Curious about a comment I saw in this entry on YA supahstah Scott Westerfeld's blog, I did some googling around and determined that, hey! The Penguin Australia edition of Scott's So Yesterday has won the 2005 Victorian Premier's Literary Award Prize for Young Adult Fiction.
Sources tell me that "[t]he Victorian Premier's Literary Awards are one of Australia’s oldest and most prestigious annual literary awards. Financially supported by the Victorian Government, the Awards are nationa and reward Australian writers for the best Australian books and writing in the categories of fiction, non-fiction, young adult fiction, poetry, drama, essay, screen writing and literary translation."
And you thought he was a Texan.
The judge's report (linked off the Award home page above) on So Yesterday has nice quotes like these:
"A clever, witty narrative wryly examines adolescent obsessions with being cool, or choosing not to be, without talking down."
"This original novel confirms adolescents as the savvy people they are."
I can't really add much to that, other than to say that while I'm not a savvy adolescent, I can highly recommend So Yesterday. Congratulations, Scott, much deserved.