Former inmate wins $18,000 poetry prize

Robert Adamson

BY GIA METHERELL

Poetry was Robert Adamson’s passport out of jail, and now it has won him the 2011 Patrick White Award.The $18,000 prize is a significant literary award, established by Patrick White with the proceeds of his 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature, for writers who may not have received due recognition for their contribution to Australian literature.The judging panel described Adamson, 68, as ”one of Australia’s truly great poets of place”.”His place is the Hawkesbury River, north of Sydney, where his grandfather was a fisherman and where he has spent much of his adult life.

”The Hawkesbury operates as both a real and an imaginative homeland in his poetry.”

Adamson said he was ”thrilled to be part of White’s marvellous legacy in the company of previous winners like Christina Stead, Gwen Harwood and Randolph Stow”.

Besides 21 collections of poetry, including the prize-winning The Golden Bird and The Goldfinches of Baghdad, he has written an acclaimed memoir, Inside Out, which tells of his troubled childhood and adolescence, leading to his imprisonment in Long Bay jail.

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REDgroup responsible for its own demise

HENRY ROSENBLOOM

23 Feb, 2011 04:00 AM

Last week’s announcement that the owners of the aptly re-branded REDgroup Retail the bookselling chains of Borders/Angus & Roberston/Whitcoulls had placed the group in administration provoked a flurry of bullshit, special pleading, and knee-jerk nonsense.Bob Carr, a board member of Dymocks, jumped on to his failed hobby-horse called parallel importation, and whipped it into a lather. He claimed that the chain was a victim of the Labor Government’s refusal to heed the advice of the Productivity Commission to allow the importation of cheap foreign books.

Carr was wrong during the debate about territorial copyright, and he’s wrong now.                                                                                  …read more

Online retailer first Oz bookseller to sign up with Google

Online bookstore Booktopia is the first Australian bookseller to enter into a partnership with Google to sell ebooks, reports The Canberra Times.

According to the report, Australian consumers will be able to purchase ebooks through the Booktopia website, as well as the websites of other local booksellers, when Google launches its ebook operation in the Australian market, which is expected to occur within the first half of this year….read more