Paul Kelly shortlisted forPM's literary award

Mon 30th May, 2011 in Local News

It’s been quite a month for Paul Kelly, first APRA announced him as the recipient of this year’s Ted Albert Award For Outstanding Services To Australian Music and now Australia’s Father Of Folk has been shortlisted for one of this country’s most respected literary awards.

Kelly’s memoir How To Make Gravy, which he published at the end of 2010, was named as one of the non-fiction books in the running to win the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the prize for which is $80,000.

Kelly’s memoir is broken up into one hundred alphabetical chapters each containing the lyrics and story behind one of his songs. The small vignettes that make up the memoir are actually an extension of the stories that Paul found himself telling on stage, night after night, when first performing his A to Z shows.

Of his book the judges said: ‘’Kelly loves language; he plays with it, sliding prose into poetry and parodying metre while condensing a complex story into a paragraph. With the eye of a poet and a keen sense of timing, he holds the reader in thrall, moving from pathos to humour and back again.’’

And in some other exciting news, Kelly has just been announced as the Coach of the Rock Dogs at this year’s Community Cup – Melbourne’s annual celebration of all things football and music which takes place at Elsternwick Park on Sunday June 26th June this year.