Trilogy Of Nominations - A Prize At Last
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday June 20, 2008
ALL books in the trilogy by the Melbourne writer Steven Carroll have been nominated for Australia's most coveted literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award. Last night the third and final novel about life in suburban Australia, The Time We Have Taken, won the award at last.
Carroll received this year's award, valued at $42,000, for his moving and powerful account of a family's yearnings and dreams in a working-class Melbourne suburb not dissimilar to Glenroy, where Carroll grew up.Praising Carroll's measured, still prose, the judges said the novel was "poised and philosophically profound", a stand-alone work that was "moving and indelible in its evocation of the extraordinary in ordinary lives". The novel, Carroll's sixth, also won this year's Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best book in South-East Asia and South Pacific. Carroll said the win was "tremendously satisfying after all this time, but also incredibly daunting, too". The book took him nearly three years to write; and the trilogy 10 years. The other two novels are The Art Of The Engine Driver (published in 2001) and The Gift Of Speed (2004).
© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald