It’s raining prizes again: not that the deluge ever abates in Australia, happily for writers. The Colin Roderick Award, presented to ‘the best book of the year dealing with any aspect of Australian life’, is one of the most lucrative prizes ($10,000) and always attracts an eclectic field. This year’s shortlist is no different: titles include Malcolm Knox’s novel A Private Man, Gay Bilson’s most original study of life, reading and food culture, Plenty: Digressions on Food (which has already won the Nita B. Kibble and Age Book of the Year Awards) and Tim Winton’s collection of short fiction, The Turning, which carried off this year’s NSW Premier’s Prize for fiction. The Award will be presented in October.

Rediscoveries at the National Library

Alan Moorehead, the inimitable World War II correspondent, historian and biographer, was one of Australia’s finest prose stylists, incapable of a duff sentence, let alone a fluffy one. The National Library has chosen him to inaugurate its new series ‘An Australian Life’, which will ‘showcase the life and work of individuals who have made an important contribution to Australian literature and culture’. Admirably, some titles will focus on important figures who have ‘fallen from public attention’ (the woeful purgatory of the out of print). Canberra historian and science writer Ann Moyal is the author of Alan Moorehead: A Rediscovery. In her memoir, Breakfast with Beaverbrook (1995), Moyal recalled her employer Lord Beaverbrook asking her to swim for the aged Winston Churchill, who was one of Moorehead’s biographical subjects. Her new book is available from the National library, at $24.95.

Alive and kicking at ASA

The Australian Society of Authors (ASA) is never backward in defending its constituency. In our Letters pages this month, Jeremy Fisher, its Executive Director, gets roundly stuck into the Australia Council over its 2005 Books Alive campaign. (‘Grand pooh-bahs’, indeed.) The ASA has just appointed Angelo Loukakis as the new Editor of Australian Author. He replaces Anne Summers and Chip Rolley, who have jointly edited the magazine since 2000. Loukakis comes to the helm with much experience in publishing and writing. He is the author of a number of books, and co-author, most recently, of Peter Beattie’s new memoir Making a Difference, which is reviewed on page 16.

ABR in Adelaide (and Melbourne)

‘Advances’ was frankly shocked by the number of people who misread (or should that be speed-read?) this column in the June–July issue, when we announced our new partnership with Flinders University and the creation of a separate ABR office there. Reports of ABR’s closure in Melbourne are greatly exaggerated. To clarify, ABR’s head office remains in Richmond, but the Editor, Peter Rose, divides his time between Melbourne and Adelaide, and has settled into his office at the university.

Meanwhile, our first ABR–Flinders University event, with the Editor in conversation with Robert Manne, attracted a full house at the Radford Auditorium on July 31. Details of future Adelaide events will be published shortly. For prior notification of all our events, forward your email address to Dianne Schallmeiner: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Blog alert

‘Advances’ is guilty of many sins, but it has never ‘blogged’, as far as it knows. At the risk of offending Richard Johnstone, who wrote an essay on the subject for our May issue, we are blog virgins, a diminishing breed. So ‘Advances’ is impressed by the Victorian Centre for Youth Literature’s venture into cyberspace, following the recent launch of ‘Read Alert’ – the Centre’s very own blog. Log on to www.slv.gov.au/readalert for all the latest news, interviews, gossip and events from the world of youth literature.