Far North Queensland-based author and former foreign correspondent Nicolas Rothwell has won the $80,000 Prime Minister's Literary Award for fiction for his third novel, Red Heaven, in a ceremony in Launceston on Tuesday afternoon that was disrupted midway through by a fire alarm.
The event was presided over by Susan Templeman, federal Labor MP and Australia's Special Envoy for the Arts, in the absence of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Arts Minister Tony Burke.
Red Heaven is a meditation on art, memory and relationships set in 60s Europe against the backdrop of the Cold War. It won this year's award against a shortlist that included Devotion by Hannah Kent (Burial Rites), and Dark as Last Night by Tony Birch (which won the NSW Premier's Literary Award for fiction earlier this year).
Rothwell's novel was recommended to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (in whose remit the final decision sits) by a panel of judges appointed by the previous federal government: poet Geoffrey Lehmann; The Australian's literary editor, Caroline Overington, and former literary editor and current writer and critic, Stephen Romei; writer and and critic Peter Craven; and Indigenous academic Sandra Phillips.
In their statement, the panel described Red Heaven as a "dazzling" novel that "transcends time and place":
"It is a romantic, dramatic, intelligent, cultured, political, cinematic, and, above all, human story that centres on the people who love us and who we love in return, regardless of the cost."
It's the second time Rothwell has won a Prime Minister's Literary Award (PMLA), having taken out the non-fiction category in 2017 for his book Quicksilver — a collection of essays marked by his fascination with the Australian landscape and classic works of art (notably, D.H. Lawrence's Kangaroo and Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker).
Red Heaven too is interested in landscapes (although largely alpine European ones) and in literature, as well as Soviet-era politics.
Taking place against the backdrop of the Cold War in the 60s, it follows an unnamed boy narrator from Eastern Europe and his relationship with his two "aunts" (not actually blood relatives, but carers in his mother's absence). These aunts, film producer Serghiana, and Ady, the wife of a conductor, impart what they know to him — about life, art, and, often disparagingly, each other.
Rothwell did not attend the ceremony; in a brief statement, read by Templeman, he thanked his agent and publisher — and expressed his gratitude to the late Australian novelist Christopher Koch, "whose encouragement and whose focus on eternal values was so helpful to me when I was seeking to make my way in words".
Books about Australian military in spotlight
Walkley Award-winning ABC investigative journalist Mark Willacy won the non-fiction category of the Prime Minister's Literary Awards for his book Rogue Forces, which expands on his work exposing SAS war crimes in Afghanistan for Four Corners.
Accepting the award, Willacy thanked publishers Simon and Schuster "for backing this project, which caused a lot of heartache for a lot of people and sparked a bit of a culture war".
He ended his speech by thanking Afghan journalists:
"Their bravery is beyond description. I would ask them to go places and find people that put them into harm's way and I'm thankful that they always came back safe," Willacy said.
He also dedicated his award to "those SAS men and women who had the bravery to speak to me and tell me what they saw and why it bothered them and why they wanted to put it right".
Another book about the Australian military won the Australian history category: Semut by Christine Helliwell, about a secret operation to recruit Borneo's indigenous peoples to fight against the Japanese during WWII.
A memoir of longing
Rothwell, like his protagonist in Red Heaven, went to boarding school in Switzerland and France, lived as a young person in America, and has worked as a writer and foreign correspondent.
The similarities between the protagonist and Rothwell have led people to ask if the novel is semi-autobiographical.
Talking to ABC RN's Late Night Live in August last year, the author pushed back on the idea of the book being a "memoir": "It's not the story of my life."
Instead, Red Heaven is "a view of characters and places that I saw distantly and was very struck by, and a milieu that meant a great deal to me," he said.
"It's a memoir of longing, if you want, or a story of an imaginary childhood, a childhood which was quite close to my own."
He described the message of Red Heaven in an interview with critic Stephen Romei in The Australian last year: "You come into the world and people form you and then you love them and then you grow apart from them and then they die."
Romei, who is also a judge in the fiction and poetry categories of the Prime Minister's Literary Awards, described the novel in The Australian as "outstanding".
"It is romantic, dramatic, intelligent, cultured, enigmatic, cinematic, musical and human. It is also funny," he wrote.
Critic Peter Craven, also a judge in the fiction and poetry categories, published a more critical review of Red Heaven in the Sydney Morning Herald: "Red Heaven is a book that will fascinate the literary seeker, alive to every literary jewel dropped on the dark pathway of the journey, but is never quite within cooee of the thing it pays such elaborate homage to."
Judges criticised
Earlier this month Peter Rose, the editor of prominent literary journal the Australian Book Review, criticised the Prime Minister's Literary Awards judging panels for their lack of diversity, pointing out that three of five fiction and poetry judges, and all five Australian history and non-fiction judges, are from NSW, and that six of those 10 judges are associated with The Australian (including Overington, Romei and Craven).
"No other media organisation is represented on these two panels," he wrote.
Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald, former PMLA judge Susan Wyndham (also former literary editor of the publication), commented: "Our panel of five had judges from three states, and I was the only (former) literary editor or journalist. While each of the current judges is highly competent … concentration of judges in one state and one media company is at least unimaginative."
A spokesperson for the Office of the Arts responded to the criticism with the statement:
"Each year the judges and the composition of the panels are reviewed. Diversity, in all ways including across geographic location, gender, expertise and differing backgrounds, will be considered by the current Government for the appointment of the 2023 Awards' judges."
EDITOR'S NOTE: December 19, 2022: The original version of this story reported that Rothwell thanked late American novelist Christopher Coe.
