Prime Minister’s Literary Awards

A debut novel written by a former cleaner has won the inaugural Australian prime minister's literary award for fiction and beaten two literary heavyweights, Thomas Keneally and David Malouf, in the process. Steven Conte's The Zookeeper's War won the fiction category. Conte worked as a barman, taxi driver, cleaner and waiter while hitchhiking around Europe and writing the book. The novel is set in 1943 Berlin and details the lives of an Australian woman and her German husband, who is the director of the Berlin zoo.

The non-fiction award was claimed by Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers written by historian Philip Jones. Again, established two heavyweights of non-fiction, Clive James and Germaine Greer, lost out. The awards were created by Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd to celebrate Aussie writing. The PM himself selected the two winners.

Fiction shortlist:
• Burning In by Mireille Juchau
• El Dorado by Dorothy Porter
• Jamaica: A Novel by Malcolm Knox
• Sorry by Gail Jones
• The Complete Stories by David Malouf
• The Widow and Her Hero by Thomas Keneally
• The Zookeeper's War by Steven Conte

Non-fiction shortlist: 
• A History of Queensland by Raymond Evans
• Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time by Clive James
• My Life as a Traitor by Zarah Ghahramani with Robert Hillman
• Napoleon: The Path to Power, 1769-1799 by Philip Dwyer
• Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers by Philip Jones
• Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer
• Vietnam: The Australian War by Paul Ham