Tony Birch has been many times a bridesmaid, but there is one literary prize he wouldn't mind losing – the new standalone prize for indigenous writers announced as part of the 2016 NSW Premier's Literary Awards' shortlist on Thursday.
"Whoever wins it I'm going to be overjoyed," Birch says.
Birch's Ghost River was celebrated among six finalists for the $40,000 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and in a shortlist for a first-time prize of $30,000 created by the NSW government to recognise the value of indigenous writing.
Not a community known to "pump our own tyres", as Birch puts it, the author-academic is comfortable to share shortlist honours with fellow writers and poets including Queensland short-story writer Ellen van Neerven and Melbourne's Bruce Pascoe, whose non-fiction work, Dark Emu, challenges the long-held view of a pre-colonial Aboriginal hunter-gatherer society.
"I know all the works, I've read them all, and they show great diversity in genre, age and topic. I wouldn't mind losing to any one of them," Birch says.
A record 500-plus entries were received across the 10 award categories of this year's NSW Premier's Literary Awards. The winners will be announced on the eve of the Sydney Writers' Festival in May. Long lists for the Kibble and Dobbie Literary Awards were announced at the same time as the traditional literary awards season gets under way.
Birch's nostalgic if unsettling tale of two teenage boys who spend their days on the banks of the Yarra River is joined in the fiction category by two distinctive tales of near-future environmental decline and extreme weather: James Bradley's Clade and Mireille Juchau's The World Without Us.
Merlinda Bobis' Locust Girl. A Lovesong, Lisa Gorton's The Life of Houses and Gail Jones' A Guide to Berlin complete the category shortlist.
Birch is the first recipient of Victoria University's Bruce MacGuinness Fellowship studying climate change and is heartened that strong stories about the social consequences of climate change have been singled out for praise. "No single person or idea can communicate the problems of climate change. It can't only be left to science."
In the non-fiction category, the books shortlisted include Magda Szubanski's bestseller Reckoning: A Memoir, Tim Winton's ode to coast Island Home, and Kate Grenville's One Life: My Mother's Story.
The new writing category features authors already singled out as future literary talent. Miles Allinson's Fever of Animals, winner of 2014 Victorian Premier's Unpublished Manuscript Award was shortlisted, along with Murray Middleton's When There's Nowhere Else To Run, which won the 2015 Vogel Literary award.
Christina Stead Prize for Fiction:
Ghost River, Tony Birch, University of Queensland Press
Locust Girl. A Lovesong, Merlinda Bobis, Spinifex Press
Clade, James Bradley, Penguin Random House
The Life of Houses, Lisa Gorton, Giramondo
A Guide to Berlin, Gail Jones, Penguin Random House
The World Without Us, Mireille Juchau, Bloomsbury
Linda Morris is on Facebook and twitter: @LindaMorrissmh
