- Cover of Shakespeare’s Wife
August 7, 2008
Shakespeare’s Wife, Germaine Greer’s biography of Ann Hathaway has been placed on the short list for the 2008 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in Australia. The awards are a new initiative celebrating the contribution of Australian literature to that nation’s cultural and intellectual life.
The awards recognize literature’s importance to the Australian national identity, community and economy. A tax free prize of $100, 000 will be awarded to one fiction book and one non-fiction book judged to be of the highest literary merit in each of two.
In nominating Shakespeare’s Wife, the awards committee said, “As an examination of life in Stratford in the 16th century it is superb, the detail extraordinary and the style engrossing. It is a work of considerable scholarship-the amount of detail the author has recovered from tomb stones and forgotten records is impressive-as well as displaying great mastery of prose. Shakespeare’s plays are brilliantly used to shed light on his domestic relationships.”
Shakespeare’s Wife is one of seven non-fiction works shortlisted for the award. Nearly 200 works were entered in the fiction and non-fiction categories of the 2008 awards.
The awards are open to works written by Australian citizens and permanent residents.
Although she currently resides in the United Kingdom, Greer was born and raised in Australia.
Greer wrote Shakespeare’s Wife in reaction to the commonly held view that Ann Hathaway was responsible for trapping Shakespeare in an unhappy marriage. Greer combines the few known facts about Hathaway with scholarly speculation to reconstruct her life. The book also explores the daily lives of Elizabethan women and the spiritual, psychological, sexual and sociological aspects of marriage in the 16th century.
Web Resources:
2008 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards website
