Winner
Lesley Jorgensen, 'Cat & Fiddle' (SA)
Runner-up
Sally Bothroyd, 'A Cocoa Jackson Mystery' (NT)
Highly commended
Courtney Collins, 'The Burial' (NSW)
Scribe Publications is pleased to announce the winner of the 2011 CAL Scribe Fiction Prize is Cat & Fiddle, a multicultural saga focusing on two British families: the Muslim Chaudrys and the landowning Bournes. With a wry and ironic voice, Jorrgensen follows the members of these two families as their lives overlap and ultimately collide at the country estate of Bourne Abbey in rural Wiltshire. The result is an impressive and multilayered portrayal of contemporary life, interracial love, and generational and cultural clashes.
The judges were Blanche Clark (Books Editor, Herald Sun), Mark Rubbo (CEO of Readings Bookstores) and Aviva Tuffield (Associate Publisher, Fiction, Scribe Publications). Of the winning manuscript, judge Blanche Clark said: 'Cat & Fiddle is a humorous and insightful examination of a Bangladeshi family trying to maintain its traditional cultural and moderate Muslim practices in modern-day Britain. The generational conflicts are astutely drawn, and its lively pace and subtle sense of mockery make it an enjoyable read.'
Lesley Jorrgensen was born in 1964 and grew up in the Adelaide Hills. She trained as a Registered Nurse at the Children's and Royal Adelaide hospitals while also completing simultaneous Arts and Law degrees. She has worked as a medical-negligence lawyer in Australia and England, and while in England she married into a Muslim Anglo-Bangladeshi family, then returned with her husband to live in Melbourne. Since 2007 she has been living in the small coastal town of Goolwa with her two children. There, she has been trying to write fiction in between working and raising a family. Cat & Fiddle will be her first book and will be published in early 2012.