Aspiring Australian writers lament the fact that few publishers are accepting unsolicited fiction manuscripts. Those that do accept them lament the fact that they are inundated by around a thousand submissions each year. What’s the solution? Increasingly, it seems, awards for unpublished work with publication as the prize. Writers know their work will at least be looked at; publishers can outsource to judges the culling of what would otherwise be their slush pile. It is no longer just the 24-year-old Vogel Award, with its promise of publication by Allen & Unwin. State-based awards now guarantee publication by UQP, FACP and Wakefield Press.
Both of these new novels bear the weight of expectation that attaches to winning such an award: Drown Them in the Sea was one of two winners of the 2003 The Australian / Vogel Literary Award; Jillian Watkinson’s The Hanging Tree follows her first novel, The Architect (2000), which won the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award in 2002 for the best manuscript by an emerging Queensland writer.
Drown Them in the Sea by Nicholas Angel
Allen & Unwin, $21.95pb, 158pp
The Hanging Tree by Jillian Watkinson
UQP, $22.95pb, 323pp
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