New Year’s Day quiz: 2014 in books
2014 saw an interesting year for Australian literature – an Australian again winning the Man Booker Prize, plenty of controversy over the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and many great new books published. Test your own memory of the past year here.
QUESTIONS
(Scroll down for answers.)
1 Name the two winners of the 2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction – the authors and the titles of their winning novels.
2 Which bestselling author said ‘Australian publishing is a small pond and I have been splashing around in it for many a year now’ when he announced in December 2014 that he was leaving long-time publisher Random House for a multi-book deal with Hachette?
3 Who won the 2014 Miles Franklin Award and for which novel?
4 In 2014 Australian children’s literature lost one of its great champions. He was the first national president of the Children’s Book Council and was a historian of children’s literature in Australia as well as an author and educator. Who was he?
5 Former Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who died in October 2014, was also an author. What was the title of the book he wrote giving his account of the constitutional crisis and his dismissal in 1975? Bonus point for the year of publication.
6 2014 marked 100 years since the outbreak of the First World War. Who wrote the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–18?
7 Which book won three separate awards at the 2014 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards? Bonus point if you can name all three awards.
8 Brooke Davis’s 2014 debut about a young girl coming to terms with the death of her father and her abandonment by her mother was an instant bestseller in Australia, and sold to 25 countries around the world. What is its title?
9 In 2014 Peter Carey published a new novel, Amnesia. How many novels for adults has he now published? Bonus point if you can name them all.
10 As we look forward to 2015, Australia will also look back to 1915. Which Australian author wrote a novel called 1915?
ANSWERS
1 Steven Carroll A World of Other People and Richard Flanagan The Narrow Road to the Deep North
2 Peter Fitzsimons
3 Evie Wyld All the Birds, Singing
4 Maurice Saxby
5 The Truth of the Matter, published 1979
6 CEW Bean
7 Michelle de Kretser Questions of Travel: it won Book of the Year, the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and the Community Relations Commission Award.
9 13: Bliss, Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda, The Tax Inspector, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, Jack Maggs, True History of the Kelly Gang, My Life as a Fake, Theft: A love story, His Illegal Self, Parrot and Olivier in America, The Chemistry of Tears, Amnesia.
10 Roger McDonald
I forgot to close a bracket in the first version I sent. This is how it should be:
Quiz question 6: Although Charles Bean was the principal author of Australia’s official history of WWI he was not the only one: there were also volumes by H. S.(Harry) Gullett (Sinai and Palestine), F.M. (Fred) Cutlack (AFC), A. W. Jose (Navy), A. G Butler (medical services), S. S. Mackenzie (Rabaul), and Ernest Scott (home front).
But Bean was the one who wrote and edited this particular title.
There are fourteen volumes in the series entitled ‘The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918’. Charles Bean wrote six of them.
Each volume has its own title e.g. the title page of Volume VI by C. E. W. Bean is ‘The Australian Imperial Force in France During the Allied Offensive, 1918’.
The title page of Volume VII by H. S. Gullett reads: ‘The Australian Imperial Force in Sinai and Palestine 1914-1918’. Bean was of course the great inspiration for the project but the other authors deserve to be acknowledged.
National LIbrary of Australia entry: Official history of Australia in the war of 1914-1918
Bean, C. E. W. 1879-1968
Think he is generally agreed to go with this overall title, though of course other people wrote other volumes of it. Take some bonus points for knowing them all!
Thanks for the bonus points!
Not sure which part of the NLA catalogue you were looking at. But the NLA catalogue entry under ‘Official history of Australia in the war of 1914-1918’ (http://nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn2612869) does not show Bean as author or editor, except as the author of the six volumes he actually wrote. It does not mention that Bean also wrote the chapter on trade in Ernest Scott’s ‘Australia During the War’; and, in Scott’s words, ‘many other less extensive but important additions’.
Wording the quiz question slightly differently would have allowed Bean’s role as both principal author and general editor of the entire series to be recognised for the incomparable achievement it was.
Sorry to be so persistent…an ingrained habit after many seasons of organising questions for ABC TV Mastermind!