The NSW Premier's Literary Awards shortlist was announced today. The shortlisted titles in each category are:

Christina Stead Prize for fiction ($20,000):

• Diary of a Bad Year (J M Coetzee, Text)
• The Trout Opera (Matthew Condon, Random)
• Ron McCoy's Sea of Diamonds (Gregory Day, Picador)
• The Lost Dog (Michelle de Kretser, A&U)
• The Widow and Her Hero (Tom Keneally, Random)
• The Landscape of Farewell (Alex Miller, A&U)

Douglas Stewart Prize for Nonfiction ($20,000):

• Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica (Tom Griffiths, UNSW Press)
• Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers (Philip Jones, Wakefield Press)
• High and Dry: John Howard, Climate Change and the Selling of Australia's Future (Guy Pearse, Penguin)
• Sunrise West (Jacob Rosenberg, Brandl & Schlesinger)
• Another Country (Nicolas Rothwell, Black Inc.)
• Courage (Maria Tumarkin, MUP)

Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry ($15,000):

• An Illustrated History of Diaries (Joanne Burns, Giramondo)
• Uncommon Light (Brook Emery, Five Islands Press)
• Westering (Pucher & Wattmann)
• Two Kinds of Silence (Kathryn Lomer, UQP)
• Typewriter Music (David Malouf, UQP)
• The Edge of Everything (Phyllis Perlstone, Puncher & Wattmann)

Ethel Turner Prize for Young People's Literature ($15,000):

• The Mag Hags (Lollie Barr, Random)
• Black Water (David Metzenthen, Penguin)
• The Black Dog Gang (Robert Newton, Penguin)
• Town (James Roy, UQP)
• Us Mob Walawurru (David Spillman & Lisa Wilyuka, Magabala Books)
• GriEVE (Lizzie Wilcock, Scholastic)

Patricia Wrightson Prize ($15,000):

• Pearl Barley and Charlie Parsley (Aaron Blabey, Penguin)
• The Brain Finds a Leg (Martin Chatterton, Little Hare)
• The Peasant Prince (Li Cunxin & Anne Spudvilas, Penguin)
• Ziba Came on a Boat (Liz Lofthouse, illus by Robert Ingpen, Penguin)
• The Key to Rondo (Emily Rodda, Omnibus)
• Dragon Moon (Carole Wilkinson, Black Dog Books)

The winners will be announced on 19 May 2008.

This article from Thorpe Bowker's Weekly Book Newsletter and Media Extra is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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