Awwwh - what about The Orphan Gunner, then? And The Lost Dog.
I want to read the Juchau novel though.

The 2007 awards had five novels on the Kibble shortlist and three on the Dobbie. So it's not as if they didn't have room. Kerryn Goldsworthy won't be happy that the de Krester novel (The Lost Dog) missed out.

Nope, because Michelle doesn't qualify; the Kibble Award conditions are more specific than just 'best novel'. It's "For women writers of a published book of fiction or non-fiction classifiable as 'life writing'".

I can see how, at a stretch, the three shortlisted books might fit that criterion (I've read the whole shortlist, for once) but The Lost Dog doesn't, and of course it's not eligible for the Dobbie 'first novel' prize either.

So what's "life writing" when it's at home?

Well that's a very good question, because they're obviously using a broader definition of it than I would. Life writing is (or was!) a sort of umbrella term used to cover biography, autobiography, memoirs, letters, diaries, transcribed oral history and so on -- anything whose main concern is to tell the story of a particular life. Previous winners of this award have tended to be biographies, I think*.

My understanding of the term 'life writing' is that it clearly refers to nonfiction, so I'm a bit startled to see fiction being included, and I'm intrigued enough by the shortlist to get in touch with the prize administrators and ask them why they decided to include fiction and how they decide which fiction is 'life writing' and which isn't.

*But I've just had a bit of a trawl through the Google hits and they seem to have been awarding it to fiction for some time now. Go figure.