Advances

We welcome entries in the third ABR Poetry Prize. In its short life, this competition has become one of the most prominent of its kind in the country. Poets have until December 15 to enter the prize, which is worth $2000. Up to six poems will be shortlisted in the March 2007 issue; the winner will be announced one month later. Full details appear on page 42. The entry form is also available on our website, or on request. The previous winners were Stephen Edgar and Judith Bishop. Advances was pleased to see that Judith Beveridge has included Edgar’s prize-winning poem ‘The Man on the Moon’ in The Best Australian Poetry 2006 (UQP) — one of eight poems in the anthology that were first published in ABR.

All we can say is that ABR readers are not short of a word, and thank goodness for that. The response to our reader survey has been exceptional and most heartening. To date, about four hundred people have filled out the survey. We’re still analysing the results, but ‘Advances’ can report that overall our readers have a deep affinity with ABR – or at least with the idea of ABR – and are thus keen for us to improve the magazine and to maximise its potential. Readers’ annotations, whether critical or positive, have been overwhelmingly helpful and constructive. Already we are adding new features to the magazine in response to your suggestions. Many of you, for instance, cited Film as an area of neglect: next month we launch our film column. Much work remains to be done as we continue assimilating the results. Since the surveys are still coming in, we’ll delay announcing the prize-winners until the September issue.

Here we go again!

There are few certainties in this world, but newspapers can be relied on to conjure stories and brouhahas from a select group of cultural activities. Screen a movie to a class of undergraduates, or add pulp fiction to a curriculum, and The Australian – possibly even the prime minister – will be down on you like a ton of bricks. Should Opera Australia go into the red, all hell can be relied on to break loose. If Radio National has the audacity to cover both sides of a story, you can be sure it will pay a heavy price.

The judges of the ABR Poetry Prize certainly earned their pastrami on rye this year! Could the short list have been closer, the final choice more difficult? Doubtful. Morag Fraser, Peter Rose and Craig Sherborne agree that a number of the six short-listed poems (which appeared in the March issue) would have made worthy winners. Such is the tyranny of competitions, they had to choose a single poem, and it took a while – longer in fact than Brendan Ryan’s marvellous road poem, ‘Back Roads, Local Roads’, took to unfold.

Ten years ago, the venerable essay was a kind of Australian fossil, rare as compassion in a bourse. They still figured in the learned journals, but other sightings were infrequent. When the current Editor of ABR proposed the first major anthology of Australian essays to his then colleagues at OUP, it was doubtless perceived as yet another instance of his eccentricity, but when it was published in 1997 Imre Salusinszky’s Oxford Book of Australian Essays was greeted with enthusiasm. Other anthologies followed in the 1990s, including the first of the Black Inc. Best Australian Essays, a series that now runs to eight volumes. Never has the essay form been more visible, more necessary, more popular, give or take the odd skirmish. Tamas Pataki’s ‘Against Religion’, published in our February issue, is a fine example of how essays can captivate and get under people’s skin. No other essay has so polarised our readers or generated as much correspondence, ranging from a kind of epistolary sigh of relief that ‘someone has said it at last’ to indignation at Dr Pataki’s supposed temerities (see our Letters pages, and there are more to come). That’s a good thing, and ABR looks forward to presenting other views on the subject, plus a response from Dr Pataki in the April issue.

Join us on March 6 during the Adelaide Writers’ Week when the Editor of ABR will announce details of a major new sponsorship and prize to be offered this year. We can’t go into details yet, but this is an event that no common or uncommon reader, least of all Australian writers, will want to miss. We will also be launching our March issue, which is largely devoted to Art and Architecture. Luke Morgan of Monash University is co-editing the issue with Peter Rose. A highlight of this annual thematic issue is Dr Morgan’s long article on the state of art criticism in Oz, which seems likely to provoke a few Cubist expressions in the art world! This launch (a free event) will take place at 12.30 p.m. on Monday, March 6, in the West Tent, Pioneer Women’s Memorial Gardens.

This year we received eighty-seven entries, with a good range in all three categories, children’s/young adult books; fiction; and non-fiction/poetry. New South Wales contributed almost half the entries; but each state was represented. It’s always interesting to note the most popular titles. This year they were Sonya Hartnett’s Surrender and Christos Tsiolkas’s Dead Europe. Sadly, no one chose to review the Sydney and Blue Mountains Street Directory, that straight classic, but we were impressed by two entrants’ celerity in reviewing The Latham Diaries. (David Free has won third prize for his review of the same.)

ABR Poetry Competition

Earlier this year, Stephen Edgar won the inaugural ABR Poetry Competition. He picked up a cheque for $2000, and ABC Television made a feature about him and other shortlisted poets – not bad coverage for poets in a country many of whose newspapers and general magazines have so lament-ably and short-sightedly reduced their coverage of poetry. Well, the competition is on again. Its principal aim is to uncover some of the best new poems being written in this country. Up to six of them will be shortlisted in the March 2006 issue; the winner will be announced in April 2006. Full details appear on page 8. The entry form is also available on our website, or on request. The closing date is December 15.

J.M. Coetzee at the National Library

‘Advances’ is often amused by prognostications about the demise or disengagement of fiction. 2005 has already proved to be an auspicious year for new Australian fiction. And there’s more to come! This month, J.M. Coetzee, the remarkable South African writer will publish his new novel, Slow Man. UK publication will follow the book’s local release by a week, though the novel has already been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. There are so many surprises in Mr Coetzee’s new novel that it would be wrong to discuss them here, except to say that the book is set in Adelaide, where he has lived for some time, and that Elizabeth Costello, the eponymous character in his previous novel, makes another appearance, bossy as ever. James Ley, who discussed J.M. Coetzee’s oeuvre in his essay ‘The Tyranny of the Literal’ in our April issue, will review the novel next month.

In a country famously saturated with prizes, the ABR Reviewing Competition is unique. It is widely regarded as one of the most constructive and needed awards, which is why we have brought forward the third competition from the advertised date of 2006. Announcing the winners of last year’s competition in the December 2004–January 2005 issue, ‘Advances’ reported that 100 new and experienced reviewers had entered, in three categories: fiction, non-fiction (including poetry) and children’s/young adult books. Our winners were Maya Linden, Vivienne Kelly and Stephanie Owen Reeder, respectively, all of whom (in addition to having their winning review published in the February 2005 issue of ABR) have gone on to write for the Review (Dr Reeder, indeed, has just become an editorial adviser). ABR looks forward to a similarly rich crop this year.