2013 PMLA winners, shortlist and judges
The winners, shortlistees and judges of the 2013 Prime Minister's Literary Awards.
Judges 2013
Fiction and poetry panel
Mr Joel Becker, (Chair)
Professor Chris Wallace-Crabbe AM
Winthrop Professor Phillip Mead
Ms Jane Sullivan
Nonfiction and Australian history panel
Mr Michael Sexton SC (Chair)
Mr Colin Steele
Ms Susan Hayes
Professor Susan Magarey
Children’s and young adult literature panel
Ms Judith White (Chair)
Ms Adele Rice
Mr Robert (Bob) Sessions
Children's literature
WINNER: Red – Libby Gleeson
Red
WINNER
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Children's literature
Published by: Allen & Unwin
Red can't remember the cyclone. She can't remember anything - her name, where she lived, who her family might be. Her identity has been ripped away. Then she makes a discovery, and finds she has an important mission to accomplish. But in this chaotic, bewildering world, can she do it on her own? Who can she trust?
About the author
Libby Gleeson
Libby Gleeson AM is a popular, highly acclaimed writer who has published over 30 books for children and teenagers.
She has been shortlisted for the CBCA Awards thirteen times, and won it three times.
The Great Bear (with Armin Greder) was the first Australian book to win the prestigious Bologna Ragazzi Award, in 2000. Her novel Mahtab's Story was published by Allen & Unwin in 2008, and her picture book I Am Thomas (with Armin Greder) in 2011.
Libby has been a teacher and lecturer and is a regular contributor to national conferences. She chaired the Australian Society of Authors 1999-2001, and in 2007 was awarded membership to the Order of Australia.
She is the winner of the 2011 Dromkeen Medal, awarded for contributions to children’s literature.
Judges’ comments
Libby Gleeson's Red it is an outstandingly well-told story that will enthral young readers for a long time to come'. The central character in this dramatic novel has a compelling voice and the natural disaster scenario is of great recognisable contemporary significance.
Red is a credible heroine, the dialogue is entirely convincing and Gleeson has woven all the elements of her story into a well-plotted page-turner. This is a book of enduring value that will resonate profoundly with today's children.
Today We have No Plans – Jane Godwin, Illustrator: Anna Walker
Today We have No Plans
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Children's literature
Published by: Penguin Random House
‘A busy week, a slower day
Brings time to dream and time to play.'
From the creators of the much-loved All Through the Year comes an ebook edition of this journey through a week in the life of an Australian family, celebrating those precious days that have no plans.
About the author
Jane Godwin
Jane Godwin is a highly acclaimed author of many books for children.
Her work is published internationally and she has received many commendations. Together with Anna Walker, Jane has created several bestselling picture books, including Little Cat and the Big Red Bus, All Through the Year, Today We Have No Plans, Starting School and, most recently, What Do You Wish For?
About the illustrator
Anna Walker
Anna Walker writes and illustrates children's books and is based in Melbourne.
Her charming studio is shared with a printmaker, Rosy the lamp, a few friendly plants, and knitted, woolly creatures. Working with pencil, ink and collage, Anna develops her characters and enjoys spending time with them before they venture out into the world.
Her illustrations are inspired by the everyday details of life and the amusing antics of her menagerie. Anna's latest book with Penguin is Mr Huff, an exploration of how kids deal with the worrying feelings that can accompany a bad day.
The Beginner’s Guide to Revenge – Marianne Musgrove
The Beginner's Guide to Revenge
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Children's literature
Published by: Penguin Random House
Two friends. One book of revenge. Zero consequences?
As a soldier's daughter, Romola's been to six schools in eight years, always having to make new friends … and now enemies. Meanwhile, Sebastian's mum is about to make the biggest mistake of their lives, unless Sebastian can find his dad in time to stop her.
Thrown together by chance, these two thirteen-year-olds set out to even the score. But once that big old ball of revenge starts rolling down the hill, there's not an awful lot they can do to stop it … or is there?
About the author
Marianne Musgrove
Marianne Musgrove wrote her first full-length novel at the age of eleven: a romantic thriller featuring her unfortunate classmates. Although the unpublished manuscript met with only localised acclaim, she never gave up her dream of becoming an author.
A descendant of King Henry VIII's librarian, you could say books are in her blood! Marianne grew up in Sydney, before studying English, law and social work (which she made her career for several years) in Adelaide.
