Debut Novel Wins The Age Book of the Year Award

Steven Amsterdam’s post-apocalyptic debut novel, Things We Didn’t See Coming, is the winner of both the 2009 The Age fiction award for “a work of imaginative writing,” which comes with an AU$10,000 prize, and The Age Book of the Year award for an additional AU$10,000. The awards are administered by Melbourne’s The Age, a broadsheet daily newspaper operating since 1854. The judges described Things We Didn’t See Coming as “suspenseful and involving; it succeeds both as a compelling vision of the future and as a study of human resourcefulness and endurance.” The 36th annual awards were presented at the Melbourne Town Hall, in a ceremony that marked the opening of the Melbourne Writers Festival.