Controversy continues to swirl around the prime minister’s literary awards with poet Les Murray criticising Tony Abbott’s “nasty” intervention to share a top prize between two authors.

Abbott presented the $80,000 prize for fiction to Steven Carroll for A World of Other People, and Richard Flanagan for The Narrow Road to the Deep North in Melbourne on Monday. It later emerged that Abbott had stepped in at the last minute to overrule the judges, who wanted to award the prize to Carroll alone.



Abbott has final say over who gets the prize, according to the rules of the award: “The prime minister will make the final decision on the awarding of the awards, taking into account the recommendations of the judges.”

On Thursday, Murray, who was a judge on the fiction panel, labelled Flanagan’s novel about the Burma railway as a “pretentious and stupid book” and expressed his anger that Abbott “went behind the scenes and worked a swifty.”

He told the Australian the judges had no idea of the change until the night of the awards, and that a majority of the panel had “rejected” Flanagan’s book.

Murray told the Sydney Morning Herald it was “deeply offensive” to ask if politics had played a part in their choice.

The prime minister’s office did not respond to a request for comment on Abbott’s intervention.

Flanagan has been an outspoken critic of the Abbott government. After winning the Man Booker prize earlier this year, Flanagan told UK media he was “ashamed” to be Australian because of the government’s environmental policies.

But Abbott revealed he and Flanagan had written to each other, and discussed the politics of art.

Abbott cited Flanagan’s letter to him.

“Too often, he said, in Australian politics, the arts are seen as the province of the left, ‘and arts and artists [are] therefore to be shunned by the right’.

“He noted that this is not the norm in most political cultures and hoped that ‘at some time, it might cease to be [so] in ours’,” Abbott said.

“Well, that’s my hope, too.”

Asked about the controversy in a Senate estimates hearing on Thursday, the attorney general, George Brandis, said the judges’ choice was only a recommendation for the prime minister.

“These are the prime minister’s awards, they’re for him to give to whoever he likes, and specifically the terms of the prize set out that the jurors’ recommendations are ... not decisions, and that it’s the prime minister’s decision.

Brandis noted that Abbott had “invested the authority of his office and his presence at the ceremony”.

“The prime minister and I made a very deliberate decision to elevate the status and the prestige of these prizes to … send a message to the Australian people that we should cherish and nurture and purchase the work of our Australian writers.”

At the ceremony Flanagan announced he would donate his $40,000 share of the prize money to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.

In his acceptance speech, Flanagan said he made the decision because he hoped “it might perhaps grow a few things”.

“My mortgage will go on as mortgages do, but if one of those books helps a few children to advance beyond the most basic literacy to one that is liberating, then I will consider the money better spent.”