Marianne's first children's novel, The Worry Tree, won the 2008 Australian Family Therapists Award for Children's Literature and has been shortlisted for three other awards.
Young adult literature
WINNER: Fog a Dox – Bruce Pascoe
Fog a Dox
WINNER
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Young adult literature
Published by: Magabala Books
Albert Cutts is a tree feller. A fella who cuts down trees. Fog is a fox cub raised by a dingo. He’s called a dox because people are suspicious of foxes and Albert Cutts owns the dingo and now the dox. Albert is a bushman and lives a remote life surrounded by animals and birds. All goes well until Albert has an accident ...
This is a story of courage, acceptance and respect. The dialogue is finely crafted and Indigenous cultural knowledge and awareness are seamlessly integrated into the story.
About the author
Bruce Pascoe
Author Bruce Pascoe is a Tasmanian, Bunurong and Yuin man who lives on country, deep in the Victorian bush.
A prolific writer, Bruce is the author of over 20 books. In 2016, his book Dark Emu (Magabala Books 2014) – which argues that systems of food production and land management have been blatantly understated in modern retellings of early Aboriginal history – won the Book of the Year and Indigenous Writer’s Prize in the 2016 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.
In 2017, his children’s book, Mrs Whitlam (Magabala Books 2016) was shortlisted for the CBCA’s Younger Readers Book of the Year.
Judges’ comments
Bruce Pascoe's Fog a Dox is a work of profound humanity' that ‘delights with its gentle humour, its knowledge of the bush and of the hidden workings of the heart, and its often surprising originality of expression. It gives an eloquent voice to those rarely heard. It has a place in the canon of Australian literature and is in every respect an appropriate winner'.
Pascoe's is an original voice and his story of people and country is beautiful in its simplicity. It speaks of a love of the land and its animals, of the innate goodness of bush people, of being an outsider and of earned respect. Its language and dialogue are crisp, authentic and inventive. The author's Aboriginality shines through but he wears it lightly, with an inclusivity brilliantly expressed in the bushmen's encounter with a young girl suffering from leukaemia.
Everything Left Unsaid – Jessica Davidson
Everything Left Unsaid
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Young adult literature
Published by: Penguin Random House
Three children have been sent to live in the countryside, safe from the war in London. When they find two boys hiding in a castle, the past and future come together to make an extraordinary adventure.
Winner of the 2013 CBCA Book of the Year – Younger Readers.
About the author
Jessica Davidson
Jessica Davidson was only 22 when her first novel, What Does Blue Feel Like?, was published. She went on to win the Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist Award in 2008.
Jessica lives in Queensland, where she divides her time between teaching and writing. Everything Left Unsaid is her second novel.
Friday Brown – Vikki Wakefield
Friday Brown
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Young adult literature
Published by: The Text Publishing Company
Seventeen-year-old Friday Brown is on the run—running to escape memories of her mother and of the family curse. And of a grandfather who’d like her to stay. She’s lost, alone and afraid. Friday Brown is the breathtaking second novel from the author of the award-winning All I Ever Wanted. Vikki Wakefield is an astonishing talent.
About the author
Vikki Wakefield
Vikki Wakefield’s first Young Adult novel, All I Ever Wanted, won the 2012 Adelaide Festival Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction, as did her second novel, Friday Brown, in 2014.
Friday Brown was also an Honour Book, Children’s Book Council of Australia, in 2013. Among other awards, it was shortlisted for the prestigious Prime Minister’s Awards, in 2013.
Vikki lives in the Adelaide foothills with her family.
Grace Beside Me – Sue McPherson
Grace Beside Me
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Young adult literature
Published by: Magabala Books
Grace Beside Me is a warmly rendered story of life in a small town that interweaves the mundane with the profound and the spiritual.
Told through the eyes of teenager, Fuzzy Mac, awkward episodes of teen rivalry and romance sit alongside the mystery of Nan’s visions and a ghostly encounter. Against a backdrop of quirky characters, including the holocaust survivor who went to school with Einstein and the little priest always rushing off to bury someone before the heat gets to them, Grace Beside Me is full of humour and timely wisdom.
About the author
Sue McPherson
Sue McPherson is a visual artist and proud Wiradjuri woman living in Eumundi, Queensland. Inspired to write by her two teenage sons, Sue took a writing workshop in Coolum and, three months later, started writing Grace Beside Me. She has since gone on to write the 12-minute short drama, Nan and a Whole Lot of Trouble, for ABC TV, which aired in 2016.
