Commonwealth writers' prize announces regional winners | Books | guardian.co.uk

Commonwealth writers' prize announces regional winners | Books | guardian.co.uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/commonwealth-writers-prize

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/indigenous-writer-triumphs-20110302-1betl.html

http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2011/s3154341.htm

ELEANOR HALL: One of Australia's leading Indigenous writers has taken out the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best book in south-east Asia and the Pacific.

Kim Scott won the Miles Franklin Award more than a decade ago for his novel Benang.

He says he's amused that's he's won the Commonwealth prize for his latest novel That Deadman Dance which explores early contact and power struggles between white settlers and Aborigines, as Emily Bourke reports.

KIM SCOTT: To some degree it may well be a departure from more recent aspects of Indigenous narratives in which for all sorts of reasons we've necessarily had to sing up a story of resistance.

Yeah in this one I'm trying to do something different - talk about what I see in my part of the world anyway at times of early contact the enormous confidence and generosity of Nyungar people and their readiness when in positions of power to be inclusive and to engage in acts of reciprocity, that being a sort of fundamental value.

So I don't think it's a departure from those really early stories. But it's perhaps a bit of a departure or a slight deviation or variation on more recent stories which have emphasised resistance and polemic.

But there's some dangers in those sort of stories I think if that's the only ones we tell.

The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, internationally recognised for promoting ground-breaking works of fiction from across the globe, announced yesterday that Australian writer Kim Scott has won the South East Asia and Pacific region Best Book category with his novel That Deadman Dance, and New Zealand writer Craig Cliff is the winner in the Best First Book category with his collection of short stories, A Man Melting.

Dr. Paul Sharrad, South East Asia and Pacific Regional Chair, said of That Deadman Dance:

"That Deadman Dance was found to best comply with the stated intent of the prize of not being only about fine literary style. It is a strong dramatisation of a consciousness poised at the intersection of magical and materialist cultures, excited by the possibilities of the new; but it also treats the negotiations between races and cultures in the period of first contact without over-simplification and with sympathetic convincing depiction of the varied responses of convicts, merchants, governors, whalers, young and old Aborigines. It is a book of lyrical energies, held in check by a realistic sense of history, which balances the elegy for what we know was lost with possibilities of mutual understanding that have always been there."