Margie goes Festive

Congrats to Margie Cronin for having her outstanding collection, More or Less Than, shortlisted in the Adelaide Festival Award for Innovation. This is a relatively new award open to "published books which depart from conventional use of genre by borrowing elements from a number of genres such as fiction, non-fiction, biography, autobiography, poetry or cultural criticism." Despite their best efforts, however, the judges have failed to meet their own criteria, Margie's being the only work that seems to come close to fitting the bill. The criteria is not, by the way, particularly innovative, as any Capote fan or avid reader of Victorian novels could tell you, but what the hey! Margie's collection is well overdue for some accolades, as is the seemingly unstoppable author herself, a writer who has copped her fair share of nasty broadsides from they whose sins are multitude and whose one great vice is to teach. And while we're on the subject of dusty old things, it's good to see the Adelaide Festival making every effort to seem like something more than a trade fair.