In 2017, Grace Beside Me was commissioned by NITV to be its first ever scripted live-action series. In an Australian first, the series will consist of 13 episodes to be screened on NITV, ABC, and the Disney Channel.
The Children of the King – Sonya Hartnett
The Children of the King
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Young adult literature
Published by: Penguin Random House
Three children have been sent to live in the countryside, safe from the war in London. When they find two boys hiding in a castle, the past and future come together to make an extraordinary adventure.
Winner of the 2013 CBCA Book of the Year – Younger Readers
About the author
Sonya Hartnett
Sonya Hartnett's work has won numerous Australian and international literary prizes and has been published around the world.
Uniquely, she is acclaimed for her stories for adults, young adults and children.
Her accolades include the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Of A Boy), The Age Book of the Year (Of A Boy), the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize (Thursday's Child), the Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year for both Older and Younger Readers (Forest, The Silver Donkey, The Ghost's Child, The Midnight Zoo and The Children of the King), the Victorian Premier's Literary Award (Surrender), shortlistings for the Miles Franklin Award (for both Of a Boy and Butterfly) and the CILP Carnegie Medal (The Midnight Zoo). Hartnett is also the first Australian recipient of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (2008).
Golden Boys, Sonya’s third novel for adults, was shortlisted for the 2015 Miles Franklin Literary Award and she also published her third picture book, The Wild One. She has been shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards three times.
Poetry
WINNER: Jam Tree Gully – John Kinsella
Jam Tree Gully
WINNER
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Poetry
Published by: Wiley Publishing
Winner
In this daring new collection, Australia's preeminent environmental poet confronts the legacy of Thoreau's Walden. With Walden as his inspiration, John Kinsella moved with his family back to rural Australia, where he wrote the poems in this original collection exploring the nature of our responsibility and connection to the land.
One of the most original and poignantly authentic poets writing in English."—Harold Bloom
About the author
John Kinsella
John Kinsella is a poet, novelist, critic, and editor. The author of more than forty books, he is the international editor of the Kenyon Review and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University. He lives in Western Australia.
Judges’ comments
John Kinsella's poems are an observation of his surrounds in the Western Australian farming community – the animals, the weather, the people. Kinsella shows his extraordinary skills, using a wide variation of verse forms to great effect in this outstanding collection.
This book of poems is an extraordinarily attentive chronicle of living in a West Australian place. Referencing Thoreau's wish, in Walden, to 'live deliberately', Kinsella's poems offer keen observations of animal life (wild, feral and domesticated), landscape, weather, and the social life of Australian country towns and the small properties that encircle them.
These are also poems of great technical virtuosity and variation, exploring traditional verse forms and freer, experimental modes of language. They capture the continual unexpectedness of the world, its violent weather, the proximate lives of animals, the depredations of settlement, the demands of the seasons. This is a poetic voice finely tuned to the shocks and delight of country life.
Liquid Nitrogen – Jennifer Maiden
Liquid Nitrogen
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Poetry
Published by: Giramondo Publishing
Jennifer Maiden’s ‘weaving’ poems are like verse essays or conversations, in which the political issues of our time and the figures who dominate them are presented with the same clear intelligence and eye for detail, as the most personal aspects of the poet’s experience. This is the quality of liquid nitrogen which gives the book its title – ‘the frozen suspension which is risky/ but also fecund and has beauty’ – a substance which permits intense and heated interactions, and at the same time the survival of delicate organisms. In the cool medium of Maiden’s poetry Julia Gillard is considered by her mentor Nye Bevan, Kevin Rudd shares a flight with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Eleanor Roosevelt plays Woody Guthrie for Hillary Clinton. The poems focus on the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, Breivik in Norway, dissidents in Beijing, the protests in Tahrir Square and Gillard’s use of power, alongside tributes to friends and family, the ox and the tiger, music and the power of poetry.
About the author
Jennifer Maiden
Jennifer Maiden has published sixteen collections of poetry; her most recent book, Pirate Rain (Giramondo, 2010) won the Age Poetry Book of the Year Award and the NSW Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. She is a recipient of the Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement.
The Sunlit Zone – Lisa Jacobson
The Sunlit Zone
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Poetry
Published by: Five Island Press
Set on the east coast of Australia between 2020 and 2050, this surprising verse novel imagines a futuristic world in which technology has changed the daily texture of human life but life itself hasn’t changed much at all. Jacobson uses a casual-seeming voice that belies the craft and care in the writing. In a world radically different from ours in some ways, in others it is disconcertingly the same. Designer babies and hybrid pets abound. Yet the love stories and family tragedies depicted have the same qualities as those we know, as do the experiences of loss and recovery.
