Michelle de Kretser pocketed $50,000 at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards on Monday, winning both the Christina Stead Prize for fiction ($40,000) and Book of the Year ($10,000) for her third novel, The Lost Dog (A&U).

De Kretser described her story of immigrant Tom Loxley and his beloved missing dog as ‘a novel about loss and being haunted by what is not there and what has been left behind.'
Herself an immigrant from Sri Lanka, De Kretser was inspired by the temporary loss of her own dog, Gus, at a farm in south Gippsland. ‘One morning we were thinking if we find him, we'll find a corpse. But struggling through this very dense terrain, he just came limping out of the bush. I feel like crying still when I think about it,’ De Kretser said.

Former Booker Prize-winner Thomas Keneally was also among the prizewinners, receiving a $20,000 acknowledgement for his lifetime contribution to literature. 

Other awards presented included:

Douglas Stewart Prize for Nonfiction ($40,000): Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica (Tom Griffiths, UNSW Press)

Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry ($30,000): Two Kinds of Silence (Kathryn Lomer, UQP)

Patricia Wrightson Prize ($30,000): The Peasant Prince (Li Cunxin, Viking)

Ethel Turner Prize ($30,000): Town (James Roy, UQP)

Community Relations Commission Award ($15,000): Sunrise West (Jacob G. Rosenberg, Brandl & Schlesinger)

Gleebooks Prize ($10,000): Race and the Crisis of Humanism (Kay Anderson, Routledge)

UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing ($5000): Feather Man (Rhyll McMaster, Brandl & Schlesinger)

Play Award ($30,000): Stories in the Dark (Debra Oswald, Currency Press)

Script Writing Award ($30,000): Forbidden Lie$ (Anna Broinowski, Liberty Productions)

NSW Premier's Biennial Literary Scholarship Prize ($30,000): Samuel Taylor Coleridge: a Literary Life (William Christie, Palgrave Macmillan)

This article from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

Tags: michelle de kretser, nsw premier award