Christos Tsiolkas wins the 60000 Melbourne Prize

Christos Tsiolkas has form with the Melbourne Prize.

It’s almost exactly 15 years ago that he won the inaugural $30,000 prize for best writing by a writer under the age of 40 for his fourth novel, Dead Europe.

The award was designed to give his blossoming career a boost, and it clearly worked: with several more books under his belt, he has now been named as the winner of the prize’s major award, worth $60,000.

Christos Tsiolkas accepts his prize in the online awards ceremony.Credit:

The Melbourne Prize is modelled on the Nobel Prize for literature and given for a writer’s body of work. Tsiolkas followed Dead Europe, which also won the Age fiction book of the year award, with The Slap, one of the defining novels about contemporary Australia, and then Barracuda, Damascus, and a short-story collection, Merciless Gods. He has also written plays and screenplays. The other writers shortlisted for the prize were poets PiO and Jodie Albiston, and children’s writer, poet and memoirist Maxine Beneba Clarke.

Christos Tsiolkas with his prize in 2006.Credit:Paul Rovere

Tsiolkas said he thought he would be “Zen” about the evening and paid tribute to his parents, saying his writing had been built on their sacrifices and struggles after they migrated from Greece to Melbourne.

Fifteen years on from that earlier Melbourne Prize, he told The Age he hoped that he was less arrogant than in 30s. “I think you learn as you age - if you don’t you’ve really screwed up your time on this planet. But I always say writing is an apprenticeship that never ends.”

In 2006 he said he was beginning to understand the importance of craft in writing: “What’s changed since is that those lessons have only strengthened in terms of how important the work as in labour is - sitting down at the desk and doing the writing, reading and thinking.”

The award would buy him time to investigate an idea that had come out of the writing of Damascus, his novel about early Christianity, to look at the place of Orthodoxy between west and east and muse on the space between Islam and Christianity. “That’s the travel I want to do and this gives me time.”

Tsiolkas’ seventh novel, 7½, was published last week. Our review said he hadn’t “simply written a lyrical book in defiance of what he deems our unlyrical moment â€" in 7½ he’s taken the tired ploy of the self-referential text and reinvigorated it, moving beyond mere authorial reflection to touch upon something, ironically enough, universal”.

The $15,000 Writers Prize for an essay of “outstanding originality, literary merit and creative freshness” went to Eloise Grills, from a shortlist that included Vivian Blaxell, David Sornig and Ouyang Yu.

Evelyn Araluen says her new work is very much a hybrid form.Credit:Simon Schluter

This year, the organisers of the triennial prize, which in other years acknowledges music and sculpture, have introduced a new category, the $20,000 professional development award for a published author. The winner is Evelyn Araluen, poet, editor and academic, who said the money would allow her to consider creative writing as part of her career “as opposed to a thing I did alongside my other jobs”.

She has had what she calls an astonishing year. Her first collection of poems, Dropbear, was published in March, critically acclaimed, and has been reprinted five times. When he reviewed it in The Age, John Kinsella described it as poetry that “can teach us all if we are willing to learn how to read, to listen, to comprehend”.

The spirit of the Melbourne award, Araluen said, was to encourage a writer to keep working, recognising there could be a tricky gap to negotiate between one project and another. It was perfect in her case as she had reached a point when her work was proving difficult because she had to balance it with three part-time jobs, including one as co-editor of Overland magazine.

She described her current writing as a “a kind of joint fiction and critical project. The main thing is a novel called Carrion, a novel that stages and explores the history of this intersection of sexism and racism in Australian literature and what that has been historically and what the legacies are today, not just for me as an Aboriginal woman but how it has affected all women in the process”.

It includes the novel but also critical essays and a series of interviews with women “whether they be scholars, poets, novelists or academics working on the lives of women”. She said its form was very hybrid.

melbourneprize.org

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