About the author
Lisa Jacobson
Lisa Jacobson is the author of four poetry collections: Hair & Skin & Teeth (Five islands Press, 1995); The Sunlit Zone (Five Islands Press, 2012), which won the Adelaide Festival John Bray Poetry Award and was shortlisted in four other national awards; South in the World (UWA Publishing, 2014) and The Asylum Poems (IPSI, 2016). She lives in Melbourne, and is an Honorary Research Fellow at La Trobe University.
Burning Rice – Eileen Chong
Burning Rice
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Poetry
Published by: Pitt Street Poetry (2012 publisher Australian Poetry)
These poems were written while Eileen Chong was an Australian Poetry Fellow in 2011-2012, mentored by Anthony Lawrence.
The first edition of Burning Rice was published by Australian Poetry in 2012 as part of its New Voices series and sold out in record time.
In 2012 it was highly commended for the “Anne Elder Award for a first collection of poetry published in Australia.
The poems in Burning Rice pull you in with their sumptuous images and seductive memories. Eileen Chong’s poetry is a gift of the interconnection of past and present, the personal and the communal. Judith Beveridge
About the author
Eileen Chong
Eileen Chong was born in Singapore. Her first collection, Burning Rice, was published in 2010. It was shortlisted for the Anne Elder Award 2012, the Australian Arts in Asia Award 2013, and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award 2013. Her second collection, Peony (2014) and third collection Painting Red Orchids (2016) were published by Pitt Street Poetry. She has lived in Sydney since 2007.
Crimson Crop – Peter Rose
Crimson Crop
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Poetry
Published by: UWA Publishing
This volume has at its core a series of elegies, several about his late father Bob Rose (a respected Australian Rules footballer and coach), thus continuing the themes of his bestselling memoir Rose Boys (2001). The volume also contains new ‘Catullan’ poems, imitations of Catullus that Rose has been writing and publishing since the 1980s.
Crimson Crop is elegant, poignant and, at times, wickedly droll.
About the author
Peter Rose
Peter Rose is a poet, memoirist, novelist and critic. Born in Wangaratta, Peter grew up in country Victoria and studied at Monash University in Melbourne. Throughout the 1990s he was a publisher at the Melbourne Oxford University Press. Since 2001 he has been the editor of the Australian Book Review. His first collection of poetry, The House of Vitriol, appeared in 1990.
Peter has also written two novels and edited two poetry collections. In 2012 Rose’s fifth poetry collection Crimson Crop won the Queensland Literary Award and was shortlisted for both the 2012 Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards and the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. His family memoir, Rose Boys, published in 2001, won the National Biography Award. The Subject of Feeling (UWA Publishing, 2015) is his latest collection.
Australian history
WINNER: Farewell, Dear People – Ross McMullin
Farewell, Dear People
WINNER
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Australian history
Published by: Scribe
For Australia, a new nation with a relatively small population, the death of 60,000 soldiers during World War I was catastrophic. It is hardly surprising, then, that Australians evaluating the consequences of the conflict have tended to focus primarily on the numbing number of losses — on the sheer quantity of all those countrymen who did not return.
That there must have been extraordinary individuals among them has been implicitly understood, but these special Australians are unknown today. This book seeks to retrieve their stories and to fill the gaps in our collective memory. Farewell, Dear People contains ten extended biographies of young men who exemplified Australia's gifted lost generation of World War I.
About the author
Ross McMullin
Ross McMullin is a historian and biographer who has written extensively about Australia's involvement in World War I.
His biographies include the award-winning Pompey Elliott and Will Dyson: Australia's radical genius, which was highly commended by the judges of the National Biography Award. Dr McMullin's most recent book, Farewell, Dear People: Biographies of Australia's lost generation, was awarded the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History and the National Cultural Award.
He is also the author of the ALP centenary history The Light on the Hill: The Australian Labor Party 1891–1991 and another book about Australian political history, So Monstrous a Travesty: Chris Watson and the world's first national labour government.
Judges’ comments
Ross McMullin has taken 10 young men from different backgrounds and various parts of the country who were killed in the Great War and poignantly recounts the story of their relatively short lives. Amongst these lost leaders were sportsmen, lawyers, a scientist, a politician, a farmer and a winemaker.
