Carmel Bird won the A$20,000 (about US$15,230) Patrick White Literary Award, which recognizes authors who "have made a significant but inadequately recognized contribution to Australian literature," Books+Publishing reported. White established the prize in 1974 using proceeds from his 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Judging panel chair Bernadette Brennan said Bird had "contributed widely and uniquely to Australian literature since her first book in 1976.... Carmel has since gone on to publish 30 more books--her imagination is extraordinarily wide-ranging and her fiction consequently creates a world that criss-crosses textual, intellectual and geographical boundaries."
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Bodo Kirchhoff has won the 2016 German Book Prize for his novel Encounter (Widerfahrnis), Publishing Perspectives reported. The €25,000 (about $27,520) prize is awarded annually on the eve of the Frankfurt Book Fair by the Börsenverein (the German book trade association) to honor "German-language literature and bring international attention to authors writing in German." Encounter was published by Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt in September.
The jury wrote that the book is about "the unprecedented journey of two people without a destination and with nothing but a direction--the South. They are driven by the age-old longing for love, for red wine, Italy, an adventure later in life. When they pick up a young vagabond along the way, they find themselves once again confronting the elementary themes of their past: loss, parenthood, radical new beginnings."