As we head into the 2009 Australian literature award year, I thought it interesting to put together a table of the major award winners, for literary fiction, from 2008. I don't intend to draw any conclusions from this, but you should feel free to do so.
| Award | Author | Title | Publisher |
| ABC Fiction Award | Kain Massin | God for the Killing | ABC Books |
| The Age Book of the Year | Tim Winton | Breath | Hamish Hamilton |
| ALS Gold Medal | Michelle de Kretser | The Lost Dog | Allen & Unwin |
| Australia-Asia Literary Award | David Malouf | The Complete Stories | Knopf |
| The Australian/Vogel Literary Award | Andrew Cromme | Document Z | (manuscript) |
| Colin Roderick Award | Malcolm Knox | Jamaica | Allen & Unwin |
| Barbara Jefferis Award | Rhyll McMaster | Feather Man | Brandl and Schlesinger |
| Miles Franklin Award | Steven Carroll | The Time We Have Taken | HarperCollins |
| Nita Kibble Literary Award | Carol Lefevre | Nights in the Asylum | Vintage Books |
| New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards | Michelle de Kretser | The Lost Dog | Allen & Unwin |
| Prime Minister's Literary Award | Steven Conte | The Zookeeper's War | Fourth Estate |
| Queensland Premier's Literary Awards | Helen Garner | The Spare Room | Text Publishing |
| South Australian Premier's Awards | Roger McDonald | The Ballad of Desmond Kale | Vintage Books |
| Victorian Premier's Literary Awards | Helen Garner | The Spare Room | Text Publishing |
| Western Australian Premier's Book Awards | Stephen Scourfield | Other Country | Allen & Unwin |
This table comes from a Wikipedia entry, titled 2008 in Australian literature that I've put together. It forms part of a continuing series of year-based pages that I am slowly developing for the encyclopedia. So far I've covered the years 2004-2008. I would like to emphasise the "slow" part of the previous sentence. These pages all hang off the List of years in Australian literature entry, which aims to give a very brief overview of Australian literature from 1770 to date. There are a lot of gaps, which tends to reflect my knowledge more than anything else.
Update: I left out a few awards which I have now added in.