The book, drawing on first hand sources, provides a fascinating glimpse into the Australia of the late 19th Century and then the first decade before the conflict that engulfed Europe and drew in the British dominions. It also tells the reader a great deal about how the war was actually fought on the ground by those present on the Western Front and at Gallipoli. Particularly moving are the accounts of how the families of these young men responded to their deaths. Many of them never fully recovered and the memory of this lost generation was an ever-present shadow over Australia in the 1920s and 1930s. This is a powerful and important contribution to Australian history.
Gough Whitlam: His Time (vol. 2) – Jenny Hocking
Gough Whitlam: His Time (vol. 2)
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Australian history
Published by: Melbourne University Publishing
Gough Whitlam, Australia's twenty-first prime minister, swept to power in December 1972, ending twenty-three years of conservative rule.
It was an ascendancy bitterly resented by some, never accepted by others, and ended with dismissal by the Governor-General barely three years later-an outcome that polarised debate and left many believing the full story had not been told. In this much anticipated second volume of her biography of Gough Whitlam, Hocking has used previously unearthed archival material and extensive interviews with Gough Whitlam, his family, colleagues and foes, to bring the key players in these dramatic events to life.
This definitive biography takes us behind the political intrigue to reveal a devastated Whitlam and his personal struggle in the aftermath of the dismissal, during the unfulfilled years that followed and his eventual political renewal as Australia's ambassador to UNESCO.
About the author
Jenny Hocking
Jenny Hocking is Head of the School of Journalism, Australian Indigenous Studies at Monash University.
She is the author of two major political biographies, Lionel Murphy: A Political Biography, shortlisted in the South Australian Festival Awards for Literature: National Non-Fiction Awards, and Frank Hardy: Politics Literature Life, shortlisted in the NSW Premier's History Awards. Jenny has also written extensively on counter-terrorism and democracy, most recently in Terror Laws: ASIO, Counter-terrorism and the Threat to Democracy.
The Sex Lives of Australians: A History – Frank Bongiorno
The Sex Lives of Australians: A History
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Australian history
Published by: Black Inc
Cross-dressing convicts, effeminate bushrangers and women-shortage woes – here is the first ever history of sex in Australia, from Botany Bay to the present-day.
In this fascinating social history, Frank Bongiorno uses striking examples to chart the changing sex lives of Australians. Tracing the story up to the present, Bongiorno shows how the quest for respectability always has another side to it.
Along the way he deals with some intriguing questions – What did it mean to be a 'mate'? How did modern warfare affect soldiers' attitudes to sex? Why did the law ignore lesbianism for so long? – and introduces some remarkable characters both reformers and radicals. This is a thought-provoking and enlightening journey through the history of sex in Australia.
With a foreword by Michael Kirby, AC CMG.
About the author
Frank Bongiorno
Frank Bongiorno is associate professor of history at the Australian National University and author of the award-winning The Sex Lives of Australians. He has written for the Monthly, the Australian and Inside Story.
The Censor’s Library – Nicole Moore
The Censor’s Library
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Australian history
Published by: University of Queensland Press
The Censor’s Library, by Nicole Moore, is the first comprehensive examination of Australian book censorship, based around the author’s discovery of the secret ‘censor’s library’. Combining scholarship with the narrative tension of a thriller, Moore exposes the scandalous history of censorship in Australia.
About the author
Nicole Moore
Nicole Moore has published widely on Australian literary history, nationally and internationally. Her bibliography Banned in Australia (co-authored with Marita Bullock) was launched on the Austlit web resource in 2008. She was contributing editor to the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature for the period 1900-1950 (Allen and Unwin 2009). She is Associate Professor in English at the University of New South Wales at ADFA in Canberra.
Sandakan – Paul Ham
Sandakan
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Australian history
Published by: Penguin Random House
The untold story of the Sandakan Death Marches of the Second World War.
This is the story of the three-year ordeal of the Sandakan prisoners of war – a barely known episode of unimaginable horror. After the fall of Singapore in February 1942, the Japanese conquerors transferred 2500 British and Australian prisoners to a jungle camp some eight miles inland of Sandakan, on the east coast of North Borneo. For decades after the Second World War, the Australian and British governments would refuse to divulge the truth of what happened there, for fear of traumatising the families of the victims and enraging the people.
The prisoners were broken, beaten, worked to death, thrown into bamboo cages on the slightest pretext, starved and subjected to tortures so ingenious and hideous that none survived the onslaught with their minds intact, and only an incredibly resilient few managed to withstand the pain without yielding to the hated Kempei-tai, the Japanese military police.
