Jock Serong Jock Serong i(A140661 works by)
Gender: Male
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BiographyHistory

Originally a lawyer, Jock Serong then worked as a features writer, writing feature articles for Surfing World, Australian Surf Business, and Slow magazines. He co-edited the natural history text The Nature of Warrnambool, and edited Great Ocean Quarterly.

His short fiction appeared in the anthologies Writings of Shipwreck Coast and Borderlands. In 2014, he published his first novel, Quota, which won the 2015 Ned Kelly Award for best first novel. He has subsequently published The Rules of Backyard Cricket and On the Java Ridge.

He has lived in Port Fairy on the far southwest coast of Victoria.

Most Referenced Works

Personal Awards

2020 recipient Creative Victoria Sustaining Creative Workers Fund ($5000): ‘To support the release of the author’s new novel, The Burning Island, with an online marketing and distribution strategy.’
2020 recipient Australia Council Grants, Awards and Fellowships 2020 Resilience Fund: Survive     $2,000 
2019 recipient Australia Council Literature Board Grants Grants for Developing Writers

Career development grant valued at $25,000

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon The Settlement Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2022 24685420 2022 single work novel historical fiction

'A career-defining masterpiece by internationally award-winning Australian storyteller Jock Serong

'On the windswept point of an island at the edge of van Diemen's Land, the Commandant huddles with a small force of white men and women.

'He has gathered together, under varying degrees of coercion and duress, the last of the Tasmanians, or so he believes. His purpose is to save them-from a number of things, but most pressingly from the murderous intent of the pastoral settlers on their country.

'The orphans Whelk and Pipi, fighting for their survival against the malevolent old man they know as the Catechist, watch as almost everything about this situation proves resistant to the Commandant's will. The wind, the spread of disease, the strange black dog that floats in on the prow of a wrecked ship...

But above all the Chief, the leader of the exiles, before whom the Commandant performs a perverse, intimate dance of violence and betrayal.

'In The Settlement, Jock Serong reimagines in urgent, compelling prose the ill-fated exploits of George Augustus Robinson at the settlement of Wyballena-a venture whose blinkered, self-interested cruelty might stand for the colonial enterprise itself.'  (Publication summary)

2023 shortlisted Voss Literary Prize
2023 shortlisted HNSA Historical Novel Prize Adult
2023 longlisted Colin Roderick Award
2023 longlisted ASAL Awards ALS Gold Medal
2023 longlisted The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
y separately published work icon The Burning Island Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2020 18935902 2020 single work novel historical fiction

'Eliza Grayling, born in Sydney when the colony itself was still an infant, has lived there all her thirty-two years. Too tall, too stern—too old, now—for marriage, she lives by herself, looking in on her reclusive father in case he has injured himself while drunk. There is a shadow in his past, she knows. Something obsessive. Something to do with a man who bested him thirty-three years ago.

'Then Srinivas, another figure from that dark past, offers Joshua Grayling the chance for a reckoning with his nemesis. Eliza is horrified. The plan entails a sea voyage far to the south and an uncertain, possibly violent, outcome. Insanity for a helpless drunkard who also happens to be blind.

'Unable to dissuade her father from his mad quest, Eliza begins to understand she may be forced to go with him. Then she sees the ship they will be sailing on. And in that instant, the voyage of the Moonbird becomes Eliza's mission too.' (Publication summary)

2022 shortlisted Dick and Joan Green Family Award for Tasmanian History
2021 winner HNSA Historical Novel Prize Adult
2020 shortlisted Staunch Book Prize
y separately published work icon Preservation Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2018 13940401 2018 single work novel historical fiction

'1797. ON a beach not far from the isolated settlement of Sydney, a fishing boat picks up three shipwreck survivors, distressed and terribly injured. They have walked hundreds of miles across a landscape whose features— and inhabitants—they have no way of comprehending. They have lost fourteen companions along the way. Their accounts of the ordeal are evasive.

'It is Lieutenant Joshua Grayling’s task to investigate the story. Gradually he comes to realise that those fourteen deaths were contrived by one calculating mind. And as the full horror of the men’s journey emerges, he begins to wonder whether the ruthless killer now at large in the infant colony poses a danger to his own family.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

2019 longlisted Voss Literary Prize
2019 longlisted Ned Kelly Awards for Crime Writing Best Novel
2019 shortlisted Wilbur Smith Adventure Prize
Last amended 17 Jun 2020 14:12:34
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