Debut Novel Takes Award

By MOORE, Christopher

New Zealand’s teenage writers still have time to submit entries in this year’s Re-Draft competition judged by Tessa Duder and James Norcliffe. The competition’s closing date is September 30. Entry is free and entry forms are available from the School for Young Writers: young.writers@xtra.co.nz.

Australiana

A debut novel by a former public servant and student has beaten Thomas Keneally and David Malouf to take Australia’s inaugural Prime Minister’s literary award for fiction.

Steven Conte’s The Zookeeper’s War, set in a war-battered Berlin in 1943, explores the lives of an Australian woman and her German husband, the director of Berlin Zoo.

The awards, established by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to celebrate Australian writing, are the country’s richest book prize with a tax-free cheque of $A100,000 to both a fiction and non- fiction title. Rudd personally selected the winners from a shortlist of seven titles.

Judges praised Conte’s book for its “command of engrossing plot” and its “ethical seriousness”, and its author as a new voice in Australian fiction.

Adelaide historian Philip Jones won the non-fiction award for Ochre and Rust, from a field that included Clive James and Germaine Greer.

Announcing the winners, Rudd described literature as “part of the sinews and soul” of the nation.

Prickly topic

The French newspaper Le Figaro described it as the publishing phenomenon of the decade. It’s been compared to Proust, sold more than a million copies in France last year and won many awards. The Elegance of The Hedgehog has plucked a cerebral Gallic chord.

Its author, Muriel Barbery, a Paris- born former philosophy teacher who now lives in Japan, explores her favourite theme – philosophy as applied to everyday life. This helps explain the book’s appeal in France, where philosophy is still a compulsory subject and most people have a basic knowledge of the great thinkers.

The story features the confessions of two women: Renee Michel, a 54-year-old concierge in a Parisian block of luxury apartments, and Paloma Josse, a precocious 12-year- old, the daughter of one of the most bourgeois families in the house.

Paloma has decided that life is meaningless and is making plans to commit suicide on her 13th birthday.

The upstart girl and the concierge are drawn together when the restaurant critic upstairs dies. A cultured Japanese man takes the apartment and shares Paloma’s fascination with Renee. They decide that the concierge has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary – and terribly elegant.

Obviously a very French affair. –Christopher Moore

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