22 Facts About Australian literature

Australian literature is the written or literary work produced in the area or by the people of the Commonwealth of Australia and its preceding colonies.

However, the narrative art of Australian writers has, since 1788, introduced the character of a new continent into literature—exploring such themes as Aboriginality, mateship, egalitarianism, democracy, national identity, migration, Australia's unique location and geography, the complexities of urban living, and "the beauty and the terror" of life in the Australian bush.

Novelists of classic Australian literature works include Marcus Clarke, Miles Franklin, Henry Handel Richardson, Joseph Furphy, Rolf Boldrewood and Ruth Park .

Eminent Australian literature playwrights have included Ray Lawler, David Williamson, Alan Seymour and Nick Enright.

Letters written by notable Aboriginal leaders like Bennelong and Sir Douglas Nicholls are retained as treasures of Australian literature, as is the historic Yirrkala bark petitions of 1963 which is the first traditional Aboriginal document recognised by the Australian Parliament.

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World's richest prize in children's literature has been received by two Australians, Sonya Hartnett, who won the 2008 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award and Shaun Tan, who won in 2011.

Australian literature's is known for her dark and often controversial themes.

Australian literature's has won several awards, including the Kathleen Mitchell Award and the Victorian Premier's Award for Sleeping Dogs, Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Aurealis Award, Best Young Adult Novel for Thursday's Child and the CBCA Children's Book of the Year Award: Older Readers for Forest.

Humphries' outlandish Australian literature caricatures, including Dame Edna Everage, Barry McKenzie and Les Patterson have starred in books, stage and screen to great acclaim over five decades and his biographer Anne Pender described him in 2010 as the most significant comedian since Charles Chaplin.

Patrick White became the first Australian to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973 "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature".

Australian literature turned down a knighthood, and various literary awards—but in 1973 accepted the Nobel prize.

Australian literature has twice won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction with 1988's Oscar and Lucinda and 2001's True History of the Kelly Gang.

Michael Robert Christie's 2009 PhD dissertation, "Unbecoming-of-Age: Australian literature Grunge Fiction, the Bildungsroman and the Long Labor Decade" states that there is a genre called "post Grunge [lit]" which follows the grunge lit period.

Australian literature'story has been an important discipline in the development of Australian writing.

Australian literature has had several scandals surrounding the identity of writers.

Unable to find publication as a white Australian literature he was an instant success using the false Aboriginal identity of "Wanda Koolmatrie" with My Own Sweet Time.

Two poets who are amongst the great Australian literature poets are Christopher Brennan and Adam Lindsay Gordon; Gordon was once referred to as the "national poet of Australia" and is the only Australian literature with a monument in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey in England.

Contemporary Australian literature poetry is mostly published by small, independent book publishers.

Some more interesting and innovative contributions to Australian literature poetry have emerged from artist-run galleries in recent years, such as Textbase which had its beginnings as part of the 1st Floor gallery in Fitzroy.

Two centuries later, the extraordinary circumstances of the foundations of Australian literature theatre were recounted in Our Country's Good by Timberlake Wertenbaker: the participants were prisoners watched by sadistic guards and the leading lady was under threat of the death penalty.

Eminent contemporary Australian literature playwrights include David Williamson, Alan Seymour, Stephen Sewell, the late Nick Enright and Justin Fleming.

Australian literature authors are eligible for a number of other literary awards, such as:.