Kristina Olson wins the Barbara Jefferis Award

MEDIA RELEASE COURTESY OF: THE AUSTRALIAN SOCIETY OF AUTHORS

The Australian Society of Authors is delighted to announce the winner of the Barbara Jefferis Award 2010.

Valued at $35,000, the Award is offered annually for “the best novel written by an Australian author that depicts women and girls in a positive way or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in society”.

The winner is The China Garden by Kristina Olsson, published by University of Queensland Press. The winning book was announced and the author presented with the award at a ceremony in Sydney on Sunday.

The Award judges - Susan Martin, Gina Mercer and Elizabeth Webby – had this to say about The China Garden:

“Unusually for a story about relinquishment and adoption, this fine novel deals with the impact on the mother and her remaining child, rather than her lost one. It delicately unfolds the ways in which Angela has made a life as a painter in a small coastal community, and has helped, and been healed by, those around her.

The title refers to Angela’s garden and its broken pieces of china. This evocative image suggests that beauty can be created from what is broken and apparently irretrievable, but also the danger and sharpness of buried secrets.

Kristina Olsson traces different possibilities of mothering, in Angela’s mutually enriching friendship with a young man, Kieran, in Kieran’s relationship with his grandmother, Cress, and in Cress’s tentative friendship with Angela’s daughter. Without feeling the need to resolve every absence or mystery, Olsson gently suggests that it is always possible to make new things out of the past, however fractured or painful.”