The West Australian Premier's Literary Award has become Australia's richest.

Re-launched this week, the $110,000 award, now to be known as the West Australian Premier's Australia Asia Literary Award, is now also open books by authors living in New Zealand or Asia, as well as to titles set in Australia or an Asian country.

‘This is a very exciting award that will re-ignite the importance and profile of literature in WA ... A prize of this value will draw the best to WA and help fulfil our vision of providing new opportunities for Western Australians,' said WA Premier Alan Carpenter.

‘We will attract some of the great authors of the world into this literary prize.'

The award is also open to 'electonic publications', including works published solely on the internet. 'The wider scope of the Award is designed to accommodate the emergence of new ways of publishing and distributing writing,' WA department of culture and the arts spokesperson Louise Atherton told WBN. 'The Award aims to highlight trends like the "cell-phone novel" that is growing in popularity in Japan, particularly among young adult audiences.'

One of three judges of the prize, Sri Lankan-born author Nury Vittachi, welcomed the move to include Asian writers.

‘What these fine people have done is created something global, something massive on the scale of the Booker, on the scale of the Pulitzer. And, where is it based? It's based here in Western Australia,' Mr Vittachi said.

For more information, go to the State Library of WA website.

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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