There were nine awards including the big one. The other winners were:drama, The Return,John Harvey;Indigenous writing,The Upwelling,Lystra Rose;non-fiction, Root&Branch:Essays on Inheritance,Eda Gunaydin;poetry,At the Altar of Touch,Gavin Yuan Gao;young-adult writing,We Who Hunt the Hollow,Kate Murray;unpublished manuscript,One Divine Night,Mick Cummins;and people’s choice,Astronomy:Sky Country,Karlie Noon and Krystal De Napoli. Winners received $25,000;the winner of the unpublished manuscript award gets $15,000,and the people’s choice award,$2000. Five of the winners were first books.
Cold Enough for Snow is fewer than 100 pages and tells the story of a woman visiting Japan with her mother,the first time they have travelled together as adults. They do all the usual things that tourists do - galleries,museums,restaurants,shops - and travel around the country.
The judges described it as gently posing the question:how well can we know the ones we love? “Masterfully slipping between memory and the present,the novel carries a subtle eloquence,replete with astute observations.”
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Au writes in a precise,controlled style that can seem at odds with the less certain nature of some of the stories the mother tells. Au likes the tension that a slightly unreliable narrator using a clear-headed voice brings.
“I really respect prose that is very clear and direct. Rachel Cusk,for example,writes like this. There’s something in me that likes prose that you can’t really hide behind.”
Au’s first novel,Cargo,was published almost 12 years ago,since when,she admits,she had been pondering what would eventually becomeCold Enough for Snow. She was working on a book of short stories,but found only one that was really working.