Behrouz Boochani has won

the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for the book "No friend but the mountains".
Now I will first admit that I have yet to read the book. I have seen a couple of short extracts and it looks good. It is very likely that the book is worthy of an award of some sort. If the account is a true and honest one then it is also a story which needs to be told. I have no problems with that at all. I want people to be able to speak out about such things, indeed have helped more than one person to do so - albeit that they have perhaps not had a book published but have had the courage to get up and speak about their experiences. 
The other thing I would like to say is that the book was written in a very, very unconventional way and, as such, is an even greater achievement. It is an enormous achievement even though Boochani is a journalist and it is his job to sell stories.
Now let me say something about the award. There is a $100,000 prize attached to it. Yes, well worth the $75 entry fee if you win.
There are rules of course and one of the rules states
 
Eligibility
7. Authors must be Australian citizens or permanent residents of Australia.

 and Mr Boochani is neither an Australian citizen nor a permanent resident of Australia. He is a Kurdish journalist in detention on Manus Island. He was not eligible to win the prize.
I know there will be people who will say, "Well, he should have got it anyway because it IS an outstanding book and was written under the most difficult of circumstances. His story needs to be told. We need to put pressure on the government to bring all those detainees here."
It is a highly political issue. It is one I know a good deal about but I am not going to comment on that here. 
I do want to comment on what the judges did  though. They ignored the rules. 

In 1994 Helen Demidenko ( as she then called herself) published a book called "The hand that signed the paper" and claimed that it was written after  she had interviewed members of her family. It went on to win several awards, including the Miles Franklin Award. The controversy arose after it was discovered that, not only did the book have quite strong anti-semitic overtones but that Darville, as she was first known, had lied about her heritage and about the way the book was written.  
The book may be good but there will forever be questions hanging over it because of the claims the author made about its origins. There was more than one author I know who questioned whether it should have won the Miles Franklin. It wasn't sour grapes on their part - they didn't have books entered - they were simply questioning whether the award had been fairly won. 
That said Demidenko/Darville was eligible to win the prize under the terms and conditions set. 
But both these things raise questions about the way literary prizes are awarded and the reasons for awarding them. 
There can be no doubt that awarding Boochani the prize is a highly political statement. Is it an appropriate statement? Perhaps it is. The writers I was with last night thought so. 
So the question is - should they have first changed the rules to make Boochani eligible? The writers I was with last night think the rules should have been changed first. However much I and others might want such stories to be told they thought it was wrong to breach the rules. The book could be worthy of the Nobel Prize for Literature and it would still be wrong. That was their view.
It has all made me wonder what the purpose of literary awards are though. There is a lot of politics in writing and reading.