Readings.com.au: Prime Minister's Literary Awards 2009 Winners

Drawing the Global Colour Line

"[This] is a pioneering account of the transnational production of whiteness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A work remarkable both for its international breadth and for its sensitivity to local particularity, it is a model for the new global history. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds expertly and imaginatively reconstruct how leading white intellectuals and politicians in Australia, South Africa, the United States, and Great Britain fought demands for racial equality and jointly invented new doctrines of racial superiority to justify the maintenance and, in some cases, the reinvigoration of white privilege in every part of the world that Britain either controlled or in which it had once deposited its settlers. A powerful and sobering history, incisively and elegantly told."

Gary Gerstle, author of American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century

House Of Exile

In 1933 the prominent author and political activist Heinrich Mann and his partner Nelly Kroeger were forced to flee Germany, finding refuge in France and later, in great despair, Los Angeles. There Nelly committed suicide in 1944 and Heinrich dies in 1950. Prior to their death they formed a unique clique of friends in exile, crossing paths with the likes of Joyce, Brecht, Kafka, Schwitters and Woolf. House of Exile is a unique work, pioneering a new literary form - the collective biography. This book is a must for all interested in the literary landscape of the 20th century and those with interest in the Bloomsbury, Algonquin set. National reviews expected.

The Boat

Winner of the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction 2009.

'The Boat raises the bar for Australian writing.'
PETER CRAVEN, Heat

'Nam Le is . . . a distributor of the peace.

'Consider the subjects of his stories: a child assassin in Colombia ('Cartagena'), an ageing New York artist desperate for a reconciliation with his daughter ('Meeting Elise'), a boy's coming of age in a rough Victorian fishing town ('Halflead Bay'), before the first atomic bomb falls in Japan ('Hiroshima'), The suffocations of theocracy in Iran ('Tehran Calling'). This astonishing range is topped and tailed by accounts of the uneasy reunion of a young Vietnamese writer in America with his ex-soldier father, and by the title story – the escape of a group of exhausted refugees from the Vietcong in a wallowing boat.

'One might be permitted to think, after all this high seriousness and intensity, Nam Le can't do funny. But this criminally talented 29-year-old can do that as well.'
BARRY OAKLEY, Australian Literary Review

'Stunning'
The Times

'A fearless new Australian voice that accepts no geographical limits: these are stories of leaping power and the most breath-taking grace and intimacy.'
HELEN GARNER

'Wonderful stories that snarl and pant across our crazed world . . . an extraordinary performance. Nam Le is a heartbreaker, not easily forgotten.'
JUNOT DIAZ

'The fiction debut of the year.'
JAMES LEY, Australian Book Review

'The best book debut of 2008.'
New York Magazine

'The runaway literary success of 2008.'
Weekend Australian