Tuesday 12 December 2006

Kate Crawford has won the 2006 Manning Clark House award for her book Adult Themes: Rewriting the Rules of Adulthood.

She works in the Meda and Communications Department at the University of Sydney, which announced the win yesterday, when Crawford said:

"My goal was to research the cluster of social norms around adulthood, and analyse how the conventions of adult life are discussed in media debates about generational difference. To do so, I needed to research Australia's history of property ownership, working practices, family formation, political participation and cultural consumption."

The competition was pretty stiff, too:

The shortlist for 2006 included Neil Chenoweth for Packer's Lunch, Ken Inglis for Whose ABC? And Paul Hetherington (ed) Diaries of Donald Friend. Chris Masters received an Honourable Mention for Jonestown, as did Sir Zelman Cowan for A Public Life and Barry Jones for A Thinking Reed.

Crawford has done well. All these books are major releases that have of late been reviewed in major periodicals. Kerry Packer was (until he died this year) Australia's richest man, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation is the publicly-funded media provider, Donald Friend is a famous Australian artist who died in 1989, Jonestown (which deals with the No. 1-rated Sydney radio shock jock Alan Jones) has been in the papers almost every day since even before its publication, Sir Zelman Cowan is an ex-governor-general and Barry Jones was Australia's Minister for Science 1983-90.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

goodness! that spam is a work of art... almost deserving of status as a poem. The spam is getting worse, isn't it?