After all the brouhaha over the Man Booker and the Nobel, it’s time for a quick round-up of the local award scene.

Best news of all is that our own Annamarie Jagose has won the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards.

Jagose’s Montana-winning Slow Water beat off some stiff competition, too: none other than J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and Malcolm Knox’s A Private Man. (All three books are Random House novels, by the way. Things must be looking up after that nasty business over Norma Khouri.)

On this side of the ditch, the winners of Copyright Licensing Limited’s two 2004 awards have just been announced. This year, for the first time, there are two whopping $35,000 prizes. And the lucky recipients are David Eggleton and Lloyd Spencer Davis, both from Dunedin.

Eggleton will be finishing off a contemporary guide to New Zealand cultural history, and Davis will be writing a popular science book on Darwin and Darwinism.

And finally, entries are now open for the 2005 Montana New Zealand Book Awards and New Zealand Post Book Awards. The deadlines are less than two months away, so it’s time for publishers to get a wriggle on.