Tim Winton
Calibre Prize
Since announcing the joint winners of the third Calibre Prize, we have received many compliments for Jane Goodall’s and Kevin Brophy’s winning essays, and various expressions of support for Calibre. Several of these appear on our website, and this month we also publish letters from Elisabeth Holdsworth inaugural winner of the Calibre Prize in 2007 and from Nicholas Jose, who also writes about the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature in this issue.
It is very pleasing to be able to announce that Copyright Agency Limited, through its Cultural Fund, will sponsor the fourth Calibre Prize, for which ABR now seeks entries. Once again the Prize is worth $10,000, making it one of the world’s most lucrative awards for a new essay. This year we are adding a second Prize Young Calibre which is open to those aged twenty-one and under. Young Calibre is worth $3000 not a bad start for a brilliant secondary student or undergraduate. More details appear on page 9, and both sets of guidelines and entry forms are available on our website or from the ABR office.
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Ten years after the first ABR FAN Poll, the second one was limited to Australian novels published since 2000 (though we received votes for recent classics such as 1984, Voss, and Monkey Grip). When voting closed in mid-September, Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North emerged ...
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Chilcot and Australia
Dear Editor,
We cannot be reminded often enough of the perfidy that led in succession to the Iraq disaster, the continuing débâcle in the Middle Eas ...
Dear Editor, I’m pleased that Peter Craven found so much to enjoy in The Boy behind the Curtain (ABR, December 2016). Winton always writes good – though somewhat deliberate ...
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If any contemporary Australian novel can be said to be canonical, or perhaps even 'the great Australian novel', then it must be Tim Winton's Cloudstreet. Published in 1991, it soon acquired a devoted following and elevated Winton into the top rank of Australian writers ...
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Here is a fine new Australian opera from Victorian Opera. Composer Iain Grandage and librettist Alison Croggon have taken Tim Winton’s Booker-shortlisted novel The Riders (1994) and created a highly expressive work. Marion Potts directs it on a wide but stark stage furnished only with wooden saw horses. There is a balcony and a revolve, but mostly Potts chooses to observe her anguished and introspective characters through a series of fairly static groupings.
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