Nam Le adds A$100,000 prize to last year's Dylan Thomas award for story collection The BoatHe came to Australia as a refugee from Vietnam, and now Nam Le's debut collection of short stories has triumphed over the cream of the country's novelists to win the Australian prime minister's literary award for fiction.Worth A$100,000 (£55,000), the awards were set up last year to "celebrate the contribution of Australian literature to the nation's cultural and intellectual life", with prime minister Kevin Rudd making the final decision on the winners (taking recommendations from a panel of judges).
This year's fiction shortlist, including works by the Pulitzer prize-winning Australian novelist Geraldine Brooks and Murray Bail, winner of Australia's most prestigious literary award the Miles Franklin, was hailed by judges for its "inspiring evocation of Australian scenes".
"It seems that Australian authors' descriptions of Australia, past and present, rural and urban, are now extremely varied and devoid of cliché," they said.The short stories in Le's The Boat - which last year won Wales's £60,000 Dylan Thomas prize - move the reader around the world, from a tale about a tourist in Tehran to one about a teenage hitman in Colombia, from an Australian fishing village where a boy is coming of age to New York and an artist growing old.
Judges said that Le, 30, "combines almost reckless artistic boldness with highly disciplined craft", calling The Boat "one of the most impressive debuts of recent years".Le, who grew up in Melbourne and is currently the fiction editor at the Harvard Review, said it seemed "barely credible" to see his name among writers whom he has "read, admired, envied and adored for so long".
"I've got to say that I feel like a petty thief on murderers' row," he said.
"Bail, Brooks, Flanagan, Goldsworthy, Laguna, London - these have long been heavy hitters in my world, writers who represent our best defence against the onslaught of the screen, writers who privilege knowledge over information, meaning over gesture, specificity over abstraction, without shying from universal assertion; writers who fuse character and milieu, looking always for nodes of common perception and experience, looking always to enact connection; writers who engage language vertically - syllable by syllable, sound by sound, who ask us to see and think and feel and act in private as well as public spheres, who reflect the news which stays news, who embrace the necessary mess, the due measure of clarity and confusion - writers in whose company I feel honoured and proud and more than a little wary to intrude."In an acceptance speech read at yesterday's ceremony by his publisher (he was on a flight), Le also thanked Rudd and the Australian government for "affirming the value of literature to this country's life".
"It's an anodyne thing to say but maybe it needs to be said, and said again and again: that books matter, that they are the truest means of telling and showing us to ourselves, that they do a strange, unaccountable, irreplaceable work that the loose, baggy monsters of film, TV, and internet cannot," said Le.
"Part of that work is the faith to put readers to work: to invite readers to share an act of imagination with the work, to seek out complexities in the friction zone of consciousness and reality, to encourage readers, in that act of imaginative completion, to convince themselves that the concerns of the book in their hands are their concerns as well.
This, for me, is the beginning of real community."Two non-fiction titles shared the A$100,000 award for non-fiction: House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nellie Kroeger-Man by Evelyn Juers, which judges called "remarkable for both its research and its prose", and a history that puts Australia's tarnished record on race in its global context, Drawing the Global Colour Line by Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds - a "masterful overview of the prejudices of the wider world", according to judges.
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