Sri Lankan writer bags top literary prize

The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser collars A$40,000 prize for fiction

By Miriam Cosic

Sri Lanka-born and Australia-based author Michelle de Kretser has won the prestigious Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, the biggest of the NSW Premier’s literary prizes. The prize is worth A$40,000 (about Rs 4.14 million). Her complex novel “The Lost Dog” also won Book of the Year, earning the writer a further A$10,000.

In a surprise move, NSW Arts Minister Frank Sartor announced that prize money for the 10 Premier’s Literary Awards sponsored by Arts NSW would be doubled, to A$290,000.

“It is appropriate that the first Premier’s Literary Awards to be initiated by a state government in Australia should be the richest and most prestigious,” Mr Sartor said. “The government's support for these awards reflects its belief in the importance of writing.”

Three more prizes, sponsored by other organisations, took the total purse to A$320,000. The Lost Dog, de Kretser's third novel, was published last year. The protagonist, Tom, whose dog is the dog in the title, arrived in Australia from India when he was a child. De Kretser migrated from Sri Lanka while a teenager, but she wrote Tom’s background only to help flesh out the complicated emotional life that sets him up for the events of the novel.

“I really wanted to show a multicultural Australia in which people are aware of their background, but it doesn’t define them,” de Kretser said. “They have friends who are white Australians, other Asian backgrounds, quite mixed really.”

De Kretser, who studied French literature at Melbourne University and the Sorbonne, was an editor at Melbourne-based travel publisher The Lonely Planet for more than 10 years and opened its Paris office. She started her first book in 1998 while on sabbatical from The Lonely Planet. The result was an acclaimed first novel, “The Rose Grower”, set in 19th-century France.

Her second novel, The Hamilton Case, about a Sinhalese lawyer involved in a murder case, last year won an award at the Frankfurt International Book Fair for its German translation.- (Courtesy The Australian)