September 12, 29024 The Conversation Alexander Howard
André Dao’s debut novel Anam (Penguin Random House) has just won the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, worth A$80,000. This follows its shortlisting for this year’s Miles Franklin Award.
Anam blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction. As Tess Do explained in her review for The Conversation, it started life “as an inquiry into his paternal grandfather’s ten-year detention without trial by the Vietnamese government in 1978, three years after the war ended”.
…The judges praised how Dao “extends the novel form, breaking rules, forming new ones, and demonstrating how the ‘imaginative power of a novel’ is perfect for witnessing uncomfortable truths”.
Click here for the winners of the Australian History Prize, Non-Fiction Prize and the Children’s Literature Prize winner and much more. Well done to all the winners!
