UWS student and Giramondo author wins NSW Premier’s Literary Prize

University of Western Sydney student Luke Carman has won a NSW Premier's Literary Award for his debut book An Elegant Young Man.

The collection of short stories set in Western Sydney was awarded the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Fiction at a ceremony in Sydney last night.

Luke Carman is a Doctor of Creative Arts student at the UWS Writing and Society Research Centre. An Elegant Young Man is issued by Giramondo Publishing (opens in a new window) an independent publisher based at UWS.

"Luke Carman's witty collection of stories heralds a new, edgy and brilliant voice in Australian fiction," the judges write in their comments.

"Immediately the writer's erudition and craft are on display. Carman's epigrammatic stories, so perfectly suited to Giramondo's Shorts form, build in intensity and poignancy."

"After a rollicking, sometimes brazen and shocking romp through fraught geographical, cultural and racial terrain, we are left with the almost nostalgic suggestion that perhaps there can be no more true heroes – no great Ulysses – in our modern world."

"But, Carman suggests, you should not let that get you down."

Giramondo Publisher Professor Ivor Indyk, the UWS Whitlam Chair in Writing and Society, has paid tribute to Luke Carman.

"I am really pleased for Luke – he has brought a new and distinctive voice to Australian literature, a Western Sydney voice, and to have this recognised with his first book of fiction is a remarkable achievement," he says.

Also shortlisted for the same award was Giramondo Publishing's Michael Mohammed Ahmad for The Tribe, a collection of three novella portraying life in an extended Muslim Lebanese-Australian family.

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12 May 2016

Mark Smith, Senior Media Officer