Awards for "Shot"

Shortlisted 2004 Ned Kelly Award for Best True Crime Non-Fiction
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Shortlisted for the 2004 Nita B. Kibble Literary Awards for Women Writers:

General comments
The judges are delighted that our short short-lists in both the Dobbie and Kibble competitions represent various of the genres embraced by the capacious term “life-writing”–and even push the boundaries of the term. This year, the Kibble shortlist has an overt political dimension, thanks on the one hand to Gail Bell’s examination of issues relating to gun control in acutely personal and in more objective dimensions; and on the other, thanks to Anne Summers’ keenly-felt evidence-based arguments about women’s issues in The End of Equality. Surfing, the occasion for Fiona Capp’s That Oceanic Feeling, may seem far removed from politics, but a strand of Capp’s account of learning to surf is concerned with the sexual politics of claiming the waves for women.

Gail Bell, Shot: A Personal Response to Guns and Trauma

A disturbing study which pulls no punches as Gail Bell works back into, and through, her own memories of the trauma of being shot in the back at the age of seventeen. Yet Shot is curiously inspiriting, because of the author’s determination to achieve a measure of understanding together with emotional resolution. It is admirably focussed, partly an investigation of the incident of the shooting itself and the way it was handled by police and others, and partly a set of ramifying reflections on other aspects of life and death in our contemporary civil society.

Professor Margaret Harris (chair) 2004 Judging Panel