But this was only the beginning of the nightmare. In late 1944, Allied aircraft were attacking the coastal towns of Sandakan and Jesselton. To escape the bombardment, the Japanese resolved to abandon the Sandakan Prison Camp and move 250 miles inland to Ranau, taking the prisoners with them as slave labour, carriers and draught horses. Their journey became known as the Sandakan Death Marches. Of the 1000-plus prisoners sent on the Death Marches, only six – all of them Australians – survived.
This important and harrowing book narrates the full story of Sandakan, as told through the experiences of many of the participants. Paul Ham has interviewed the families of survivors and the deceased, in Australia, Britain and Borneo, and consulted thousands of court documents in an effort to piece together exactly what happened to the people who suffered and died in British North Borneo, and who was responsible.
About the author
Paul Ham
Paul Ham is the author of Hiroshima Nagasaki (2011), Vietnam: The Australian War (2007) and Kokoda (2004). Vietnam won the New South Wales Premier's Prize for Australian History and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Prize for Non-Fiction (2008). Kokoda was shortlisted for the Walkley Award for Non-Fiction and the New South Wales Premier's Prize for Non-Fiction.
Sandakan: The Untold Story of the Sandakan Death Marches was published in 2012 and was shortlisted for the 2013 Prime Minister's Literary Award for History.
A former Sunday Times correspondent, with a Master's degree in Economic History from the London School of Economics, Paul now devotes most of his time to writing history. He lives in Paris and Sydney with his family.
Non-fiction
WINNER: The Australian Moment – George Megalogenis
The Australian Moment
WINNER
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Non-fiction
Published by: Penguin Random House
George Megalogenis, one of our most respected political and economic writers, reviews the key events since the 1970s that have forged institutional and political leadership and a canny populace. He examines how we developed from a closed economy racked by the oil shocks, toughed it out during the sometimes devastating growing pains of deregulation, and survived the Asian financial crisis, the dotcom tech wreck and the GFC to become the last developed nation standing in the 2000s. As a result, whatever happens next, we're as well positioned as any to survive the ongoing rumblings of the Great Recession.
About the author
George Megalogenis
George Megalogenis is an author and journalist with three decades' experience in the media. The Australian Moment won the 2013 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Non-fiction and the 2012 Walkley Award for Non-fiction, and formed the basis for the ABC documentary series Making Australia Great. He is also the author of Faultlines, The Longest Decade, Quarterly Essay 40: Trivial Pursuit—Leadership and the End of the Reform Era and Quarterly Essay 61: Balancing Act—Australia Between Recession and Renewal.
Judges' comments
The Australian Moment examines the social and economic contributions of both sides of politics, from the Whitlam government of the 70s to the global crises of the early 21stCentury, detailing how each government has responded to both internal and external conditions. While most readers will be familiar with the events of recent history, Megalogenis provides additional insights from declassified documents from the USA; and a fascinating and probing series of interviews, where he asks successive Prime Ministers to comment on the value of each other's contribution.
A seasoned political journalist, George Megalogenis writes with elegance and clarity.
The Australian Moment is an important contribution to Australia's social and political history, not least for its ability to explain the Australian reform agenda since the 1970s to a broad audience.
Uncommon Soldier – Chris Masters
Uncommon Soldier
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Non-fiction
Published by: Allen & Unwin
Chris Masters turns his penetrating gaze on the young men and women who make up the Australian Army. Having been taken into their ranks in a way rarely afforded an outsider, he gives heart and soul to the contemporary digger: how they are selected, how they are led, and how they are transformed from civilians to disciplined professional soldiers. And by sharing their experiences, he puts under severe challenge that soldiering is the province of dumb grunts.
Uncommon Soldier is a rich and powerful character study of the modern Australian soldier - war fighter, peacekeeper, street-level diplomat and aid-worker.
About the author
Chris Masters
Chris Masters is Australia's best-known investigative reporter, and is the author of the bestselling Jonestown (2006). In 1985, he won Australia's most prestigious award in journalism, the Gold Walkley, for his Four Corners report on the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior. His reports 'The Big League' and 'The Moonlight State' both led to royal commissions that helped transform the nation.
Bradman’s War – Malcolm Knox
Bradman’s War
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Non-fiction
Published by: Penguin Random House
The Australian and English Test cricketers who fought and survived together in WWII came home planning to resume the Ashes in a new spirit of friendship. Australia's legendary captain had something else in mind.
