This year is the first time the biennial awards have been presented since undergoing changes that saw them uncoupled from Adelaide Writers’ Week and renamed, after previously being called the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. The 2024 iteration attracted a record 827 entries from across Australia, with 46 writers shortlisted in six national categories (including the Premier’s Award) and five South Australian categories.
Arts Minister Andrea Michaels presented Shannon Burns with the Premier’s Award for the best overall published work at a ceremony last night in the Mortlock Chamber of the State Library of South Australia, which administers the awards.
Burns, an Adelaide-based writer, literary critic and academic, also won the national Non-Fiction Award ($15,000) for Childhood. The memoir recounts his early years bouncing between dysfunctional homes with parents who couldn’t care for him, before leaving school at 16 to take a job at a recycling centre, and finding solace – then ultimately a path to a different life – in reading and literature.
Childhood, by Shannon Burns.
“The book is startlingly intelligent, written with sophisticated prose, and deeply evokes its place and time,” the Premier’s Award judges (Jessica Alice, Verity Laughton and Sean Williams) said in a statement.
“Childhood stood out as the overall winner against a highly competitive group of winners of their forms and genres as a masterful literary accomplishment that utterly succeeded in concept and execution.”
It is the latest in a string of accolades for Burns’ literary debut, which has previously been shortlisted in awards including the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.
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InReview books columnist Jo Case recently named Childhood as one of the six best South Australian books of the 21st century, describing it as “a savage, tender meditation on his precarious youth in Adelaide’s disadvantaged suburbs” and a masterclass in memoir. “He [Burns] viscerally inhabits the damaged child he was, while meticulously investigating his life and circumstances – and the complexities of class – as the sophisticated writer he is.”
Shannon Burns accepting his award. Photo: James Field Photography
The literary awards have been presented since 1986, with previous winners including Frank Moorhouse, Helen Garner, Peter Carey, Dorothy Porter and Richard Flanagan. The State Library took over administration of the awards from Arts SA in 2020, with director Geoff Strempel telling InReview last year that it believed presenting them as a stand-alone event – rather than announcing the winners during Adelaide Writers’ Week – would increase recognition for the winners.
In total this year, $167,500 was awarded across all categories of the South Australian Literary Awards.
Other national award winners included artist and writer SJ Norman, who won the national Fiction Award for Permafrost, a collection of short stories that explore “the shifting spaces of desire, loss and longing”, and Tristan Bancks, who scooped the Children’s Literature Award for suspense thriller Scar Town – described by the judges as “a cracking read”.
In the South Australian categories, Melissa-Kelly Franklin won the Jill Blewett Playwright’s Award for Paradise Lost, a play about a young Australian doctor who connects with an Iranian poet in an offshore detention centre. Lyn Dickens won the Arts South Australia Wakefield Press Unpublished Manuscript Award for Salt Upon the Water, Gavin Yuan Gao won the John Bray Poetry Award for At the Altar of Touch, and the SA fellowships were awarded to Alexis West, Molly Murn and James A Cooper.
South Australian Literary Awards winners:
National Awards
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Premier’s Award ($25,000)
Winner: Childhood by Shannon Burns (Text Publishing)
Fiction Award ($15,000)
Winner: Permafrost by SJ Norman (University of Queensland Press)
Non-Fiction Award ($15,000)
Winner: Childhood by Shannon Burns (Text Publishing)
Young Adult Fiction Award ($15,000)
Winner: Completely Normal (and Other Lies) by Biffy James (Hardie Grant Publishing)
Children’s Literature Award ($15,000)
Winner: Scar Town by Tristan Bancks (Penguin Random House Australia)
John Bray Poetry Award ($15,000)
Winner: At the Altar of Touch by Gavin Yuan Gao (University of Queensland Press)
South Australian Awards and Fellowships
Jill Blewett Playwright’s Award ($12,500)
Winner: Paradise Lost by Melissa-Kelly Franklin
Arts South Australia Wakefield Press Unpublished Manuscript Award ($10,000)
Winner: Salt Upon the Water by Lyn Dickens
Highly commended: Dear Vincent by Heather Taylor Johnson
Tangkanungku Pintyanthi Fellowship ($15,000)
Winner: Monologues, Poems and Ramblings for You, Them, Us… and Me… by Alexis West
Barbara Hanrahan Fellowship ($15,000)
Winner: Radiance: A State of Being by Molly Murn
Highly commended: A Life Half Lived by Karen Wyld
Max Fatchen Fellowship ($15,000)
Winner: The Children of Elphinstone by James A Cooper
The full list of winners and finalists across all categories is on the South Australian Literary Awards website.