When Sandra Pankhurst first read the manuscript of her extraordinary life – life spent first as a son, husband and father, then as a sex worker, rape survivor, wife and trauma cleaner – she told the author Sarah Krasnostein she found the book “cathartic”.
“That was a huge relief for me to hear,” Krasnostein tells Guardian Australia. She had given Pankhurst the draft a week before it went to print. “I’m sure the experience of reading it was not easy; there were memories there that she had chosen for a long time not to share.”
On Thursday evening Krasnostein’s complex and tender memoir about Pankhurst, The Trauma Cleaner, won top honours at the 2018 Victorian Premier’s literary awards, taking the $100,000 Victorian prize for literature and the $25,000 category prize for nonfiction.
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