PM's book prize for Marilyn Lake
Professor Marilyn Lake.
Historian Professor Marilyn Lake has shared Australia’s top literary prize – jointly winning the non-fiction category in this year’s Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. Selected from a wide range of non-fiction including biography, memoir, travel writing, literary studies and history, Drawing the Global Colour Line was co-written with Professor Henry Reynolds from the University of Tasmania.
‘At last a history of Australia in its dynamic global context,’ was how the award citation described the book. At a time when public debate rages anew about response to asylum seekers, it noted: ‘Drawing the Global Colour Line offers a new perspective on the history of human rights and provides compelling and original insight into the international political movements that shaped the twentieth century.’
It added that by using ‘a rich cast of characters’, the book tells a ‘gripping story about the circulation of emotions and ideas, books and people in which Australia emerged as a pace-setter in the modern global politics of whiteness’. It described the work as ‘remarkable for the breadth of its research and its engaging narrative’.
Launched by former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser in March 2008, the book has received widespread acclaim, including last year’s Queensland Premier’s History Book Prize and the University of Melbourne’s prestigious Ernest Scott History Prize. It has also been favourably reviewed overseas, the International History Review judging it a ‘once-in-a-generation book’.
(Drawing the Global Colour Line shared the PM’s award with House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann by Evelyn Juers.)