University of Queensland Press authors celebrate success
University of Queensland Press will release a 10th anniversary edition of award-winning author Tara June Winch’s debut novel Swallow the Air on January 4.
Winch, an Australian based in France, has sold 20,000 copies of Swallow the Air, which has been used in the High School Certificate English syllabus since 2009.
Swallow the Air is described as an unforgettable story of living in a torn world and finding the thread to help sew it back together.
The book follows May Gibson, a young girl living in coastal New South Wales. When May’s mother dies suddenly, she and her brother Billy are taken in by Aunty.
Loss leaves May and Billy searching for their place in a world that doesn’t seem to want them. Billy takes his own destructive path while May sets out to find her father and her Aboriginal identity.
Swallow the Air has won many literary awards, including the David Unaipon Award and a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award.
Winch won International Rolex Mentor and Protégé Award that saw her work under the guidance of Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka.
She has written essays, short fiction and memoirs for Vogue, Vice, McSweeneys, and various Australian publications and anthologies.
UQP will release Tara’s new collection of short fiction in 2016.
University of Queensland Press author Claire Zorn will take home $80,000 in prize money after her latest novel won the prestigious Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction.
Zorn’s The Protected has been described as an honest and searing portrayal of loss and grief that conveys the repercussions of bullying to the modern-day teenager.
It also won this year’s Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year for Older Readers and won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction.
She said she was honoured to win the award.
“It's quite overwhelming. In a practical sense it will have a huge impact on my ability to devote more time to writing,” she said.
Zorn’s first young adult novel The Sky So Heavy received a 2014 CBCA Honour Book award for Older Readers.
Media: University of Queensland Press, Rachel Crawford, rachelc@uqp.uq.edu.au, 07 3346 7932.
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