Talk:Gail Jones (writer)

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It is my intention to re-arrange the Awards section of this page. I'm not sure why this section was edited previously to only include awards which were won. It is my opinion that being longlisted or shortlisted for such awards as the Man Booker and the Miles Franklin is pretty important and should be noted. Feel free to persuade me otherwise. Perry Middlemiss (talk) 04:37, 26 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Is it all short and long listed that you want to list (hopefully not, as there is no chance of the lists ever being complete), or do you want to record the "almost won" details for some selected awards? Do these additional facts increase the information in the articles?  I wonder which writers don't bother to put their books forward for these prizes. Just took up your offer to try and persuade.  Stellar (talk) 10:49, 27 March 2008 (UTC)


 * The list of awards that I'd consider to be of major importance isn't that long for Australians (Man Booker, Miles Franklin, Ned Kelly, Ditmar, Aurealis, Davitt, State Premiers' awards and maybe a few others) so I think it's worth a try. A lot of author biographies on Wikipedia seem to describe the awards the author has won, or been nominated for, as a means of indicating the author's significance in the current literary environment.  There are some arguments for that as the award structure does provide for a level of "independent" assessment.  It also means that such a critical consideration on the page isn't likely to be taken for bias.  The trouble is that including the awards in the main biographical section leads to constant rewriting, while listing them in a table separates them from the biographical material and allows for easier maintenance.  As to the inclusion of longlist and shortlist entries, Jones is a good test case here as she has only written a few novels, all of which have been listed for one award or another.  So it will be interesting to see how it ends up. By the way, I am only talking about wins, shortlists and longlists here, not "nominations" as such.  The titles of novels entered for the Man Booker, for example, are never released, only those that make the final lists released by the judges.  It's those I wish to list here.  How about I include a table of awards for Jones as I have for some other Australian authors, and if it's too long or irrelevant we can edit it later.Perry Middlemiss (talk) 00:16, 28 March 2008 (UTC)