Nam Le has won Australia’s oldest literary award for the second time.
Sixteen years after bursting onto the literary scene with his debut short story collection, The Boat (which won, or was nominated for, pretty much every major book prize in Australia), Vietnamese-Australian writer Nam Le’s first book of poetry has earned its author his second Book of the Year award at the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.
Nam Le won the top prize at this year’s NSW Literary Awards on Monday night for his book-length poem 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, an exploration of family, racism, war, trauma, and the Vietnamese diaspora which the judges praised for its “poetic brilliance, power and accessibility.”
Le also won the $30,000 NSW multicultural award category, but lost the Kenneth Slessor prize for poetry to Lebanese-Palestinian writer Hasib Hourani and his acclaimed debut rock flight.
Nam Le came to Australia from Vietnam as a boat refugee in the late 1970s, when he was just a year old, and originally worked as lawyer before turning to writing full time.
With a total purse of $360,000, the NSW Literary Awards are considered Australia’s oldest and richest state-based literary prizes.
Other winners in this year’s NSW Literary Awards included Fiona McFarlane for her book Highway 13, which won The Christina Stead Prize for Fiction ($40,000); James Bradley for Deep Water, a look at the oceans and the part they play in nature, history and climate, which won the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction ($40,000); and Katrina Nannestad for Silver Linings, which received the Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature ($30,000).
