PRIZES to win! PROMOTIONS
"This may be the best book I've read this year" says author Jack Marx in his recent review. "The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin is so unusually brilliant, so unique in structure, so ludicrous, hilarious and ominous at once, that it's hard to believe it's a work of 21st-century Australian storytelling."
2024 WINNER OF THE 20/40 PUBLISHING PRIZE – FICTION.
The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin welcomes us to a world where absurdity and reality are increasingly indistinguishable and where questions of identity dominate public discourse.
31 ordinary people around the globe have one startling thing in common - each is a doppelganger for Vladimir Putin. Each is approached by the Russian playmakers with an offer too good to refuse - a generous monthly payment to do nothing but wait until called upon, sometimes for years...
This story spirits us off on a playful journey into the lives of a group of individuals whose physical attributes appear to matter more than who they may be. This comedic exploration of the role of the ordinary person in the exercise of power offers a striking reminder that, whoever we are, we are captured by the systems that govern us.
About the Prize:
Finlay Lloyd, an independent, non-profit publisher, established the 20/40 Publishing Prize to encourage imaginative and challenging writing of the highest quality, and to celebrate the pleasures of print on paper in an electronic age.
In an environment where writers find it increasingly difficult to find an audience, the prize offers a publishing opportunity for fiction and non-fiction prose works between 20,000 and 40,000 wordsIndependent, non-profit publisher Finlay Lloyd established the 20/40 Publishing Prize to encourage and support writing of the highest quality.
Finlay Lloyd's aim is to identify and encourage good writing free from external pressures such as reputation and the undue influence of market forces. Entries to the prize are evaluated by a judging panel that reads all submissions ‘blind’, with a focus on creative inventiveness and quality.
P S Cottier has written eight books of poetry, a collection of stories and a nonfiction pamphlet about the wild-life near Parliament House. Her collection Utterly was shortlisted for the ACT Book of the Year. She has worked as a university tutor, a union organiser, a lawyer and a tea-lady. N G Hartland’s short stories have been published in Australia, the United States, and South Korea. ‘How to get to be a three-thousand-year-old mining AI’ was included in Robotic Ambitions: Tales of Mechanical Sentience. He has worked in criminology, social policy, and as a ministerial adviser.
