Alison Lester wins the $60,000 Melbourne Prize for Literature

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Alison Lester wins the $60,000 Melbourne Prize for Literature

By Jason Steger
Updated

In 1985 Alison Lester made a decision that was to change her life - and the lives of thousands of Australian children. For the previous six years she had illustrated books for younger eyes, but that year, having got fed up with working on other people's stories, she published the first she had written. It was about Clive, a little boy who likes to eat alligators for breakfast.

Since then her many works – Magic Beach, Noni the Pony, Are We There Yet?, to name only a few – have become enduring and endearing presences in the reading of Australians young and old. On Wednesday she was presented with the $60,000 Melbourne Prize for Literature for her body of work, the first children's writer to win the award.

'Magic Beach' by Alison Lester.

'Magic Beach' by Alison Lester.

Maria Tumarkin won the $30,000 best-writing award for her acclaimed non-fiction work, Axiomatic, while Jamie Marina Lau won the the Readings Residency Award for an early-career Victorian writer.

The prize judges described Lester, who has written and illustrated more than 80 books, as a national treasure: "There's hardly an Australian who has not read her work." Among Lester's many other awards are the Dromkeen Medal for services to Australian children's literature and in 2012 she was named inaugural Australian Children's Laureate along with Boori Monty Prior. She has also been an ambassador for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.

'Are we there yet? A journey around Australia' - a novel by Alison Lester.

'Are we there yet? A journey around Australia' - a novel by Alison Lester.

Axiomatic is Tumarkin's fourth book and considers, through reportage, narrative and meditation, the past and its relationship to the present. When Jeff Sparrow reviewed the book in The Age he said Tumarkin demonstrated again and again "what literary prose can do".

The Melbourne Prize operates on a three-year cycle honouring sculpture, music and writing. Other writers in consideration for the $60,000 prize were Tony Birch, Gideon Haigh, Alexis Wright and Christos Tsiolkas, who won the inaugural best writing award in 2006. Previous winners have included Helen Garner and Gerald Murnane.

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