Three finalists named in the shortlist of the 2009 Walkley Non-Fiction Book Award.
Graham Freudenberg’s study of Winston Churchill’s relationship with Australia, Sally Neighbour’s portrait of a matriarch among terrorists and Gerard Ryle’s investigation of the Firepower scandal are the shortlisted finalists for the prestigious Walkley Non-fiction Book Award.
The shortlist was announced at an event in Sydney on Monday November 9. The three finalists are:
Graham Freudenberg, Churchill and Australia (Pan Macmillan)
Over 65 years, from the eve of the Boer War to the eve of the Vietnam war, this history examines the fraught relationship between Winston Churchill and seven Australian prime ministers.
Sally Neighbour, The Mother of Mohammed (Melbourne University Press)
From Mudgee girl, to hippy backpacker, to Muslim convert and perceived threat to Australia’s national security, the extraordinary story of Rabiah Hutchinson.
Gerard Ryle, Firepower (Allen & Unwin)
A compelling account of perhaps the greatest fraud in Australian history: the magical pill to cut fuel consumption and emissions promised by the Firepower company took in politicians, doctors, business leaders and sporting stars.
Read more about the finalists here.
Guest speaker at the event Matthew Ricketson, a professor of journalism at the University of Canberra and one of the award judges, spoke about book-length journalism as a vibrant part of Australia's media industry. He said the amount of book-length journalism published appears to be growing although it's difficult to get precise data.
"Newsrooms may be liberally sprinkled with practitioners extending their daily reporting to book-length, but most do this at nights and on weekends or take leaves of absence," said Ricketson, who is researching a PhD on book length journalism.
"Such books have not been seen as part of the industry. Once journalists enter the book publishing industry, though, their work is subsumed into non-fiction, a carpetbag of a category that includes everything from history to gardening to sociology to cooking, and that far from exhausts its range.
"A publisher’s catalogue might list Chris Masters’ Jonestown as a biography on radio’s Alan Jones and a bookseller may shelve it with other biographies. But most readers would, I think, recognise it as a work of book-length journalism. The book grew out of a Four Corners program; Masters used journalistic methods of interviewing and first-hand observation to investigate Alan Jones’s life and work, and Jonestown contained revelations and insights that made an important contribution to public debate about a newsworthy person."
Read more of Ricketson's findings in the December issue of The Walkley Magazine, out November 26.
