Carol Lefevre, author of IF YOU WERE MINE and NIGHTS IN THE ASYLUM, has had her unpublished novel A MAZE IN THE GARDEN shortlisted for the Barbara Hanrahan Fellowship at the Adelaide Festival Literary Awards 2012.
The winners will be announced Saturday 3 March, by South Australian Premier, the Hon Jay Weatherill, in a presentation at the Pioneer Women's Memorial Garden in Adelaide during Adelaide Writers' Week which is held as part of the Adelaide Festival.
Winning authors will also be invited to give a public reading during a Writers' Week session on Sunday 4 March at 5:30pm.
Introduced by the Government in 1986, the awards are managed by Arts SA, and offer a total $135,000 in prize money, shared between 10 awards, including six national awards, and two awards and two fellowships specifically for South Australian writers.
For full list of all shortlisted titles in each category, click here.
IF YOU WERE MINE and NIGHTS IN THE ASYLUM are published in Australia by Random House Century and NIGHTS IN THE ASYLUM is published by Picador in the UK.
Praise for IF YOU WERE MINE:
'Haunting and
beautifully written; themes of love and loss are vividly explored.' --
Jane Rogers, author of MR WROE'S VIRGINS and THE VOYAGE HOME
'Lefevre is a great stylist and her landscapes are imposing…Lefevre's technique in IF YOU WERE MINE is fluid, the imagery is fine and well balanced (night skies described as the "felt lining of a mandolin case, scattered with silver coins", for example)…The empathetic dualities operating in the novel, the juxtaposition of maternal instincts with desire for the mother, propel this tale of loss and longing…Lefevre measures lyricism with poignancy and IF YOU WERE MINE is a tender, resonant achievement.' -- Rebecca Starford, Australian Book Review
'Lefevre…paints the area in vivid elegiac prose, and gives us wonderful word pictures of Semaphore and the burgeoning valley. The passages that stop the heart, however, are the frozen moments of tragedy, poignant in their restraint, their silent, visual power.' -- Katherine England, Adelaide Advertiser
Praise for NIGHTS IN THE ASYLUM:
'A
very atmospheric novel, deftly exploring relationships within families
and beyond them, touching on aspects of race and discrimination as they
have played out in small-town Australia.' -- www.bookbag.co.uk
'Haunting tale' -- Dorset Echo
'Emotionally intense novel of broken hearts and lives gone astray' -- The Guardian