PASCALL PRIZE FOR CRITICAL WRITING

1990 Winner

Marion Halligan

I was very excited to win the Pascal Prize.  The unexpectedness was one thing.  But the main delight was the honour of it.  It was its first year as a critical prize.  The very first one had been given to David Malouf for a body of work.  Then it was decided that since Geraldine Pascall was herself a critic, the prize should go to a critic. 

My field was literary criticism: book reviews mainly.  People have thought since it was for food writing, but it wasn’t.  I can’t quote from my speech, since I didn’t write it down, I never do, I prefer to think hard beforehand but stand up and put it together spontaneously, looking at people, making it a spoken rather than a read construct.  I do remember I made an extended image about book reviewing, that receiving a prize was like getting the best review you could imagine, the accolade of not one but a number of peers.  I recall sitting at breakfast at the Regent when the presentation was made, with some very grand people (I won’t mention their names) who all knew one another and hadn’t a clue who I was, so they totally ignored me, until they were astonished to find I was the winner.

 

Year later I met another critic, editor of an important journal, who told me that for most of this time she had not been able to forgive me for the fact that I had won; she felt sure she was the person who deserved it.  We sat in the cafe of the Hilton one Adelaide Writers’ Week and drank several glasses of white wine and she told me it was all right now, she had got over it.  I am not sure she had, but she was very friendly to me after that.  I suppose foolishly, I had not imagined until that moment all the other people who thought they might have won, but hadn’t.  I know I was lucky; I think prizes are always as much luck as merit, though one hopes for a good dose of the latter.

 

I still write book reviews, and essays about literature and other topics.  Sometimes I write about food.  My books are mainly novels, with some essays into works of autobiography, travel and food.  And I love writing short stories.  The novels these days are published by Allen and Unwin, and include The Fog Garden, The Point, and The Apricot Colonel  -  the other five are out of print.  The Taste of Memory is autobiography.  I write essays in Meanjin, Heat, The Griffith Review, The Age and The Australian’s Review, book reviews in the Canberra Times, The Age, Review, and such.  Somebody gave me a very strange book the other day and I found myself reviewing it in my head, and feeling quite disappointed that I hadn’t been invited to get these comments down on paper, the fine mental sentences I kept turning.

 

I have on several occasions been a Pascall Prize judge, and have greatly enjoyed the company of other judges, though these days it is sadly, if time-savingly, virtual.  Their passion, their enthusiasm, their convictions, the ardour with which they argue their choices, all make the experience an exciting one.  I am not always sure that criticism in my own field is very informed or elegant, novels in particular often seem to be written about by people with only the haziest notions of what they are, but the Pascall judges, all former winners, are testimony to the lusty good health of Australian criticism.