Sixty Minutes journalist Ross Coulthart had shared top prize in the history category at the Prime Minister’s literary awards for his investigative biography of one of Australia’s greatest war correspondents, Charles Bean.
Ross shared the prize with David Horner, who wrote an unofficial history of ASIO called The Spy Catchers.
Joan London won the prize for best fiction with a novel called The Golden Age about a boy who falls in love while a patient on a polio ward in Perth.
Judges described London’s novel as one of ‘great beauty and powerful emotion.’
The full list of winners from last night’s ceremony are:
Fiction:
- The Golden Age by Joan London (Penguin Books Australia)
Poetry:
- Poems 1957-2013 by Geoffrey Lehmann (UWA Publishing)
Prize for Australian History (joint winners):
Charles Bean by Ross Coulthart (HarperCollins Publishers)
The Spy Catchers -The Official History of ASIO Vol 1 by David Horner (Allen & Unwin)
Non-fiction (joint winners):
John Olsen: An Artist’s Life by Darleen Bungey (ABC Books, Harper Collins Publishers)
Wild Bleak Bohemia: Marcus Clarke, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Kendall by Michael Wilding (Australian Scholarly Publishing)
Young Adult Fiction:
- The Protected by Claire Zorn (University of Queensland Press)
Children’s Fiction:
- One Minute’s Silence by David Metzenthen and illustrated by Michael Camilleri (Allen & Unwin)
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