Melbourne Moomba Festival Award
or Volkswagen Award
Subcategory of Awards Australian Awards
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History

Known as the Volkswagen Award this prize was a part of the Melbourne Moomba Festival. It held a prize of £200. 

Subcategories

Latest Winners / Recipients (also see subcategories)v468

Year: 1965

winner y separately published work icon The Slow Natives Thea Astley , Sydney : Angus and Robertson , 1965 Z269700 1965 single work novel

'A suburban couple have drifted into the shallows of middle-aged boredom. Their fourteen-year-old son is a stranger, meeting their attempts at love with hostile indifference. Surly at home, he is a dab hand at shoplifting and looks like sliding into delinquency.

'Moving from Brisbane to a country convent and the Gold Coast, the novel is a brilliant, witty portrait of the surface of ordinary life. The Leverson family and their connections appear normal but desire and inner emotion are never quite so simple.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (House of Books ed.)

Year: 1964

winner y separately published work icon Distant Land Judah Waten , Melbourne : Cheshire , 1964 Z52668 1964 single work novel

This novel of present day migrant life centres on Joshua Kuperschmidt who arrives with his wife Shoshanah, from Poland, in 1925. He has given up his family and his traditional European ties to escape war and persecution, in the hope of a better life.

It is the moving story of a Jewish couple who have adapted themselves to a strange new environment in a distant land - a country where even the small Jewish community differs markedly from that they have known. Material success is the reward for Shoshanah's unrelenting ambition; but Joshua is never sure whether his own ambitions in this new society are ever fulfilled. (Publisher's blurb).

Works About this Award

Moomba Book Prize to Johnston Stuart Sayers , 1970 single work column
— Appears in: The Age , 28 February 1970; (p. 2)
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