New novel, new website


This blog will be going quiet for a while.

The reason for this hiatus is that, with my new novel, The Norseman's Song, coming out in March, I've launched a new website -- www.joeldeane.com

That site also has a new blog, The Norseman's Blog, which I'll be updating regularly.

You can also follow me on Twitter and Facebook.

I'll be keeping an eye on this site, though, and can be contacted via email.

The next thing

Now that my poetry collection, Magisterium, has run its race with all the prizes and reviews, I'm working on getting a new book out for 2010.

This new book is a novel. It's title is The Norseman's Song. In Melbourne, The Age newspaper has been nice enough to flag it as a "promising" book for the year ahead (whatever that means).

Didn't win the Melbourne Prize for Literature -- Nam Le did for The Boat (a very cool collection of short stories) -- but I did get this video that they showed at Federation Square...

Melbourne Prize for Literature

Magisterium, my second collection of poetry, has been named as a finalist in the 2009 Melbourne Prize for Literature's Best New Writing category.

It's a unique award, run ever three years and open to just about every literary form, from poetry to fiction to non-fiction to theater. The only criteria is that award has to be 'for a piece of published or produced work of outstanding clarity, originality and creativity by a Victorian writer, 40 years or under.'

The range of work represented by the other finalists is very broad. Those finalists are:

• Tom Cho - Look Who’s Morphing
  
• Lisa Gorton - Press Release
  
• Chloe Hooper - The Tall Man
  
• Simmone Howell - Everything Beautiful
  
• Myfanwy Jones - The Rainy Season
  
• Lally Katz – Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd
  
• Nam Le - The Boat
  
• Amra Pajalic - The Good Daughter
  
• Jeff Sparrow – Killing
  

It's great to be in such good company.