More than a decade after attracting international acclaim for his debut The Boat, Nam Le has won book of the year at the NSW Literary awards for his follow-up, a book-length poem titled 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem.
Le won the $10,000 top gong as well as the $30,000 NSW multicultural award category, but missed out on the Kenneth Slessor prize for poetry, which went to Lebanese-Palestinian writer Hasib Hourani for another book-length poem, Rock Flight.
The $40,000 Christina Stead prize for fiction went to Fiona McFarlane for her collection of crime stories, Highway 13. James Bradley, also a poet as well as novelist and critic, won the $40,000 Douglas Stewart prize for nonfiction for his ode to the ocean, Deep Water.
Le, who arrived in Australia as an infant with his Vietnamese refugee parents in the late 1970s, worked as a corporate lawyer before turning to writing full-time. His 2008 debut, The Boat, a collection of short stories, won a slew of literary awards including the UK’s Dylan Thomas prize.
There was a 16-year gap between The Boat and 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, released last year. But speaking to Guardian Australia before he knew he had won, Le said his second book had actually been decades in the making.
“How long had I been thinking about it, taking notes for it, starting collecting various fragments of it? I’ve basically been writing it my whole life,” he said. “There are poems in there, lines in the book, which existed in old notebooks of mine from 20, 30 years ago.”
The judges praised 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, which explores family, racism, war, trauma and the Vietnamese diaspora, for its “poetic brilliance, power and accessibility”.
“This collection is damning, frank, and unwavering in its exploration of diasporic identity and its implications both personal and political.
“It is passionate and bold in its depiction of otherness, trauma and struggle – demanding consideration, care and intellect of its reader – and cerebral in its reception and contemplation.”
McFarlane, a fellow former winner of the Dylan Thomas prize, was also recognised on Monday for Highway 13, a collection of stories all linked to the same serial killer.
Judges praised McFarlane’s “beautifully poised prose”, calling the book “an exhilarating example of the magical power of story, turning straw into gold”.
“Highway 13 amplifies our understanding of how violence in one corner of the world can ripple globally and across generations. Our experiences of the emotional truths McFarlane exposes make us witnesses too, but not so much to crime – here we are witnesses to humanity itself.”
After seven novels and a book of poetry, Bradley, who was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for services to literature four years ago, received recognition for his first work of nonfiction, Deep Water, which the judges called “a remarkable combination of great labour and literary skill” that “tells a story of eternity and rapid change, of vastness and immediacy, and it does so in a masterfully moving way”.
With a total prize pool of $360,000, the NSW Literary awards are considered Australia’s oldest and richest state-based literary prizes.
In the children’s books categories, Katrina Nannestad won $30,000 for Silver Linings, her children’s novel set in 1950s Australia, while Emma Lord won $30,000 for her apocalyptic young adult novel Anomaly.
Wathaurong and Ngarrindjeri writer Glenn Shea won the playwriting category for his play Three Magpies Perched in a Tree, in which a juvenile justice worker tries to tackle Indigenous youth incarceration.
The Indigenous writers’ prize was won by the Juluwarlu Group Aboriginal Corporation for their graphic novel recounting Yindjibarndi creation stories, When the World Was Soft.
Other winners include the film-maker Charles Williams who won the Betty Roland prize for scriptwriting for his script Inside, a prison drama starring Guy Pearce, and Elizabeth Bryer, who won the translation category for her translation of Eduardo Sangarcía’s The Trial of Anna Thalberg from Spanish into English.
The award for new writing went to Australia’s first Indigenous person to complete a PhD in clinical psychology, Dr Tracy Westerman, whose book Jilya examines the ways Australia’s mental health system fails First Nations people.
The people’s choice award went to the journalist Lucia Osborne-Crowley for The Lasting Harm, her account of the trial of the convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.
