After a “crazy” seven-month journey of secrecy, Paul D. Carter last night enjoyed two life-changing literary milestones at once.
The Melbourne school teacher, 32, won this year's Vogel Literary Award for his novel Eleven Seasons, and saw his work published that same night.
For the second year, the online release of this year's winner was timed to coincide with last night's announcement, with physical copies available for sale today.
To make this possible, Carter was told of his win last year, forcing him to keep the news secret from everyone except his girlfriend.
“That stopped my head from exploding,” he said. “It's been a crazy journey for the two of us.”
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The $20,000 Vogel prize, for an unpublished manuscript by an author under 35, helped launch the careers of Tim Winton, in 1981, and Kate Grenville, in 1984.
For most of the Vogel's 31-year history at least six months has passed between the announcement of the winner and the publication of their book.
The chairman of publisher Allen & Unwin, Patrick Gallagher, said rearranging the schedule was necessary in “these days of instant gratification”.
It also capitalised on interest in the author and their book at the time of the win.
Carter's Eleven Seasons is a coming-of-age story about a young AFL player growing up in a broken home Melbourne in the 1980s.
He said the idea for the book had been with him for about nine years, and one of his ambitions had been to write a book about sport which anyone could read.
“On the one hand, football provides the character with an outlet for him to express himself,” he said.
“But it also becomes a form of armour that imprisons him and stops him from being as emotionally expressive as he could be.”
The Vogel Literary Award was established 31 years ago by the late Danish migrant Niels Stevns, founder of the Vogel bread and cereal brand in Australia.
The family business continues to sponsor the award, and Mr Stevns's son, Alan, told SBS his father would be proud of its importance today.
“I don't think he ever imagined it would take on quite the momentum and the status that it now has,” he said.
“My father emigrated to Australia in 1947 after the war and Australia was good to him.
“He felt that he wanted to give something back and had always been interested in the arts.”
Despite a lack of knowledge about AFL, Mr Stevns said he couldn't put Eleven Seasons down.
This year's award was presented by Brisbane author John Birmingham, who joked to organisers: “Thank you for smuggling me on a train out of Queensland, where it is illegal to give writers' prizes out.”
The remark took aim at the decision of new Queensland premier Campbell Newman, who recently announced that the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards, established in 1999, would be dumped in an effort to bring the state's budget back to surplus.
Carter said his day job as a teacher is fertile ground for inspiration for his next novel.
“I'm interested in writing about education and the massive enigma that is being a teacher and grappling with the Australian school system,” he said.
