Congratulations to Kim Scott who took home the Fiction prize at the Queensland Literary Awards last night with the much-lauded Taboo! Kim received the University of Queensland Fiction Book Award which is given to an outstanding work of fiction by an Australian writer.
The winner of The University of Queensland Fiction Book Award is Kim Scott for his novel Taboo (@panmacmillan). The judges described Taboo as “A confronting but ultimately hopeful book that probes Australia’s heart of darkness in poetic and masterly prose” #QLDLitAwards @UQ_News
— Qld Literary Awards (@QldLitAwards) October 23, 2018
Judges’ comments:
A confronting but ultimately hopeful book that probes Australia’s heart of darkness in poetic and masterly prose. Scott just gets better and better in a novel that is brutal but also idealistic. He should be regarded as an important voice in world literature.
This novel is an absolute must-read.
About the book:
From Kim Scott, two-times winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, comes a work charged with ambition and poetry, in equal parts brutal, mysterious and idealistic, about a young woman cast into a drama that has been playing for over two hundred years …
Taboo takes place in the present day, in the rural South-West of Western Australia, and tells the story of a group of Noongar people who revisit, for the first time in many decades, a taboo place: the site of a massacre that followed the assassination, by these Noongar’s descendants, of a white man who had stolen a black woman. They come at the invitation of Dan Horton, the elderly owner of the farm on which the massacres unfolded. He hopes that by hosting the group he will satisfy his wife’s dying wishes and cleanse some moral stain from the ground on which he and his family have lived for generations.
But the sins of the past will not be so easily expunged.
We walk with the ragtag group through this taboo country and note in them glimmers of re-connection with language, lore, country. We learn alongside them how countless generations of Noongar may have lived in ideal rapport with the land. This is a novel of survival and renewal, as much as destruction; and, ultimately, of hope as much as despair.
Get your copy:
[supapress id=”2071″ title=”Taboo”]