The 16th Annual Warrick's Book of the Year Awards

 

Here it is, the list you've been waiting for! My BEST BOOKS list for 2001.  Don't fill that Christmas stocking yet! It's always tough to decide but all the books listed here are well more than worthwhile. Happy Christmas to everyone and happy holiday reading one and all.

Poetry Brook Emery: 'and dug my fingers in the sand' (Five Islands, 2000)   So much to like about this book, from the surfie-ish cover to the poems about coasts and 'imagined seas'. The title poem is partly about body-surfing and there's poems about swimming, landscapes, caravan parks and the Beat Generation.  Just when we were beginning to doubt; an interesting, fresh, accessible collection of poetry from a new poet.	Fiction Frederic Manning 'The Middle Parts of Fortune' (Text 2000)   A book I'd never seen before about World War I; an English/Australian author, not about the Gallipoli  campaign but the tedious horror of the Somme. Apparently this book was well known in its time, published anonymously in London in 1929 it ws not published in Australia until 1977. It stands alongside 'All Quiet on the Western Front' as a great book about World War I and alongside Johnston's  'My Brother Jack', Koch's 'The Year of Living Dangerously' and McDonald's '1915' as a great Australian novel about the experience of war.	Non-Fiction 'In Ruins' by Christopher Woodward (Chatto & Windus 2001)   An English writer's exploration into the history and attraction of ruins. Why do they fascinate us? When did all that start. The description of the Roman statues being fed into lime kilns, of the creation of false ruins and the battle between the archaeologists and the poets over ruins is fascinating stuff! As is the 'Planet of the Apes' like visions of future ruins in American painting. Not unduly scholarly, personal, quirky, you feel like re-reading it when you finish!**

**Read a review here http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,217-2001323614,00.html

 

or..READ THE FIRST CHAPTER online: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2001322856,00.html

 

Highly Commended

 

IN POETRY: Diane Fahey's fables in her new poetry collection 'The Ninth Swan' (Five Islands)

 

IN FICTION: Alice Munro's short story collection, 'Dance of the Happy Shades', W.G. Sebald's continually eccentric 'Vertigo' and William Maxwell's moving short novel 'They Came Like Swallows'

 

IN NON-FICTION: Once again a highly contested section. David Remnick won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Ali called 'King of the World', I loved Kim Mahoof's 'Craft for a Dry Lake' as she followed her father's footsteps into the deep north of Australia, 'Perfect Day' celebrated forty years of SURFER magazine with a compilation of the best articles over the years, Barry Lopez could have won it with 'Arctic Dreams' and maybe Ken Inglis should have won it with 'Sacred Places', a fascinating study of war memorials in Australia and in most years it would have!