The 1948 'Invincibles' are the only Australian team to complete a tour of England undefeated. Knox exposes the mixed feelings among the fans, commentators and players about how their feats were achieved. At its heart was a rift between players who had experienced the horrors of active duty, epitomised by the fiery RAAF pilot Keith Miller, and those who had not, such as the invalided Bradman
About the author
Malcolm Knox
Malcolm Knox is the former literary editor and award-winning cricket writer of the Sydney Morning Herald, where he broke the Norma Khouri story, for which he won one of his two Walkley Awards. His novels include A Private Man, winner of the Ned Kelly Award; The Life; and The Wonder Lover. His many non-fiction titles include The Greatest: The Players, the Moments, the Matches 1993–2008; The Captains: The Story Behind Australia's Second Most Important Job; Boom: The Underground History of Australia, From Gold Rush to GFC, which won the 2013 Ashurst Business Literature Prize; and Bradman's War.
Plein Airs and Graces: The life and times of George Colingridge – Adrian Mitchell
Plein Airs and Graces: The life and times of George Colingridge
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Non-fiction
Published by: Wakefield Press
Plein Airs and Graces examines the extraordinary life of George Collingridge de Tourcey, a landscape painter of the late nineteenth century, just ahead of the Australian impressionists. When he emigrated from France to Australia he grew passionate about the possibilities of his new country, and worked tirelessly to contribute to it – not least for his Discovery of Australia (1895), in which on the evidence of ancient maps he argued controversially for Portuguese and Hispanic pre-discovery of Australia.
About the author
Adrian Mitchell
Adrian Mitchell retired from academic life at the University of Sydney in 2006, though he has remained an honorary research associate in the Department of English since then. In the respite from that kind of confusion he has managed to publish five previous books, all with Wakefield Press, and all hovering about the interface of fiction and nonfiction. These are all stories of people and communities that should be better known than they are.
Bold Palates: Australia’s gastronomic heritage – Barbara Santich
Bold Palates: Australia's gastronomic heritage
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Non-fiction
Published by: Wakefield Press
In Bold Palates Professor Barbara Santich describes how, from earliest colonial days, Australian cooks have improvised and invented, transforming and 'Australianising' foods and recipes from other countries, along the way laying the foundations of a distinctive food culture.
What makes the Australian barbecue characteristically Australian? Why are pumpkin scones an Australian icon? How did eating lamb become a patriotic gesture?
Bold Palates is lovingly researched and extensively illustrated. Barbara Santich helps us to a deeper understanding of Australian identity by examining the way we eat. Not simply a gastronomic history, her book is also a history of Australia and Australians.
About the author
Barbara Santich
Barbara Santich is an internationally respected culinary historian and the author of seven books. For many years she taught food history and culture, and food writing, at the University of Adelaide. She lives in South Australia and has recently written the history of Haigh's Chocolates, Enjoyed for Generations (Wakefield Press).
Fiction
WINNER: Questions of Travel – Michelle de Kretser
Questions of Travel
WINNER
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Fiction
Published by: Allen & Unwin
A mesmerising literary novel, Questions of Travel charts two very different lives. Laura travels the world before returning to Sydney, where she works for a publisher of travel guides. Ravi dreams of being a tourist until he is driven from Sri Lanka by devastating events.
Around these two superbly drawn characters, a double narrative assembles an enthralling array of people, places and stories - from Theo, whose life plays out in the long shadow of the past, to Hana, an Ethiopian woman determined to reinvent herself in Australia.
About the author
Michelle de Kretser
Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka and immigrated to Australia when she was 14. Educated in Melbourne and Paris, Michelle has worked as a university tutor, an editor and a book reviewer. She is the author of The Rose Grower, The Hamilton Case, which won the Commonwealth Prize (SE Asia and Pacific region) and the UK Encore Prize, and The Lost Dog, which won a swag of awards, including: the 2008 NSW Premier's Book of the Year Award and the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, and the 2008 ALS Gold Medal.
The Lost Dog was also shortlisted for the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, the Western Australian Premier's Australia-Asia Literary Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Asia-Pacific Region) and Orange Prize's Shadow Youth Panel. It was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction.
Judges' comments
Michelle de Kretser has written a brave account of two extraordinary and apparently separate lives, and all the lives that intersected with theirs that will have readers examining their own sense of place in the world.
