Scribe is thrilled to announce that Fever of Animals by Miles Allinson has been shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards 2016 Prize for Fiction.
Also shortlisted for the Prize for Fiction are: The Other Side of the World by Stephanie Bishop; Clade by James Bradley; Forever Young by Steven Carroll; The World Without Us by Mireille Juchau; and The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood.
The winners of the five award categories – fiction, non-fiction, drama, poetry and writing for young adults – each receive a prize of $25,000, and go on to contest the Victorian Prize for Literature. Worth a further $100,000, the Victorian Prize for Literature is Australia’s single richest literary prize.
The public are encouraged to participate in the Awards by voting for their favorite shortlisted work. The winner of the $2,000 People’s Choice Award will be named alongside the main category winners on Thursday 28 January 2016.
To vote for the People’s Choice Award, visit wheelercentre.com.
JUDGE’S REPORT
Miles Allinson’s debut novel, Fever of Animals, is an assured, inventive exploration of love, loss, creativity and identity, with a metafictional wink at the reader that dares us to make assumptions about the link between author and narrator (both named Miles). The narrator is a twentysomething artist who’s realised that his talent is too slight to build a career on, and has redirected his ambition into an obsession with obscure (fictional) surrealist painter Emil Bafdescu, who mysteriously disappeared in a Romanian forest. This distant, storied loss is intertwined with two immediate, intimate ones: the death of Miles’ father and the disintegration of his relationship with his first love, Alice. Allinson writes perceptively about young, self-absorbed love: Miles is besotted with Alice, but deliberately evades her imperfect authentic self in favour of his projected fantasy of her. Fever of Animals isn't an exercise in invention or cleverness for its own sake: it’s a genuine and genuinely complex attempt to understand the nature of love and loss, rendered in crisp, painterly prose that is a pleasure to read.
