Mark's Say: The Age short story award & Max Perkins

A few months ago I was talking to Jason Steger, the literary editor of the Age. The Age has been, and still is, a great newspaper for the Melbourne community, supporting many worthy initiatives as well as undertaking several of their own. Support for the arts has been particularly strong; from a literary viewpoint, the Age Book of the Year award and the Age Short Story Award have both been very important in encouraging and rewarding quality Australian writing.

It’s no secret that many media outlets, especially traditional platforms, are doing it tough. The Age has been working hard to create a model that is relevant and viable – I can’t imagine Melbourne without this newspaper so I wish them well. Sadly, a consequence of this remodeling has seen the Age Book of the Year award held over for 2013, and the Short Story Award was set for a similar fate before Jason and I had our conversation. We both agreed how lamentable it was that the Short Story Award should be postponed, and I asked Jason if Readings were able to support the prize, could it go ahead. Fortunately, the answer was yes. The winners will be announced in mid-December and the top three stories will be published in the Age this summer.

In other news, one of my favourite books has recently been reprinted, the biography Max Perkins: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg.

All Berg’s works have been republished to coincide with the release of his new biography of Woodrow Wilson, Wilson. Max Perkins was originally published in 1978 and won a National Book Award. Perkins joined the New York-based publisher Scribner’s in 1910, when it was a rather stuffy house with the likes of Edith Wharton and Henry James on the list. Perkins wanted to publish younger writers, and in 1919 he found F. Scott Fitzgerald who had a rough draft of a book, The Romantic Egotist. After working on it intensively with Fitzgerald, the book was published in 1920 as This Side of Paradise. Perkins worked closely with all his authors, including Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, often refashioning whole works.

Max Perkins is a fascinating and lively book on both the craft of writing and a period in publishing that has long passed.

I was also thrilled to learn that Alice Munro has won the Nobel Prize in Literature 2013; another writer I’ve long admired. Her ability to find universal truths in the banality of ordinary life is unique. She only ever wrote short stories and there are numerous collections, all of them brilliant. My favourite story is ‘Runaway’ – from the collection of the same name – about a woman trying to escape an abusive relationship. Munro’s most recent collection, and perhaps her last, is Dear Life.


Mark Rubbo

Cover image for Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

A. Scott Berg

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