Miriam Cosic; 2/9/09
When Chloe Hooper conceived of turning her powerful 2006 Monthly essay about Cameron Doomadgee’s death on Palm Island into a full-length book, publishers were not exactly queuing up to take her on. “I felt I was trying to write a page-turner about something no one wanted to know about,” Hooper said yesterday. “I realised you say the words ‘death in custody’ in Australia and people’s eyes glaze over.” Last night, Hooper won the $30,000 Nettie Palmer Prize for non-fiction in the 2009 Victorian Premier’s Literary Prizes for the resulting book, The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island.
See: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26015288-5013404,00.html
Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Death in Custody