Literature professor, novelist and breast cancer survivor Brenda Walker has won this year’s Kibble Literary Award for Women Writers for her novel Reading by Moonlight - a memoir of her illness. It is the second time she has received the accolade and comes a year after her mother, Shirley Walker, won the award for her own memoir The Ghost at the Wedding. Kristel Thornell, who’s historic fiction Night Street draws on the life of painter Clarice Beckett, won the Dobbie Literary Award for a first-published female writer.

Nita May Dobbie instigated the Kibble Literary Awards in memory of her aunt Nita Bernice Kibble, the first female librarian at NSW’s State Library. She hoped the awards, established in 1994, would recognise the country’s leading female writers and encourage them to advance literature for the community’s benefit. Since that time almost $400,000 has been awarded to authors such as Helen Garner, Geraldine Brooks, Drusilla Modjeska, and Jacqueline Kent.

Brenda Walker won the $30,000 2011 Kibble prize ahead of shortlisted authors Delia Falconer (for Sydney) and Annette Stewart (Barbara Hanrahan: A Biography). Lara Fergus (My Sister Chaos) and G.L. Osborne (Come Inside) were shortlisted for $5,000 Dobbie Award won by Kristel Thornell.

Reading by Moonlight

Reading by Moonlight traces Brenda Walker’s journey through her breast cancer treatment and recovery. She describes her five treatment stages – surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, reconstruction and survival – and discusses how different books and authors comforted and helped her deal with the events – Charles Dickens’ Bleak House during her surgery stage, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty during chemotherapy, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward during radiation. Other authors include Dante, Tolstoy, Nabokov and Beckett.

Chair of the judging panel Professor Robert Dixon described the book as ‘a reading diary that reaffirms literature’s power to sustain. Ms Walker’s memoir of surgery and her ultimate recovery is satisfyingly shaped by a pattern of allusions to other writers and to some of the great mythic events of world literature,.’

Walker is a Winthrop Professor in English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia. Born in Grafton, NSW, she completed her undergraduate studies at the University of New England and gained her doctorate at the Australian National University for her dissertation on the work of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Samuel Beckett. She has previously published four novels (of which Wing of the Night won the 2006 Kibble Award and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award the same year). As well as winning this year’s Kibble award, her memoir Reading by Moonlight won the 2010 Nettie Palmer Award in the Victorian Premier’s Awards (non-fiction).

Night Street

Kristel Thornell found creative inspiration in the early 1900s paintings of Melbourne landscape artist Clarice Beckett, which the novelist first saw at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 2007. In Night Street’s opening pages Thornell acknowledges that Beckett’s ‘art and life drew me into this dream’ and her novel draws on the artist’s name (the main character is Clarice) and her life experience (as a young painter in Melbourne’s bayside suburbs). But rather than providing an historical, biographical account, Thornell offers an alternate, imagined life of the artist.

As Professor Dixon explained: ‘Thornell’s atmospheric writing does a wonderful job of evoking the Melbourne of Beckett’s time, as well as the process of painting and Beckett’s unconventional life.’

As an unpublished manuscript, Night Street was the joint winner of the 2009 Australian/Vogel Literary Award. It is Sydney-born Thornell’s first published novel, having previously published reviews, poetry and fiction in literary journals such as Meanjin and Overland. After studying at the University of Sydney, she has spent most of the last decade in North America where she also completed her Masters degree in English. She is currently working on a doctorate in creative writing through the University of Western Sydney.

Photos:

(top) Brenda Walker (second from left) the 2011 Kibble Literary Award winner with her mother (and last year’s winner) Shirley Walker, Chair of the Kibble judging committee Prof. Robert Dixon (left) and Peter Scott (right) Perpetual Chairman.

(centre) The Kibble Award shortlisted works

[images courtesy of Perpetual]