Jaclyn Moriarty

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Don Watson, Mark Henshaw and David Malouf among winners in NSW Premier’s Awards

DonWatsonDon Watson’s The Bush: Travels in the Heart of Australia has taken out the overall Book of the Year award in the Australian  New South Wales Premier’s Awards announced tonight as part of the Sydney Writers Festival. Watson who was a speechwriter for the former Prime Minister, Paul Keating, also won the prize for non-fiction. Other winners were Mark Henshaw whose The Snow Kimono won the fiction prize and David Malouf who won the prize for poetry with Earth Hour.

Playwright David Williamson received a special award recognising him as Australia’s “greatest playwright with a prodigious output of more than 40 plays that have shaped how we view ourselves”. He announced he would donate his $10,000 prize to the Sydney’s Ensemble Theatre.

Full list of winners:

Phillipp Meyer at Brisbane Writers’Festival

Philipp MeyerThere was some unusual feedback from American novelist Phillipp Meyer, (pictured left) author of the knock-out The Son, who is star attraction at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival this week.“Praise is just as bad as criticism when you’re doing work,” he said in an interview with The Australian newspaper. “You can’t have anyone else’s voice in your head but your own, so the way I deal with it is I just don’t think about it,” he said. “When I see those sort of comments they have no emotional effect. It’s like a pretty girl getting your attention at a bar. If you did actually think about it, artistically you’d be ruined, you’d turn into a monster.”

He’d better get used to ignoring a lot of pretty girls in bars as the plaudits are

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