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Wanted: Stories not about lawyers and leggy blondes
YOUR Humble Narrator has just been to Australia for five minutes. Yes, that's right, five minutes. And no, it wasn't a brief touchdown in transit. It was an entire journey from Asia to Australia and back again for the purposes of an extremely short meeting.
Of course, in the event, it wasn't actually five minutes long. It lasted four minutes.
Now I know what you are thinking. You are thinking: Why am I reading this boring column, anyway?
Well, I have no answer to that. So you could actually stop here.
Those of you who choose to continue to read are demonstrating that you are either: (a) highly discriminating, intelligent people or (b) sad folk with nothing better to do. Obviously, the answer is (a), so you will have deduced that it could only be worth my flying thousands of kilometres for a very, very, short meeting, if (a) I was an idiot or (b) because the meeting was important.
Obviously, the answer in this case is (b). (I can hear you say: "Obvious to who?" but I choose to ignore the comment.)
Anyway, here's the tale. Some wise people in Australia noticed that people were enjoying stories more and more, in the shape of books, movies based on books, television series based on books, and so on. But while the vast majority of the world's people live on the eastern side of the planet, all the big awards for story writers were on the western side.
Second, ever since the rise of John Grisham, international aw has decreed that all books arc about young, male, American lawyers. In most thrillers, a handsome guy surmounts huge odds, battles villains, and wins a leggy
blonde. But while that may be the plot of 90 per cent of modern fiction, it doesn’t reflect everyday life for the bulk of the world's population (present columnist excluded).
Third, it was noticed that people were spending a lot of time staring at mobile phones and iPods.
Put all these facts together, and the answer became clear. We needed to organise the mass importation of leggy’ blondes to Asia. No, what 1 meant was: we needed to organise a huge writing award for stories set in the Asia-Pacific region.
The smart guy behind this plan was one Alan Carpenter, premier of Western Australia, and he chose your humble narrator to work on the judging side — which is why I had to fly Down Under to talk for four minutes in front of television cameras and press reporters.
So we're launching a new story prize. It's called the Western Australian Premier's Australia-Asia Literary Award, or AALA for short, and is worth AS 110,000 (US$102,000) for a single, good tale. That makes it the same as the famous Man Booker Prize of London, and is a sum of cash known technically in the financial world as Big Bucks. The AALA is open to some electronic books as well, so you may wish to start writing I a story on the web or on your I mobile phone.
Now some people will criticise me for flying 12,000 kilometres for a four-minute meeting. But in truth, 1 had some I other adventures while I was I there. To find out the juicy I details, read my next book, soon to appear on your mobile phone screen. Okay, you can stop reading now.
Visit our columnist at wwwvittachi com for a link I to one of the wodef s biggest story prizes