Awards in Australia
The Crime Writers Association of Australia has announced the winners of the 2007 Ned Kelly Awards. Among the honorees is Adrian Hyland's Diamond Dove for best first novel. Read it yourself, and see what I and Australia raved about!
Also, hat tips to the several bloggers who have highlighted this interview with Peter Temple, the multiple-Ned Kelly (and also Dagger) winning author of The Broken Shore, the Jack Irish novels and others. Among other things, he has high praise for Hyland and Diamond Dove.
© Peter Rozovsky 2007
Technorati tags:
Adrian Hyland
Peter Temple
Australian crime fiction
Also, hat tips to the several bloggers who have highlighted this interview with Peter Temple, the multiple-Ned Kelly (and also Dagger) winning author of The Broken Shore, the Jack Irish novels and others. Among other things, he has high praise for Hyland and Diamond Dove.
© Peter Rozovsky 2007
Technorati tags:
Adrian Hyland
Peter Temple
Australian crime fiction
Labels: Adrian Hyland, Australia, Peter Temple
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 3:01 PM
15 Comments:
Peter Temple gave one of the best, and funniest, speeches you could hope to hear as his introduction to the announcement of Hyland's prize last night. In the process of the speech he implored writers to stop writing crime novels - there were too many out there and too many writers writing them. From there he proceeded to slag off his publisher TEXT for cultivating this excess, all in good fun of course. He lamented the lack of money available for crime writers, alerting us to the facts about poor Garry Disher: living on the Mornington Peninsular amongst vineyards and horse studs, surviving in a weatherboard shack by selling tickets (50c) to a small maze he had created in his backyard out of seashells, the centre of which featured a Hills Hoist (a complicated clothes line) with Disher underpants flapping in the breeze. He cracked everyone up. A five-minute joke that ended with a beautiful piece of self-deprecation.
The other presenters didn't have a hope after that. I saw someone videotaping part of the awards ceremony. I hope they saw fit to tape Temple's rant and post it to YouTube.
Thanks for a report that makes me wish I'd been there. You ought to write up a full account on Matilda if you haven't already. It's nice to read that there seems to be camaraderie among these top-flight crime writers, and I will look for Peter Temple's speech on YouTube. Considering all the crap posted there, it would be a shame if something worth seeing did not make it.
It appears Peter Temple's stature in Australia's crime-fiction world keeps on growing.
If you'd been there you would probably have ended up as inebriated as I was when I left. An advertised 6pm start turned into 7pm, so I had a bit of time waiting for writer and reviewer Lucy Sussex and her partner to turn up. A pretty solid bottle of red helped pass the time. So I was a bit relaxed before proceedings got under way.
The trouble with events like this is that you don't want to remember the boring bits - nor write about them for that matter - and the entertaining parts go by so fast you forget to take notes.
It sounds as if Australian crime-fiction conventions are similar to American ones, from what I read.
Think of your comments as an impressionistic report on the proceedings. Think of Peter Temple's wit as sharp enough to pierce the fog of alcohol.
Sorry - I am not a Temple fan
BUT
I am throwing my hat over the moon at Adrian Hyland's well deserved win
WHOO HOOOOOOOO!!!!!
Peter, this was the Melbourne Writers' Festival which had some crime elements - the Ned Kelly Awards and Karen Slaughter as a guest - and some sf - Cory Doctorow was here. But mainly it's a general literary festival.
There haven't been any major crime conventions here, such as Bouchercon, but we have had three sf worldcons. There has been talk amongst a few people about bidding for a major crime convention but you need 3 or 4 dedicated people who are steeped in the conventions of the genre for it to succeed.
Well, Sally, I half agree with you. You know I'm a big Peter Temple fan, but you also know I'm a big Diamond Dove fan. (February 2008 publication date for Diamond Dove in the U.S,. by the way -- under its new American title.)
Perry, that was a slip on my part. I knew it was the Melbourne Writers' Festival rather than a crime-fiction convention. I was impressed by the crime-fiction presence, though.
What do you reckon it was like for me? I'm a shithouse public speaker at the best of times, and I had to come on after one of the funniest speeches I'd ever heard. Felt like Moses getting the tablets from God.
Well, Moses had a pretty good career for himself even though he occasionally found it hard to come up with the right words.
He was a pretty modest guy, as we all recall from Numbers 12:3. Perhaps he, too, would have refrained from signing his blog comments!
Don't think I've actually figured out how to sign my comments - could only log on by signing in as 'Anonymous'
Adrian
You could try logging in as "other" rather than "anonymous" and seeing what happens. "Other" and "anonymous." Some choice! But thanks for visiting under whatever name.
Peter, I don't think you've detected that the Adrian who first commented above as Anonymous is Ned Kelly 2007 superstar ADRIAN HYLAND.
Oh, but I did know who it was. It's why I tried to goad my "anonymous" commenter into signing his name!
Adrian - you did just fine - but I wish you'd asked one of us to go fetch your bag for you - we could have saved you a lot of worry and let you concentrate.
Nobody is ever going to be able to follow Mr Temple or Mr Maloney at these things - they have that dry sense of the ridiculous down pat - although I did think that Graeme Blundell and his speech from the mountain as part of the debate might have been one way to take the pressure off - maybe he'll do some coaching for new writers.
Perry - we should have organised some sort of symbol - clutching a copy of Diamond Dove or something to finally meet up in real life - if the videotaping you were referring to was the woman right at the front she was an unknown who joined us at our table - I didn't get a chance to ask if she was planning on uploading the video anywhere but she did mention that she'd come to last year's Neds and enjoyed it so much she thought she'd return :)
Karen, I trust you will join me in wishing Adrian many more opportunties to put his awards-speech technique into practice.
And let me know if you track down a copy of this Neds tape!
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