The TDK Australian Audio Book Awards (1991-1999)
National Library of Australia National Audio Book-of-the-Year Award (1988-1990)
Subcategory of Awards Australian Awards
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History

'The TDK Australian Audio Book Awards were established by the National Library of Australia in 1988 and sponsored by TDK from 1991. They were the leading audio book awards in Australia between 1989 and 1999, and were open to both commercial and non-commercial publishers. 

'The aims were: to improve the quality of Australian audio book production by recognising the achievements of the producers/publishers and narrators; to increase public awareness of books in this format; and to promote consumer access to a wide range of Australian audio books.' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TDK_Australian_Audio_Book_Awards)

Latest Winners / Recipients (also see subcategories)v371

Year: 1999

winner (Audiobooks for Young People) y separately published work icon Staying Alive in Year 5 John Marsden , Sydney : Piper Books , 1989 Z837344 1989 single work children's fiction children's

'Scott and his friends are simply staying alive in year 5 until their surprising new teacher, Mr Murlin, comes along.

'Boring textbooks go into the bin, eating chocolate in class becomes compulsory and suddenly it's OK to be weird.

'But Mr Murlin is not popular with everyone...'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

winner (Unabridged Non-Fiction) y separately published work icon Caddie: A Sydney Barmaid : An Autobiography Written by Herself Catherine Elliot-Mackay , Dymphna Cusack (editor), London : Constable , 1953 Z812153 1953 single work autobiography

Year: 1998

winner (Abridged Audio Book) y separately published work icon Picnic at Hanging Rock Joan Lindsay , Melbourne : Cheshire , 1967 Z305085 1967 single work novel historical fiction mystery (taught in 2 units)

'It was a cloudless summer day in the year 1900. Everyone at Appleyard College for Young Ladies agreed it was just right for a picnic at Hanging Rock. After lunch, a group of three girls climbed into the blaze of the afternoon sun, pressing on through the scrub into the shadows of the secluded volcanic outcropping. Farther, higher, until at last they disappeared. They never returned. ...'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Penguin Random House, 2014).

Separate from the award for abridged fiction (awarded to Arundhati Roy).
winner (Unabridged Non-Fiction) y separately published work icon Dreamtime Alice : A Memoir Mandy Sayer , Milsons Point : Random House Australia , 1998 Z186806 1998 single work autobiography This work, which was a finalist in the 1988 Vogel Award, recalls the author's itinerant early life as a tap dancer with her jazz drummer father on the streets of New York and New Orleans.
winner (Audio Book for Young People) y separately published work icon Blueback Tim Winton , Sydney : Pan , 1997 Z935140 1997 single work children's fiction children's 'Abel Jackson loves to dive. He's a natural in the water. He can't remember a time when he couldn't use a mask and snorkel to glide down into the clear deep. Life is tough out at Longboat Bay. Every day the boy helps his mother earn their living from the sea and the land. It's hard work but Abel has the bush and the sky and the bay to himself. Until the day he meets Blueback, the fish that changes his life. An ecological novel on a boy who protects a fish from property developers and rapacious fishermen. The boy befriends the fish, a blue grouper while diving for abalone, his family's trade. Blueback is about people learning from nature.' (Source: Trove)

Year: 1997

winner (Abridged Fiction) y separately published work icon Eating Out and Other Stories Natalie Scott , Sydney : Natalie Scott , 1995 Z1136063 1995 selected work short story
winner (Abridged Non-Fiction) y separately published work icon 50 Years of Silence Jan Ruff-O'Herne , Sydney : Editions Tom Thompson , 1994 Z857203 1994 single work autobiography

'The long idyllic summer of Jan Ruff-O'Herne's childhood in Dutch colonial Indonesia ended in 1942 with the Japanese invasion of Java. She was interned in Ambarawa Prison Camp, along with her mother and two younger sisters. In February 1944, when Jan was 21, her life was torn apart. Along with nine other young women, all of them virgins, she was plucked from the camp and her family, and enslaved into prostitution by the Japanese Imperial Army.' (Publisher)

winner (The Trish Trinick Prize for the Best Narrator) y separately published work icon The Fiftieth Gate : A Journey Through Memory Mark Raphael Baker , Sydney : HarperCollins Australia , 1997 Z1296530 1997 single work biography

'A love story and a detective story, a study of history and of memory, this spellbinding new work explores a son's confrontation with the terror of his parents' childhood. Moving from Poland and Germany to Jerusalem and Melbourne, Mark Raphael Baker travels across the silence of fifty years, through the gates of Auschwitz, and into a dark bunker where a little girl hides in fear. As he returns to scenes of his parents' captivity, he struggles to unveil the mystery of their survival. The Fiftieth Gate is a journey from despair and death towards hope and life; the story of a son who enters his parents' memories and, inside the darkness, finds light.' (Harper Collins)

