Byline: Peter Craven

Last week `The Hand that Signed the Paper' won Helen Demidenko the Australian Literature Society award. Peter Craven looks at the row about the controversial novel and the work itself. LAST year Helen Demidenko won the Vogel Award for first fiction and no one took very much notice. There were some good reviews and some talk of `The Hand That Signed the Paper' as a powerful novel about Ukrainian involvement in the Holocaust but nothing that compelled a busy reader to take time off to read the maiden effort of a young woman in her early '20s. Then the other week Demidenko won the Miles Franklin Award and all hell broke loose. She was attacked by the liberal columnist Pamela Bone and, in a ferocious and formidable critique, by the conservative commentator Gerard Henderson who described `The Hand' as a "loathsome book". Then two days after Demidenko had declared, a bit self-consciously, "I'm a lawyer by training; I have a strong instinct for seeking the truth at the bottom of a collection of facts" she was castigated by no less a figure than Alan Dershowitz, Harvard professor of law and arguably the most famous lawyer in the world. "One of the most pernicious, mean-spirited works of fiction," he wrote. The reason for the controversy is that...