3M Talking Book of the Year Award
Subcategory of Awards Australian Awards
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

History

The 3M Talking Book of the Year Award was presented by the Royal Blind Society. The award highlighted the importance of quality talking books to vision impaired and blind people.

Latest Winners / Recipients (also see subcategories)v435

Year: 1996

winner y separately published work icon Highways to a War Christopher Koch , New York (City) : Viking , 1995 Z456830 1995 single work novel (taught in 1 units)

'When Mike Langford, a war photographer with a reputation for unusual risk-taking, disappears inside Cambodia, he becomes a mythic figure in the minds of his friends. The search for him which is at the heart of this novel explores the personal highways that led him to war, and to his ultimate fate.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Year: 1995

winner 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)

Year: 1994

winner y separately published work icon Fishing in the Styx Ruth Park , Ringwood : Viking , 1993 Z378816 1993 single work autobiography

Year: 1993

winner y separately published work icon Lovers' Knots : A Hundred-Year Novel Marion Halligan , Port Melbourne : Heinemann Australia , 1992 Z314607 1992 single work novel

Year: 1991

winner y separately published work icon Poppy Drusilla Modjeska , Ringwood : McPhee Gribble , 1990 Z791794 1990 single work novel (taught in 2 units) Drusilla Modjeska sets out to collect the evidence of her mother's life. When the facts refuse to give up their secrets, she follows the threads of history and memory into imagination. There she teases out the story of Poppy, who married at twenty and had an apparently happy life until, suddenly one day in 1959, she was taken away to a sanatorium. (Source: Libraries Australia)

Works About this Award

Prizes Go to Literature for the Ears Susan Wyndham , 1996 single work column
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 18 November 1996; (p. 15)
`Shifty Shadow' in Winton's US Tour Robert Hefner , 1992 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 12 July 1992; (p. 23)
Foreword : Ton of Talent Signs Up for Writers' Fest Murray Waldren , 1992 single work column
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 4-5 July 1992; (p. 6)
Women Keeping Ahead of Men in Exploring the Sexes Robert Hefner , 1991 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 29 September 1991; (p. 23)
Foreword : Sexist Swings and Literary Roundabouts Elizabeth Swanson , 1989 single work column
— Appears in: The Australian Magazine , 21-22 October 1989; (p. 8)
X