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- The 2005 Pascall Prize for the Critic
of the Year is awarded to Gerard Windsor, a Sydney-based novelist,
essayist and freelance literary critic.
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- Windsor began training as a Jesuit
priest and although he did not take final vows, his education in
philosophy, classics, the arts and intellectual argument strongly
influenced his thinking and writing.
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- His career as a writer followed an
arts degree at the Australian National University and a Master of Arts
in Irish Literature. He is the author of eight books, including the 2000
collection of critical essays, The Mansions of Bedlam.
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- For more than 20 years he has written
book reviews for publications including The Bulletin, The Sydney
Morning Herald, The Australian and The Australian’s Review of
Books. While specialising in Australian and Irish literature, he has
demonstrated a wide range and a voice that is elegant, independent,
incisive, and occasionally scorching.
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- His Pascall Prize is for a series of
2000-word essay-style book reviews in The Australian Financial
Review’s Friday Review section, which is currently one of the
country’s few venues for extended criticism.
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- Given this opportunity, Windsor has
produced an outstanding body of work, covering subjects from Gilbert and
Sullivan and Australian theatre to the Boyer lectures and Helen Garner’s
true-crime drama, Joe Cinque’s Consolation.
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- The judges noted in his work an
“intellectual sparkle and seductive blarney”; “eagerness to pursue
imaginative connections”; “ability to enjoy his subject matter, to
characterise it humorously and to prompt further curiosity”.
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- Windsor’s reviews always express a
clear opinion as well as original thought, lightly-worn erudition and
the too rare quality of wit. He displays a maturity of cultural
knowledge, judgement and style, lifting his work to the level of art.
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- 2005 Judges:
- Elizabeth Farrelly (2001 winner)
- Marion Halligan (1990 winner)
- Adrian Martin (1997 winner)
- Robert Nelson (2000 winner)
- Susan Wyndham (board member and
judges’ convenor)
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