AWARDS, SHORT LISTINGS, BOOK LISTS ...
2003 Winner HQ Magazine National Short Story Competition
2014 Winner WA Premier's Book Award (Western Australian Emerging Writer)
Judge's Report
This is a beautifully written and intelligent epistolary novel that works as an extended meditation on the nature of love, sexuality, art, illness and identity. It uses three alternating historical time frames and locations to explore both the historically specific social circumstances of sexual relationships and the universal need for intimacy, understanding and compassion in the face of illness, abuse and injustice. Written with a painter’s eye for visual detail and composition, and with a musician’s ear for the cadences of language, Letters to the End of Love integrates its extensive research into three carefully crafted stories.
2014 Shortlisted NSW Premier's Book Award (UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing)
Judge's Comments
An assured and original debut, Letters to the End of Love is an exquisite meditation on the nature of grief and romantic love. In epistolary form, the book introduces us to three couples – an exiled Russian painter and his novelist wife writing to each other from within the same house in Cork in 1969; a young bookseller writing from Perth to her estranged girlfriend in 2011; and a retired English doctor writing from Bournemouth, 1948, back to his past and the love of his life, a German artist he lived with decades before.
A work of impressive maturity and authority, Letters to the End of Love is a deceptively risk-taking novel. A pure and unashamed exploration of love – achieved without a shred of sentimentality – it is a delicately constructed work of many layers, deftly traversing time spans, cultures and histories in its quiet contemplations on the making of art and of love, the grief and degradation of war and illness, and the profound human capacity for courage in the face of death. It is deeply moving, expansively imagined and beautifully written.
Australian Book Review Best Books of 2014
West Australian Books of the Year 2014
Australian Book Design Awards Shortlist 2014
Book Cover design by the marvellous Alison Colpoys
Sydney Morning Herald Australian Authors Best Books of 2014
"... all year I've been recommending Yvette Walker's devastating, delicately layered meditation on art, loss and grief, Letters to the End of Love ..." Charlotte Wood
2014 Winner WA Premier's Book Award (Western Australian Emerging Writer)
Judge's Report
This is a beautifully written and intelligent epistolary novel that works as an extended meditation on the nature of love, sexuality, art, illness and identity. It uses three alternating historical time frames and locations to explore both the historically specific social circumstances of sexual relationships and the universal need for intimacy, understanding and compassion in the face of illness, abuse and injustice. Written with a painter’s eye for visual detail and composition, and with a musician’s ear for the cadences of language, Letters to the End of Love integrates its extensive research into three carefully crafted stories.
2014 Shortlisted NSW Premier's Book Award (UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing)
Judge's Comments
An assured and original debut, Letters to the End of Love is an exquisite meditation on the nature of grief and romantic love. In epistolary form, the book introduces us to three couples – an exiled Russian painter and his novelist wife writing to each other from within the same house in Cork in 1969; a young bookseller writing from Perth to her estranged girlfriend in 2011; and a retired English doctor writing from Bournemouth, 1948, back to his past and the love of his life, a German artist he lived with decades before.
A work of impressive maturity and authority, Letters to the End of Love is a deceptively risk-taking novel. A pure and unashamed exploration of love – achieved without a shred of sentimentality – it is a delicately constructed work of many layers, deftly traversing time spans, cultures and histories in its quiet contemplations on the making of art and of love, the grief and degradation of war and illness, and the profound human capacity for courage in the face of death. It is deeply moving, expansively imagined and beautifully written.
Australian Book Review Best Books of 2014
West Australian Books of the Year 2014
Australian Book Design Awards Shortlist 2014
Book Cover design by the marvellous Alison Colpoys
Sydney Morning Herald Australian Authors Best Books of 2014
"... all year I've been recommending Yvette Walker's devastating, delicately layered meditation on art, loss and grief, Letters to the End of Love ..." Charlotte Wood
