Andrew McGahan award received Aurealis Award for best science fiction novel
Literary career
Novels
In 1991 McGahan won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for unpublished novels with Praise – a semi-autobiographical account of a doomed, drug and alcohol-fuelled relationship. It became an Australian bestseller, and is often credited with launching the short-lived Grunge Lit or Dirty realism movement – terminology that McGahan himself (along with most of the writers to whom it was applied) rejected. In 1995 McGahan followed up with 1988, a prequel to Praise, partially based on time the author spent working at a lighthouse in the Northern Territory during Australia's bicentennial year.
In 2000, having by his own admission struggled to come up with a third novel, McGahan produced his first work of non-autobiographical fiction: the crime novel Last Drinks, a reflection upon the endemic political corruption in Queensland in the 1980s, and the aftermath of the famous Fitzgerald Inquiry. It won a Ned Kelly Award for crime writing. In 2004 McGahan published one of his most successful and respected novels – The White Earth, an epic and gothic tale set in a fictionalised version of the wheat district in which he had grown up. It became another bestseller, and won a raft of literary awards, in particular the Miles Franklin Award. In 2006 came Underground, an absurdist satire attacking the more extreme manifestations of the War on Terror in Australia. It received mixed reviews and caused conservative commentator Andrew Bolt to declare McGahan an "unhinged propagandist".In 2009 he wrote Wonders of a Godless World, a work entirely without dialogue or proper nouns and delving into such topics as geology, weather and immortality and madness. It won the 2009 Aurealis Award for Science Fiction. In 2011 McGahan published The Coming of the Whirlpool, Book 1 of Ship Kings, a fantasy seafaring series. This was followed by Book 2, The Voyage of the Unquiet Ice in 2012, and Book 3, The War of the Four Isles in 2014. The fourth and final volume in the series, The Ocean of the Dead, was released in 2016.
McGahan's final novel, The Rich Man's House was published posthumously in September 2019. John Birmingham praised the book, saying 'a uniquely powerful voice roars out one last time, and then stillness and silence forever. This is Andrew's masterwork. His final gift to us.'Awards
Praise – Australian/Vogel Award; Commonwealth Writers Prize South East Asia and South Pacific Region, First Novel.
Praise Screenplay – AFI for Best Adapted Screenplay; Film Critics Circle of Australia Award for Best Adapted Screenplay; Queensland Premier's Award, Best Drama Script.
Last Drinks – Ned Kelly Award for Crime Writing, Best First Novel.
The White Earth – Miles Franklin Award, Commonwealth Writers Prize South east Asia and South pacific Region, Age Book of the Year, Courier Mail Book of the Year.
Wonders of a Godless World – Aurealis Award, Best Science Fiction Novel.
The Coming of the Whirlpool – Shortlisted for the 2012 Indie Awards (Children's category), CBCA Book of the Year and a finalist in the 2011 Aurealis Awards for Children's Fiction
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