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Craig Sherborne's memoir Hoi Polloi was shortlisted for the Queensland and Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. The follow-up, Muck, won the Queensland Literary Award for Non-fiction. Sherborne's debut novel, The Amateur Science of Love, won the Best Writing Prize in the 2012 Melbourne Prize for Literature and was shortlisted for the NSW and Victorian Premiers' Awards. He has also written two volumes of poetry, and his journalism and poetry have appeared in most of Australia's leading literary journals and anthologies. His two most recent novels are Tree Palace, shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and Off the Record.
'Pays homage to the body in all its vulnerabilities...The Grass Hotel is an unsparing but humane portrait of a mother and son.' * Books+Publishing * 'Sherborne's talents with narrative and poetry combine to produce a striking fiction...offering a unique, vivid portrait of his characters. With the crystallisation and compression of poetry, Sherborne explores ideas of property, freedom and loyalty, and produces a novel as beautiful in its conjunctions as the chandelier swinging over its landscapes.' * Australian on Tree Palace * 'A riveting piece of writing that is liable to transfix any reader who gets past the opening chapter...Sherborne is a breathtaking writer because he writes of unspeakable things with a kind of affectless gaucherie that dazzles the mind...this is an engulfing, heart-stopping book-a performance that dazzles the eyes and leaves the reader gasping for air.' * Age/SMH on The Amateur Science of Love * 'The novel's poetic, image-rich, disjointed realm is immersive and memorable...The Grass Hotel leaves us with a persuasive articulation of familial power dynamics, their emotional turbulence.' * Guardian * '[Craig Sherborne] writes simple sentences full of emotional power...This [is a] soul-searching novel, in which long-suppressed memories are hinted at and then slowly released.' * Stephen Romei, Saturday Paper * 'At every turn the book's natural lyricism and gentle melancholy rub against [a] darker mood-resentment, disappointment, all the unsettled scores of parent and child, even after death...At every turn the prose is taut, fractured and imagistic-a sustained act of broken beauty over 200 pages...[Sherborne] has used fiction and imagination to raise the contemptuous cliche of a common life to the highest fury and power...What matters more than the mere actual of personal history is the summoned force of art, and it's here where the book's power lies. It is genuinely haunted, and haunts in turn.' * Adam Rivett, Age *
