NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2010

Award sponsored wholly by the University of Technology, Sydney.

The UTS Glenda Adams Award ($5,000) is for a published book of fiction written by an author who has not previously published a book­length work of fiction.

Named in honour of the Glenda Adams, the late Australian novelist, short story writer and teacher of creative writing, the award seeks to recognise outstanding new literary talent. The winning author may produce an excellent piece of writing in a traditional fictional form or may challenge and expand the boundaries of the genre.

The winner of the UTS Glenda Adams Award is chosen from entries submitted for the Christina Stead Prize. There is no shortlist for this award.

Previous winners of the UTS Glenda Adams Award include Denise Young, Steven Lang, Tara June Winch and Rhyll McMaster.

The winner of the 2009 UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing is:

Nam Le - The Boat
Penguin Group (Australia)

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 the usual limits of time or place, leaping between country, milieu and era using narratorial ventriloquism to sharpen the contrasts between them.

But there are more connections here than are first apparent. The restlessness of subject-matter is itself an acknowledgement of an emerging 'transnational' literature: writing that views traditional national borders in the same way that capital does in the era of Globalisation.

This polyglot reach is balanced by attentiveness to the intimate, small-brushwork strokes of those worlds summoned into being. So it is that Le, whether writing of the experience of the Vietnamese world of his parents or the schoolyard one of his Australian childhood, whether inhabiting the voice of an elderly New York painter or a Japanese girl, finds the universal in the local human detail.