So it seems a news story is doing the rounds about this year’s IP Picks awards. I was very surprised to see that this article had been syndicated by Reuters, and thus had turned up in unlikely places such as the Straits Times in Singapore, as well as the normal Australian media outlets such as ABC News, Yahoo etc. Here’s the article on Reuters:

(Reuters Life!) – A novel set in a future where an unchecked global population has created an apocalypse took the top fiction prize in Australia’s IP Picks unpublished book awards on Wednesday.

The awards, now in their 11th year, are aimed at giving unpublished writers from Australia and New Zealand a chance to break into the increasingly cut-throat literary world, with publication the top prize for books in five categories.

“As usual, the judges were hard pressed to find a clear winner,” said David Reiter, director, Interactive Publications (IP), the Queensland-based publisher that hands out the awards.

“They felt that at least five or six of the shortlisted entries were publishable or very close to being publishable.”

Guy Salvidge’s “Yellowcake Springs,” in which all but the elite are suffering through a slow, painful apocalypse, is set against what the judges called “a frighteningly plausible Australian future.”

The rest of the article is here.

Here it is, my big news. My second novel Yellowcake Springs has won First Prize in the Best Fiction category of Interactive Publications’ IP Picks Awards 2011. This means that the novel will be published by IP later in the year. You can read the full synopsis, written by Candice Poole of IP, on the Yellowcake Springs page.

You can read the report on the winners in the other categories and the rest of IP’s latest newsletter here.