Extinctions by Josephine Wilson won the $20,000 Colin Roderick Award, one of Australia’s oldest literary awards, at a ceremony at James Cook University in Townsville last night.
Founded in 1967 by Professor Colin Roderick and presented by the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies, the award is presented to the best original book that is published in Australia in the previous calendar year. The winning book must deal with ‘any aspect of Australian life and can be in any field or genre of writing, verse or prose.’
Extinctions was selected from a shortlist of eight books, which were:
- Carrying the World by Maxine Beneba Clarke
- Wisdom Tree: Five Novellas by Nick Earls
- Offshore: Behind the Wire on Manus and Naru by Madeline Gleeson
- The Art of Time Travel: Historians and Their Craft by Tom Griffiths
- From the Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories by Mark McKenna
- Saltwater by Cathy McLennan
- The Rules of Backyard Cricket by Jock Serong
The judges of the 2017 award were Adjunct Professor Stephen Torre, Professor Leigh Dale, Emeritus Professor Alan Lawson, and journalist and book reviewer Mary Vernon.
The announcement of the Colin Roderick Award follows the Miles Franklin Literary Award, which Extinctions won in September. Extinctions was published in late 2016 and as the inaugural winner of UWA Publishing’s Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript.
