Bibliofemme News
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14/03/2006
Greville, McWatt winners of 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Prize
Australian Kate Grenville and Mark McWatt of Guyana are the winners of the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Prizes for Best Book and Best First Book.
The overall Best Book Award, worth £10,000, went to Grenville's historical novel The Secret River, about the competing claims of settlers and aborigines in 19th Century Australia.
The Overall Best First Book Award of £3,000 was awarded to by Mark McWatt of Guyana.
McWatt, the £3,000 Best First Book winner, took the prize for his series of short stories, Suspended Sentences: Fictions of Atonement.
The annual Commonwealth Writers' Prize aims to reward the best in Commonwealth fiction written in English by both established and new writers.
Chair of the judges, Professor Chris Wallace-Crabbe commented on the diversity of the entries: "Among the eight regional prize winners there was an exciting range of formal experiment, and a great play of interesting voices. The eight winning books, which included linked short stories as well as novels, explored country, belief, crisis and identity."
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