Fremantle author Joan London has been awarded the 2015 Patrick White literary award for her ongoing contribution to Australian literature.
Established by the late Australian author Patrick White, who set up a trust with the winnings of his 1973 Nobel prize for literature, this annual honour is bestowed on a writer of novels, short stories, poetry or plays who may not have received due recognition for his or her work.
London, the author of three novels and two short story collections, said she was deeply honoured and moved to accept “a writer’s prize to a fellow writer”.
“It’s an award that has always intrigued me, embodying, it seems to me, the deepest values of Patrick White himself, who knew all about the highs and lows of the writing life, the anxiety and doubts that only solid, daily hours of application can help overcome,” she said.
“He knew also of the advantage of a secure living that enables writers to experiment, take risks, and give the necessary time and care to their work.”
It is third time lucky this year for London, whose latest novel, The Golden Age, was shortlisted for both the Stella and Miles Franklin prizes. She was widely seen as favourite for the latter, which eventually went to Sofie Laguna for The Eye of the Sheep.
The Golden Age is the story of two young polio patients in Perth – Australian Elsa, and Frank, the child of Hungarian Jewish refugees – who fall in love.
London was inspired by a pub of the same name in inner-city Perth that was converted into a polio convalescent home for children after the war, and researched its story in the JS Battye Library of West Australian History.
“I wanted to write about the 1950s, the time of my childhood, when the schools were overflowing with baby-boomer kids,” London wrote in an article for Guardian Australia.
“They will belong to an era of great change in Australia, a time of reclaiming and forging our own identity, of the influence of waves of immigration from Europe and Asia, of breaking away from the English colonial model, and from the moral attitudes of preceding generations.”
Although London studied at the University of Western Australia and has lived in Fremantle for almost four decades, her writing is preoccupied with travel.
“Her quiet, poetic prose opens up worlds, both real and imagined, of travel, desire, loss and love,” said Bernadette Brennan, a judge for the Patrick White literary award. “London’s nomadic characters travel through space and time affirming through their relationships and varied histories a global humanity.”