The two travellers in these gorgeously addictive parallel tales could not be more different: Laura the restless Australian and perpetually dissatisfied tourist, and Ravi the Sri Lankan, forced to become a refugee.
As they criss-cross the world and each others' paths, never quite escaping the ties of home, de Kretser's novel assembles an array of encounters and experiences for each of her travellers to raise questions that are droll, piquant, satirical, sometimes devastating. In prose of sparkling wit, she seduces, teases and challenges her readers into looking at their own assumptions about what it means to be on the move.
Lost Voices – Christopher Koch
Lost Voices
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Fiction
Published by: Harper Collins
Young Hugh Dixon believes he can save his father from ruin if he asks his estranged great-uncle Walter – a wealthy lawyer who lives alone in an inherited Tasmanian farmhouse – for help. As he is drawn into Walter's rarefied world, Hugh discovers that both his uncle and the farmhouse are links to a notorious episode in the mid nineteenth century. Dramatic, insightful and evocative, Lost Voices is an intriguing double narrative that confirms Koch as one of our most significant and compelling novelists.
About the author
Christopher Koch
Christopher Koch was an award-winning Australian novelist. Born and educated in Tasmania, he spent most of his life in Sydney where he worked for some years as a radio producer in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. His novels won international praise and a number of awards. One of his novels, The Year of Living Dangerously, was made into a film by Peter Weir. Koch twice won the Miles Franklin Award for fiction: for The Doubleman and Highways to a War. In 1995 he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for his contribution to Australian literature.
Floundering – Rommy Ash
Floundering
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Fiction
Published by: The Text Publishing Company
Tom and Jordy have been living with their gran since the day their mother, Loretta, left them on her doorstep and disappeared. Now Loretta’s returned, and she wants her boys back. Tom and Jordy hit the road with Loretta in her beat-up car. The family of three journeys across the country, squabbling, bonding, searching and reconnecting. But Loretta isn’t mother material. She’s broke, unreliable, lost. And there’s something else that’s not quite right with this reunion. This beautifully written and gripping debut is as moving as it is frightening, and as heartbreaking as it is tender.
Mateship with Birds – Carrie Tiffany
Mateship with Birds
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Fiction
Published by: Pan Macmillan
On the outskirts of an Australian country town in the 1950s, a lonely farmer trains his binoculars on a family of kookaburras that roost in a tree near his house. Harry observes the kookaburras through a year of feast, famine, birth, death, war, romance and song. As Harry watches the birds, his next door neighbour has her own set of binoculars trained on him. Ardent, hard-working Betty has escaped to the country with her two fatherless children. Betty is pleased that her son, Michael, wants to spend time with the gentle farmer next door. But when Harry decides to teach Michael about the opposite sex, perilous boundaries are crossed.
Mateship with Birds is a novel about young lust and mature love. It is a hymn to the rhythm of country life - to vicious birds, virginal cows, adored dogs and ill-used sheep. On one small farm in a vast, ancient landscape, a collection of misfits question the nature of what a family can be.
About the author
Carrie Tiffany
Carrie Tiffany was born in West Yorkshire and grew up in Western Australia. She spent her early twenties working as a park ranger in the Red Centre and now lives in Melbourne, where she works as an agricultural journalist. Her first novel, Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living (2005) was shortlisted for numerous awards including the Orange Prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Guardian First Book Award and the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, and won the Dobbie Award for Best First Book (2006) and the 2006 Western Australian Premier's Award for Fiction. Mateship with Birds is her second novel.
The Chemistry of Tears – Peter Carey
The Chemistry of Tears
Shortlist year: 2013
Shortlist category: Fiction
Published by: Penguin Random House
When her lover dies suddenly, all Catherine has left is her work. In an act of compassion her manager at London's Swinburne Museum gives her a very particular project: a box of intricate clockwork parts that constitute a nineteenth-century automaton, a beautiful mechanical bird. It's an object made of equal parts magic, love, madness and science, a delight that contains the seeds of our age's downfall. When Catherine discovers the diary of the man who commissioned it, one obsession merges into another.
About the author
Peter Carey
Peter Carey was born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, and now lives in New York. He is the author of fourteen novels (including one for children), two volumes of short stories, and two books on travel.
Amongst other prizes, Carey has won the Booker Prize twice (for Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang), the Commonwealth Writers' Prize twice (for Jack Maggs and True History of the Kelly Gang), and the Miles Franklin Literary Award three times (for Bliss, Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs).
