2014 PMLA winners, shortlist and judges
The winners, shortlistees and judges of the 2014 Prime Minister's Literary Awards.
Judges 2014
Fiction and poetry panel
Ms Louise Adler AM (Chair)
Ms Margie Bryant
Mr Jamie Grant
Mr Robert Gray
Mr Les Murray AO
Nonfiction and Australian history panel
Mr Gerard Henderson (Chair)
Mr Peter Coleman
Professor Ross Fitzgerald AM
Dr Ida Lichter
Dr Ann Moyal AM
Children’s and young adult literature panel
Mr Mike Shuttleworth (Chair)
Emeritus Professor Belle Alderman AM (Emeritus Professor)
Ms Kate Colley
Dr Mark MacLeod
Dr Irini Savvides
Non-fiction
WINNER: Moving Among Strangers – Gabrielle Carey
Moving Among Strangers
WINNER
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Non-fiction
Published by: University of Queensland Press
Winner
Two literary lives defined by storytelling and secrets
As her mother Joan lies dying, Gabrielle Carey writes a letter to Joan’s childhood friend, the reclusive novelist Randolph Stow. This letter sets in motion a literary pilgrimage that reveals long-buried family secrets. Like her mother, Stow had grown up in Western Australia. After early literary success and a Miles Franklin Award win in 1958 for his novel To the Islands, he left for England and a life of self-imposed exile.
Living most of her life on the east coast, Gabrielle was also estranged from her family’s west Australian roots, but never questioned why. A devoted fan of Stow’s writing, she becomes fascinated by his connection with her extended family, but before she can meet him he dies. With only a few pieces of correspondence to guide her, Gabrielle embarks on a journey from the red-dirt landscape of Western Australia to the English seaside town of Harwich in a quest to understand her family’s past and Stow’s place in it.
Moving Among Strangers is a celebration of one of Australia’s most enigmatic and visionary writers.
About the author
Gabrielle Carey
Gabrielle Carey is the author of novels, biography, autobiography, essays, articles and short stories. She teaches writing at the University of Technology, Sydney, where her infatuation with Randolph Stow is happily tolerated. Gabrielle’s memoir, The Waiting Room was published in 2009.
Judges’ comments
Gabrielle Carey's Moving Among Strangers is a beautifully written account of the relationship between the Geraldton-born writer and poet Randolph Stow and the author's family.
Part biography and part memoir, Carey's book gives fresh insights into her late parents Alex Carey and Joan Ferguson and traces the author's own intellectual development over the decades.
Moving Among Strangers also reveals the alienation of the expatriate Randolph Stow.
WINNER: Madeline: A Life of Madeleine St John – Helen Trinca
Madeline: A Life of Madeleine St John
WINNER
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Non-fiction
Published by: The Text publishing Company
Winner
Helen Trinca has captured the troubled life of Madeleine St John in this moving account of a remarkable writer. After the death of her mother when Madeleine was just twelve, she struggled to find her place in the world. Estranging herself from her family, and from Australia, she lived for a time in the US before moving to London where Robert Hughes, Germaine Greer, Bruce Beresford, Barry Humphries and Clive James were making their mark. In 1993, when The Women in Black was published, it became clear what a marvellous writer Madeleine St John was.
About the author
Helen Trinca
Helen Trinca has co-written two previous books: Waterfront: The Battle that Changed Australia and Better than Sex: How a Whole Generation Got Hooked on Work. She has held senior reporting and editing roles in Australian journalism, including a stint as the Australian’s London correspondent, and is currently Managing Editor of the Australian.
Judges’ comments
Helen Trinca's Madeleine: The Life of Madeleine St John is a finely written account of the deeply troubled and highly talented expatriate Australian novelist, Madeleine St John.
Trinca examines how she fled Sydney, in part to escape her father, Edward St John QC, the independently-minded Liberal MP for Warringah. Madeleine St John's crucial time in London is told with the detailed assistance of her avid supporters, Clive James, Germaine Greer, Peter Porter and Barry Humphries.
