Kyra Giorgi, author of The Circle and the Equator, has won the 2017 Steele Rudd Award, the $10,000 prize for a collection of short fiction in the Queensland Literary Awards.
The Circle and the Equator is Giorgi’s debut collection of short stories, and was highly commended in the inaugural 2015 Dorothy Hewett Award. The winner of the 2015 Dorothy Hewett Award, Extinctions by Josephine Wilson, recently won the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award.
Of the collection, the judges said, ‘Each of these stories take us to a new part of the world in a very specific time but the variations in settings and periods are achieved without a sense of forced internationality or exoticisation. The attention to detail means that each story-world feels incredibly concrete and immediate. The stories are elegantly restrained and emotionally engaging with subtly connecting themes and motifs: war, maiming/the body as a site of emergency and anxiety. The protagonists have their own unique voices and yet there is a clear, unifying authorial voice making the collection feels like a whole rather than a group of disconnected ideas. Each story takes the reader to a place that is surprising and fresh.’
The award is named after the Queensland novelist, playwright and short story writer Steele Rudd, best known for his novel On Our Selection (1899). Previous winners of the award include David Malouf, Nam Lee, Christos Tsiolkas, and Janette Turner Hospital.
The Queensland Literary Awards ceremony was held this evening, Wednesday 4 October, at the State Library of Queensland. UWA Publishing Director Terri-ann White accepted the Award on Giorgi’s behalf, who is currently based in Germany.
The Circle and the Equator was selected from a shortlist of three, which included Michelle Cahil’s Letter to Pessoa (Giramondo) and Tara June Winch’s After the Carnage (Penguin).
Read more about The Circle and the Equator here.
