NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2010

The judges of the book awards will choose from among the winners of the awards a 'New South Wales Book of the Year', with an additional payment of $10,000 prize money to the writer of the work so designated.

Previous winners of the Book of the Year include Robert Drewe, Anna Haebich, Samuel Wagan Watson, Shaun Tan and Michelle de Kretser.

The Winner of the 2009 Book of the Year is Nam Le - The Boat, Penguin Group (Australia)

Nam Le was born in Vietnam and grew up in Melbourne. He is currently the fiction editor at Harvard Review. His work has been published in Overland, Zoetrope, A Public Space, Conjunctions and One Story, and anthologised in The Best Australian Stories 2007, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007, Best New American Voices 2009, and The Pushcart Prize 2008.

Judges' Comments:
At first glance, the only thing linking the stories in Nam Le's first collection is their determined difference from one another. They refuse fictional uniformity, leaping between time, place and milieu, miraculously discovering a fresh voice and style in each instance to sharpen the contrasts between them.

But there are more connections here than are first apparent. The restless subject-matter reflects a larger agitation. Nam Le is, after all, a Vietnamese-born writer; his family came to Australia by boat when he was one. And although he was raised and educated in this country Le is currently based in America, where he journeyed to hone his skills at the famed Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Nam Le's life, then, is not unlike like his writing - the kind described by critics and academics as transnational. Such literature views traditional borders, whether physical, linguistic or racial, as increasingly arbitrary and superficial constructs. Just as money travels around the global economy with no thought of passports or visa regulations, transnational literature goes wherever it wants. So it is that, in The Boat's seven stories, we visit Tehran and the slums of Columbia; we inhabit the minds of aging American painters and Japanese schoolgirls; we hear the sounds of ocker slang and formal Vietnamese address. Each created world is real, believable; each in turn makes the others seem strange and unfamiliar, almost dream-like.

The danger of this approach is that these constant shifts become a form of cultural tourism - making a fetish of difference without lingering to understand a particular people or place on its own terms. But Nam Le's writing does not strike us in this way. His polyglot reach is always balanced by attentiveness to the intimate, the small-scale. He delights in the small-brushwork strokes that together form a picture of each new world and set it in motion in the reader's mind.

What the stories of The Boat teach us is not relativism, the idea that our world is just the same place with different clothes and accents. Rather, they acknowledge that nations and cultures differ, often in profound ways. Sometimes it is impossible to reconcile the demands of one with the needs of another.

But whether Le writes of the Vietnamese world of his parents or the schoolyard universe of his Australian childhood, the quality of the attention paid is, in itself, a gesture of respect. What is common to all cultures - the longing for dignity and acceptance, the love of family, the desire for a better life - is contained in every one of these pages. And that is what makes The Boat such a special arrival on our shores: its ability to assemble the universal from local human detail.