That St John is a worthy subject for Trinca's moving biography is exemplified by the fact that in 1997 her third novel, The Essence of the Thing, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Rendezvous with Destiny – Dr Michael Fullilove
Rendezvous with Destiny
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Non-fiction
Published by: Penguin Random House
In the dark days between Hitler's invasion of Poland and the attack on Pearl Harbor, a group of highly unorthodox emissaries dispatched to Europe by President Franklin D. Roosevelt paved the way for America's entry into the war.
There was Sumner Welles, the buttoned-down diplomat; William 'Wild Bill' Donovan, war hero and future spymaster; Harry Hopkins, frail social worker and New Dealer; Averell Harriman, banker and railroad heir; and Wendell Willkie, the charismatic former Republican presidential candidate.
Together, they shaped the future of America, the Second World War, and the modern world.
About the author
Dr Michael Fullilove
Dr Michael Fullilove is the Executive Director of the Lowy Institute in Sydney and one of Australia's leading thinkers on international affairs. A Rhodes Scholar and former prime ministerial adviser, he writes widely for publications such as the Sydney Morning Herald.
The Lucky Culture – Nick Cater
The Lucky Culture
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Non-fiction
Published by: Harper Collins
A provocative book about Australia's national identity and how it is threatened by the rise of a ruling class. Nick Cater tracks the seismic changes in Australian culture and outlook since Donald Horne wrote The Lucky Country in 1964. The overriding principle of Australia’s pioneers was fairness: everybody had the right to a fair go. Today that spirit of egalitarianism is being eroded by a new breed of sophisticated Australians who claim to better understand the demands of the age. Cater takes stock of the rift dividing this presumptive ruling class from a people who refuse to be ruled.
About the author
Nick Cater
Nick Cater is a senior editor at THE AUSTRALIAN. Born in Britain, he fell in love with the idea of Australia at an early age. He made the decision to migrate while on assignment for the BBC to covering the Australian bicentenary in 1988. Finding a job as a reporter at THE ADVERTISER, he has been a journalist at News Limited ever since. He was appointed to senior editorial positions at the DAILY TELEGRAPH and the SUNDAY TELEGRAPH before joining THE AUSTRALIAN in 2004.
Citizen Emperor: Napoleon in Power 1799-1815 – Philip Dwyer
Citizen Emperor: Napoleon in Power 1799-1815
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Non-fiction
Published by: Bloomsbury Publishing
This second volume of Philip Dwyer's outstanding biography sheds further light on one of the great figures of history. After a meteoric rise, a coup in 1799 established Napoleon Bonaparte in government, aged just thirty. Dwyer examines the man in power, from his brooding obsessions and capacity for violence, to his ability to inspire others. One of the first modern politicians, Napoleon skilfully fashioned the image of himself that laid the foundation of the legend that endures to this day; Dwyer's ambitious work separates myth from history in its exploration of one of history's most charismatic and able leaders.
About the author
Philip Dwyer
Philip Dwyer studied in Perth, Berlin and Paris, where he was a student of France's pre-eminent Napoleonic scholar, Jean Tulard. He has published widely on the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, and is the editor of Napoleon and Europe, the author of Talleyrand, and has co-edited Napoleon and His Empire: Europe, 1804-1814. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in Modern European History and is Director of the Centre for the History of Violence at the University of Newcastle, Australia.
Australian history
WINNER: Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War – Joan Beaumont
Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War
WINNER
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Australian history
Published by: Allen & Unwin
The Great War is, for many Australians, the event that defined our nation. The larrikin diggers, trench warfare, and the landing at Gallipoli have become the stuff of the Anzac 'legend'. But it was also a war fought by the families at home. Their resilience in the face of hardship, their stoic acceptance of enormous casualty lists and their belief that their cause was just made the war effort possible.
