Hurrah for Helen Garner!

Helen Garner, one of my favourite Australian writers, who writes across genres,  has just won the prestigious Windham-Campbell prize for non-fiction. When she received an email asking for her telephone number from someone at Yale University, she thought it was a case of spam.

This brings her great validation, as well as $US150, 000 in prize money.  Her novel  Monkey Grip,  written in 1977 was a unique  commentary on Australian youth culture at the time. Since then, she has written three important non-fiction books, one of them The First Stone (1995) , was part of the university curriculum when I studied Creative Writing at the University of Technology, Sydney in the nineties. It asked questions about sex and power inspired by a 1992 sexual harassment scandal at Ormond College, one of the residential colleges of the University of Melbourne. Her latest book, This House of Grief (2014)  was based on a harrowing court case that focused on a man who drowned his three young sons by driving his car into a dam.

The judges’ citation  stated: “Helen Garner brings acute observations and narrative skill to bear on the conflicts and tragedies of contemporary Australian life”.