Shortlist for 2012
Scribe Publications is delighted to announce the shortlist for this year's CAL Scribe Fiction Prize for writers 35 and over:
Amy Espeseth, Trouble Telling the Weather
Andrew Lindsay, Manly
Hugo Wilcken, The Reflection
We received 175 manuscripts in total from writers ranging in age from 35 to 85. This year, the prize money for the winner is $15,000 plus a book contract.
This shortlist now goes to the judges of this year's CAL Scribe Fiction Prize: Blanche Clark, Books Editor at the Herald Sun; Jon Page, CEO of Pages & Pages Bookstore and President of the ABA; and Aviva Tuffield, Associate Publisher at Scribe.
More about the prize
In 2009, Scribe launched the CAL Scribe Fiction Prize for an unpublished manuscript by an Australian writer aged 35 and over, regardless of publication history. Many writers only find the time and have acquired the life experience to write fiction later in life. This prize recognises that there are many examples of late bloomers when it comes to writers, certainly in terms of getting published. Youth is already celebrated in so many ways, and Scribe wants to support writers who are emerging or still going strong in their prime.
It is Scribe's intention that this prize will raise the profile of Australian fiction, demonstrate our commitment to local authors, and find a wonderful new voice and/or novel.
Scribe gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Copyright Agency Limited's Cultural Fund.
More about the shortlist
Amy Espeseth was awarded the Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript by an Emerging Victorian Writer in the 2009 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. Her fiction has appeared in various journals including Wet Ink, antithesis, and The Death Mook. She received the Felix Meyer Award for Literature in 2007.
Trouble Telling the Weather unfolds through the viewpoint of five characters who share a difficult past. The pastoral beauty of their town is undermined by the racial, economic and social inequalities that refuse to remain buried beneath the snow.
Andrew Lindsay is the author of The Breadmaker's Carnival, which won the Jim Hamilton Award, and The Slapping Man, shortlisted for the FAW (Vic.) Christina Stead Award. He also won the Radio National Books And Writing short-story competition, the 2008 Peter Blazey Fellowship and the 2009 National Jazz Writing Competition.
Manly is a literary account of a teenage boy who is transported from his idyllic bushland childhood to the hostile environment of a boarding school.
Hugo Wilcken was born in Sydney in 1964. He has recently returned to live there after 20 years in Paris, where he worked as a translator. He has published two novels and has written cultural criticism for the Times Literary Supplement, Frieze Magazine and other publications.
A plot-driven meditation on identity, The Reflection takes its cues from the mystery novel, but ultimately spins off into a quite different space.