The 2012 winners of the “reinvigorated and strengthened” NSW Premier’s Literary Awards have been announced.

The Christina Stead Prize was awarded to 2011 Miles Franklin winner, Kim Scott, for That Deadman Dance (Pan Macmillan) (also picking up Book of the Year). The judges said, “Compassionate and lush, this is a novel which unsettles and displaces the reader even while seducing them. Full of sensory descriptions, Scott calls up the landscape of pre-European Australia, creating a rich novelistic world. Shifting in form and in language, often with the feel of song, That Deadman Dance is a stunning interplay of form and content.”

Scott edged out Anna Funder’s All That I Am (Penguin), Sarah Thornhill  by Kate Grenville (Text), People’s Choice winner Five Bells byGail Jones (Random House), The Life by Malcolm Knox (Allen & Unwin), and Rohan Wilson’s The Roving Party by (Allen & Unwin).

Wilson won the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing, Mark McKenna won the Douglas Stewart Prize with An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark (Miegunyah, MUP) and the Kenneth Slessor Prize went to Gig Ryan for her New and Selected Poems (Giramondo Publishing).

The full list of awards, $350,000 in prize money offered across 17 categories, is on the State Library website.

In 2013 the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and the Premier’s History Awards will revert to May and September respectively.