Friday, August 21, 2009
MEDIA RELEASE - EMBARGOED UNTIL 7PM TODAY
The Age Book of the Year Award
Steven Amsterdam has won the 36th
Age Book of the Year
award, which was presented
tonight at the opening of the
Melbourne Writers Festival
at the Melbourne Town Hall.
Amsterdam won the fiction award and overall book-of-the-year award, worth a total of
$20,000, for
Things We Didn’t See Coming
. Amsterdam's book is a depiction of life in a
post-apocalypse world set in the not-too-distant future. It is a series of stories narrated
by the same character that takes him from his boyhood to middle age as he negotiates a
life that is increasingly problematic.
Amsterdam is a New Yorker who has lived in Melbourne for five years. He said it was
wonderful to have won and was particularly pleased for his publisher, Sleepers, as it
was its first book of fiction.
The Age
review said: “
Things We Didn’t See Coming
occupies a world at once
disturbingly familiar and utterly fantastical. It is both ambitious and successful.
Preternaturally assured, finely crafted and thoroughly accomplished, it deserves to be
read widely.”
Guy Rundle won the non-fiction prize ($10,000) for
Down to the Crossroads: On the
Trail of the 2008 US Election
–
an account of the most recent US election. He described
the book as a series of reflections on what America is. ''It was an enormous historical
moment when a new US came up against older ideas of itself. Barack Obama was a
captivating historical force.''
Peter Porter, the much admired Australian poet who turned 80 earlier this year, won the
poetry prize ($10,000) for
Better than God
–
a wonderfully meditative collection that
includes several more personal and reflective poems. He said he was very pleased and
grateful to have won. ''I have always been more impersonal than a lot of poets but as
you get older you begin to remember things. The deep past comes more readily to
mind.”
The Age Book of the Year Award was presented at the Melbourne Town Hall tonight,
before the keynote address by Bernhard Schlink.
_____________________________________________________
For further information:
Jason Steger,
Age
literary editor: 03 9601 2044; 0419 467 127
NEWS 
