The Boat by Nam Le wins the 2009 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction

‘… it needs to be said, and said again and again: that books matter, that they are the truest means of telling and showing us to ourselves …’

Quoted from Nam Le’s acceptance speech for the just awarded 2009 Prime Minister’s Literary Award on the Penguin website. It’s a short, passionate speech about putting the reader to work and not allowing other media, ‘the loose, baggy monsters of film, TV, and internet’, to replace what is vital to our sense of shared humanity.

What a wonderful acknowledgement for Nam Le that his book of short and long stories has been so well received, first by the reading public and now the judges of this prestigious prize. Below are their comments about the book:

Nam Le’s collection of fiction, The Boat, which comprises short and long stories, artfully arrayed, is one of the most impressive debuts of recent years. The range of subjects and settings astonishes, as does the assurance and control with which the author immerses us in the stories that he makes from them. While the span of the fiction is cosmopolitan, each story is intensely attuned to the local circumstances that deform and enable the lives of these varied characters, animated as they are by love and despair. As shown especially in the final and title story, Nam Le combines almost reckless artistic boldness with highly disciplined craft.

By the way, the shortlist included Geraldine Brooks for People of the Book, Wanting by Richard Flanagan and Everything I Knew by Peter Goldsworth.

If you want to read more about it all go to the 2009 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards

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