South Australia Premier's Award Winner

Dr Shannon Burns has won the SA Premier's Award for best overall published work for his memoir Childhood.

Arts Minister Andrea Michaels presented Dr Burns with the Premier’s Award for the best overall published work at a ceremony in the Mortlock Chamber of the State Library of South Australia, which administers the awards.

Burns, an Adelaide-based writer, literary critic and academic, also won the national Non-Fiction Award ($15,000) for Childhood. The memoir recounts his early years bouncing between dysfunctional homes with parents who couldn’t care for him, before leaving school at 16 to take a job at a recycling centre, and finding solace – then ultimately a path to a different life – in reading and literature.

“The book is startlingly intelligent, written with sophisticated prose, and deeply evokes its place and time,” said the Premier’s Award judges - Jessica Alice, Verity Laughton and Sean Williams.

“Childhood stood out as the overall winner against a highly competitive group of winners of their forms and genres as a masterful literary accomplishment that utterly succeeded in concept and execution.”