Year: 1996

winner (Overall Winner and Unabridged Fiction) y separately published work icon The Riders Tim Winton , Chippendale : Pan Macmillan Australia , 1994 Z295967 1994 single work novel (taught in 3 units)

Fred Scully is in another country, a 'desert Irishman' far from home. After two long years of travelling through Europe, he decided to move his family from Australia to western Ireland. Scully arrived weeks ahead of his family to renovate the old farmhouse they'd bought in the shadow of a castle in County Offally, and which he's renovated by hand. Now, at the gate of Shannon's international airport, he anxiously awaits the arrival of his pregnant wife and seven-year-old daughter, envisioning a new life ahead, a fresh start. He has waited for and worried about this for months. He is a man who does not like being alone. The plane lands, the glass doors to the terminal slide open and his daughter emerges. Alone. There is no note, no word of explanation from his wife, only the mute silence of his stunned child. In an instant, Scully's life goes down in flames. This is a story of a marriage in our time. So begins a love-crazed odyssey across Europe, to the underside of the male psyche, in search of a woman vanished.

(Adapted from Trove)

winner (Abridged Fiction) y separately published work icon Foxspell Gillian Rubinstein , South Melbourne : Hyland House , 1994 Z816897 1994 single work novel young adult fantasy

'Foxspell is a fable of shape-shifters and animal spirits, of teenage gangs and schoolyard friends and finding your place in the world—or worlds—all concentrated in a dense, vivid corner of the half-wild Adelaide hills. A Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year for Older Readers, Foxspell is a mysterious and unforgettable dream.

'Deserted by his father, Tod moves with his sisters and mother into his grandmother's house in the foothills of Adelaide, South Australia. He finds refuge in the hills and quarries, where he meets a fox spirit who teaches him to cross between the human and animal worlds. As his family life and his involvement in a local gang become more complicated, the lure of the fox grows ever stronger.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

winner (Unabridged Non-Fiction) y separately published work icon Home Before Dark Ruth Park , Rafe Champion , Ringwood : Viking , 1995 Z833896 1995 single work biography
winner (Special Award for an audiobook of outstanding quality aimed at a younger market) y separately published work icon That Eye, the Sky Tim Winton , Melbourne : McPhee Gribble , 1986 Z426161 1986 single work novel young adult (taught in 8 units) Ort knows the sky is watching. He knows what it means to watch; he spends long hours listening at doors and peering through cracks. Things are terribly wrong. His father is withering away, his sister is consumed by hatred, his grandmother is all inside herself, and his mother, a flower-child of the 1960s, is brave but helpless. Then a strange man appears at their door. That Eye, the Sky is about love, about a boy's vision of the world beyond, about the blurry distinctions between the natural and the supernatural. All this, and more, begins at the moment the ute driven by Ort Flack's father ploughs into a roadside tree, throwing the whole world out of kilter. (Source: Bookseller's website)

Year: 1995

winner (Overall Winner and Unabridged Fiction) y separately published work icon Dark Places Kate Grenville , Sydney : Macmillan , 1994 Z454528 1994 single work novel

'This is Albion Gidley Singer at the pen, a man with a weakness for a good fact. The first fact is always the hardest: you have to begin somewhere, and such is the nature of this intractable universe that the only thing you can start with is yourself.

'Dark Places, a companion novel to Lilian’s Story, is the tale of a man with a comically grand exterior who believes he has the right, and the duty, to conquer the mocking flesh of any woman. Even his own daughter.' (Publication summary)

winner (Unabridged Non-fiction) y separately published work icon Goodbye Girlie Patsy Adam-Smith , Ringwood : Penguin , 1995 Z104232 1995 single work autobiography
winner (Abridged Non-fiction) y separately published work icon Kings in Grass Castles Mary Durack , London : Constable , 1959 Z419305 1959 single work biography

'‘... far better than any novel; an incomparable record of a great family and of a series of great actions.' The Bulletin When Patrick Durack left Western Ireland for Australia in 1853, he was to found a pioneering dynasty and build a cattle empire across the great stretches of Australia. With a profound sense of family history, his grand-daughter, Mary Durack reconstructed the Durack saga - a story of intrepid men and ground-breaking adventure. This sweeping tale of Australia and Australians remains a classic nearly fifty years on.' (2008 Publication summary)

Works About this Award

Reading Through Listening Penelope Layland , 1990 single work criticism
— Appears in: National Library of Australia News , December vol. 1 no. 3 1990; (p. 11-13)
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