary Award as a follower, rather than a leader, of other prizes. There was, though, an absence of books that have won major awards: the winners of the Booker Prize, the Miles Franklin and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award were conspicuously absent. The Australia–Asia judges still wanted to be seen as the consecrators of a text and gain authority and attention for their prize.

The winner, David Malouf’s The Complete Stories, was a powerful, if unadventurous, selection. As a much-lauded literary figure, Malouf bestows gravitas on the new prize. He also embodies the same kind of international expansiveness as the Australia-Asia Literary Award. Malouf was born and raised in Brisbane but also has Portugese and Lebanese ancestry; he has lived in Sydney, England and Tuscany. In The Complete Stories and novels such as Remembering Babylon and Fly Away Peter, Malouf is attentive to Australian landscape and history in a way that marks him out as a national writer. At the same time, he openly embraces other cultures. There are characters in The Complete Stories who are from Hungary and Poland, who go to Vietnam, who spend time in Italy. Malouf’s cosmopolitanism, while generally directed towards Europe rather than Asia, is invoked in the author’s encouraging comment on receiving the prize: ‘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.’

Malouf was a strong choice and a good fit for the award, but his win was not widely reported. The prize perhaps suffered from the rupture caused by the departure of the Carpenter government in Western Australia. If it is to compete with the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards – and other large scale prizes – in future years, the Australia-Asia Literary Award must demonstrate a more coherent, effective PR strategy and a bolder literary vision in (at least) its longlist.

The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and the Australia–Asia Literary Award are potentially major new players in the field of literary culture. The mark they’ve made in their first year showcases the potency of mingling artistic, commercial and political interests in a single literary institution. These prizes have peculiarly political dimensions, providing credibility and status for Rudd and Western Australia respectively. They also have implications for the development of our national literary culture. Their terms of eligibility speak of a new maturity and ambition in Australian literary culture, a readiness to engage with the world. In terms of popular appeal, the prizes are still developing. Their high cash value has meant that the selections of judges, shortlists and winners have generated some media interest and a moderate effect on sales. Through wise promotional, administrative and judging decisions there is room for the public impact of these awards to grow. Among the myriad ways in which federal and state governments can support literary culture in Australia, these prizes have a powerful symbolic role: as affirmations of our writers, our nation and our region.

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NOTES

1. Quoted in Corrie Perkin, ‘Rudd to reward Aussie writers’, Australian, 5 December, 2007. Back to article

2.Gail Jones, ‘A new cultural dawn for Australia’, The Guardian Books Blog, 8 August 2008. Back to article

3. Rosemary Sorensen, ‘Rudd has final say on literary awards’, Australian, 1 April 2008. Back to article

4. John Lyons, ‘Blainey ire over PM’s history prize’, Australian, 17 November 2007. Back to article

5. See http://pavlovblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/absolutely-revolting.html. Back to article

6. Jason Steger, ‘PM’s awards a bit of a shambles’, Age, 27 September, 2008. Back to article

7. Siobhain Ryan, ‘Rudd and writers get first time glow with literary awards’, Australian, 13 September 2008. Back to article

8. See http://www.dca.wa.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/12551/Ignite_-_WA_-_A_State_on_Fire_edit.pdf. Back to article

9. See http://www.writersconnect.org/?link=Hi-tech-Asia-Pacific-book-prize-to-be-among-world%E2%80%99s-biggest.html&cat=1&id=26. Back to article

10. See http://mrjam.typepad.com/diary/2008/08/how-to-judge-a.html. Back to article

.11. See http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=648819. Back to article

— Beth Driscoll