Alice recently caught up with Two Flat Whites to discuss life, passions, future endeavours and her new novel ‘The Last Sky’ . The Last Sky moves between a love story in wartime Shanghai and a failing marriage in Hong Kong during the handover to China. A very ambitious and resourceful young author. Don’t forget the name Alice Nelson!

Where did you grow up & where do you hang your hat?

I grew up on Cottesloe Beach in WA and always find myself drawn back there, though I’ve lived overseas for extended stints – in New York for the longest. I’m living in Perth at the moment but am just about to head to rural France for several months for a writing sabbatical of sorts.

In your own words, what do you do?

Joan Didion once described writers as lonely, resistant rear rangers of things, people who spend their most absorbed and passionate hours arranging words on pieces of paper. That’s certainly part of it but there’s a tremendous joy in imagining, in telling stories, in entering into the sweet obsession of writing when it feels like there is nothing outside the world of the page. It’s a solitary occupation but you also have to be terribly interested in people.

Where did you learn your craft?

From reading mostly – I think that it’s impossible to be a writer if you are not voraciously, obsessively passionate about reading all kinds of literature. I used to copy out Ernest Hemingway in the vain hope that I might learn how to write the perfect sentence! I’ve studied creative writing at university, both in Australia and in the Masters program at the City University of New York, and while I’m not sure that you can actually teach the craft of writing, I found both experiences incredibly valuable. The discipline of having to produce work constantly, the thick skin you develop from the criticism, the contacts you make, are all so important.

Who and what inspires you?

Writers who are constantly doing new and innovative things with their craft, who aren’t afraid to challenge themselves. People like Anne Michaels, Pablo Neruda, Michael Ondaatje, Joan Didion, Marguerite Duras, Gail Jones, Brian Castro, to name just a few. The African refugees I know through my work with the Coalition for Asylum Seekers, Refugees and Detainees – incredible men and woman who have often survived unimaginable violence and loss and still look to a happier future.

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In 1978 the New South Wales Government inaugurated the annual New South Wales Premiers Literary Awards to honour distinguished achievement by Australian writers. The Awards are announced during the Sydney Writers’ Festival. The NSW Premier’s Literary Awards are the richest literary awards in Australia.

The NSW Premiers Book of the Year for 2009 is ‘The Boat’ by Nam Le .

Nam Le was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia. He has previously received the Pushcart Prize, the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, and fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Phillips Exeter Academy. His fiction has appeared in venues including Zoetrope: All-Story, A Public Space, Conjunctions, One Story, NPR’s, Selected Shorts and the Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best New American Voices, Best Australian Stories, and Pushcart Prize anthologies. He is the fiction editor of the Harvard Review.

The Boat is a stunningly inventive, deeply moving fiction debut: stories that take the readers from the slums of Colombia to the streets of Tehran; from New York City to Iowa City; from a tiny fishing village in Australia to a foundering vessel in the South China Sea, in a masterful display of literary virtuosity and feeling. In the opening story, “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” a young writer is urged by his friends to mine his father’s experiences in Vietnam — and what seems at first a satire on turning one’s life into literary commerce becomes a transcendent exploration of homeland, and the ties between father and son.

Full list of all the winners can be found here .