Dog Boy wins 2010 Prime Minister's Literary Award
8th November 2010
Australian novelist Eva Hornung has won one of her home country's leading literary prizes for Dog Boy.
The author was named as the winner in the fiction category of the 2010 Prime Minister's Literary Award, which carries a prize of AUS 100,000 (GBP 62,500).
Dog Boy, which follows the story of a four-year-old Russian child who becomes a member of a dog pack, was described by the judging panel as a 'remarkable work of international standing'.
'The resonances of the novel are bleak and unsettling, but the resolution is both shocking and apt, the experiment and the manner of its telling have a compelling assurance,' the judges commented.
In winning the prize, Hornung saw off competition from a shortlist that included Summertime by J.M. Coetzee, Deborah Forster's The Book of Emmett and The Lake Woman by Alan Gould.
David Malouf's Ransom, Lovesong by Alex Miller and Alison Wong's As the Earth Turns Silver were also finalists in the prize.
The 2010 Prime Minister's Literary Award also saw Grace Karskens win the non-fiction prize for The Colony: The History of Early Sydney, Bill Condon take home the young adult fiction honour with Confessions of a Liar, Thief and Failed Sex God and Lorraine Marwood scoop the children's fiction accolade for Star Jumps.