Fathoms by Rebecca Giggs and The Trials of Portnoy by Patrick Mullins have both been longlisted for the 2020 Mark & Evette Moran Nib Literary Award.
The Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award presented by Waverley Council with support from Principal Sponsors Mark & Evette Moran, celebrates excellence in research and writing in Australia. It is the only major national literary award of its kind presented by a local council.
Mark & Evette Moran Nib Literary Award finalists and Alex Buzo Shortlist Prize winners will be announced on 1 September. The People’s Choice Prize and major award winners will be announced on 12 November.
Congratulations to Rebecca, Patrick, and all the longlisted authors.
‘There is a kind of hauntedness in wild animals today: a spectre related to environmental change … Our fear is that the unseen spirits that move in them are ours. Once more, animals are a moral force.’
When Rebecca Giggs encountered a humpback whale stranded on her local beach in Australia, she began to wonder how the lives of whales might shed light on the condition of our seas. How do whales experience environmental change? Has our connection to these fabled animals been transformed by technology? What future awaits us, and them? And what does it mean to write about nature in the midst of an ecological crisis?
Fifty years after the event, here is the first full account of an audacious publishing decision that — with the help of booksellers and readers around the country — forced the end of literary censorship in Australia.
For more than seventy years, a succession of politicians, judges, and government officials in Australia worked in the shadows to enforce one of the most pervasive and conservative regimes of censorship in the world. The goal was simple: to keep Australia free of the moral contamination of impure literature. Under the censorship regime, books that might damage the morals of the Australian public were banned, seized, and burned; bookstores were raided; publishers were fined; and writers were charged and even jailed. But in the 1970s, that all changed.
Rebecca Giggs
Rebecca Giggs is a writer from Perth, Western Australia. Her work has…
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Patrick Mullins
Patrick Mullins is a Canberra-based writer and academic who has a PhD…
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