Rose wins $40,000 prize

TASMANIAN author Heather Rose has won the $40,000 Christina Stead prize for The Museum of Modern Life, a novel 11 years in the making and inspired by performance artist Marina Abramovic.

Just weeks after winning the $50,000 Stella Prize for an Australian woman writer, Rose, 52, said she was totally unprepared for the moment when her name was called out at the prestigious New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards in the NSW State Library on Monday night.

“It was really intense,’’ Rose said.

“People who have won this award are some of the greatest writers in Australia — Helen Garner, Peter Carey, David Malouf, Tim Winton and Joan London.”

She said the novel went through a lot of changes over the years it was in the making. “You just don’t give up — it’s important that when you ask a prominent Serbian artist to be in your book, you can’t fail.”

She said The Museum of Modern Life was “finding a wider readership than I’ve ever had before”.

The two prizes have given her “the freedom to write and not have to look for work”.

“This is the first year in my life I’ve been able to just be a writer full-time.”

Rose said 2017 was a big year for Tasmanian literature.

With the release of Katherine Scholes’ new novel Congo Dawn and another work by Richard Flanagan due out in October, Tasmania’s literary reputation was continuing to grow, she said.

“There will be really standout writers emerging out of Tasmania over the next few years.”

Rose said the burgeoning literary scene owed much to writer Danielle Wood’s creative writing course at the University of Tasmania and Richard Flanagan’s literary status around the world.

The $40,000 prize for a work of fiction named after the Australian novelist and short story writer Christina Stead has only been won by one other Tasmanian, Helen Hodgman in 1989 for Broken Words.