Broken Nation is the first book to bring together all the dimensions of World War I. Combining deep scholarship with powerful storytelling, Joan Beaumont brings the war years to life. We witness the fear and courage of tens of thousands of soldiers, grapple with the strategic nightmares confronting the commanders, and come to understand the impact on Australians at home, and at the front, of death on an unprecedented scale.
About the author
Joan Beaumont
Joan Beaumont is Professor of History at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, and has published several books about World Wars I and II.
Judges’ comments
Joan Beaumont's Broken Nation: Australians in the Great Wartakes a fresh approach to a well-known story.
Her lively book concurrently examines life at the military front and life on the home front—with special reference to the families of those who served with the Australian Imperial Force along with the domestic political debate.
The author details the trauma of the First World War while acknowledging that Australia had clearly identified war aims in 1914 and that Australians at the time supported the cause.
The author makes the point that, despite the cost, victory was achieved in 1918 and that the men of the Australian Imperial Force chose to remember their victories, rather than their defeats, on the field of battle.
WINNER: Australia’s Secret War: How unionists sabotaged our troops in World War II – Hal G.P. Colebatch
Australia's Secret War: How unionists sabotaged our troops in World War II
WINNER
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Australian history
Published by: Quadrant Books
This book tells the shocking, true, but until now largely suppressed and hidden story of the war waged from 1939 to 1945 by a number of key Australian trade unions against their own society and against the men and women of their own country’s fighting forces at the time of its gravest peril.
The author’s conclusions are based on a broad range of sources, from letters and first-person interviews between the author and ex-servicemen to official and unofficial documents from the archives of World War II.
This secret war was a conflict that may have cost the lives of many Australian and allied servicemen and women, and eventually, the author argues, that of wartime prime minister John Curtin.
About the author
Hal G.P. Colebatch
Hal G.P. Colebatch has a PhD in Political Science and BA Honours and MA degrees in History and Politics from the University of Western Australia.
He is also a lawyer with BJuris and LLB degrees, and has lectured in international law at Edith Cowan and Notre Dame universities in Western Australia. For several years he acted as solicitor for a major trade union.
He has had a number of books published in areas from biography to political economy, including seven volumes of poetry and fifteen works of fiction. He has also written for many newspapers and journals, including The Australian, American Spectator Online, Quadrant, Australian Financial Review and Times Literary Supplement.
Judges’ comments
Hal. G. P. Colebatch's Australia's Secret War relates a neglected chapter in the history of Australia during World War Two.
Based on letters, diaries, memoirs and interviews rather than on official hand-outs, it shows in telling and often shocking detail how strikes by a minority of trade unionists in essential industries sabotaged the war effort both during and after the Hitler-Stalin pact.
Arthur Phillip: Sailor Mercenary Governor Spy – Michael Pembroke
Arthur Phillip: Sailor Mercenary Governor Spy
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Australian history
Published by: Hardie Grant
As a captain in the Georgian navy Arthur Phillip’s integrity, intelligence and persistence made him perfectly suited to the role that history and circumstance presented to him in 1788, but landing the First Fleet at Botany Bay was only one of many achievements in a captivating life. His is a story of political intrigue, eighteenth-century sailing ships, and the race for economic and geographic advancement in a world that was becoming truly international. It is a tale of ambition, of wealthy widows and marriage mistakes; of money and trade, espionage and mercenaries, hardship and illness.
About the author
Michael Pembroke
Michael Pembroke is a writer, judge and naturalist. He spent his childhood travelling to many maritime ports of the colonial era. His first school was at Sandhurst in England in the grounds of a military academy and his last on the foreshore of Sydney Harbour. He completed his education at Cambridge and now lives in Sydney and at the hamlet of Mount Wilson in the Blue Mountains. In 2009 he wrote Trees of History & Romance, a paean to nature and poetry. He is a direct descendant of Nathanial Lucas and Olivia Gascoigne, who arrived in Botany Bay in January 1788.
The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka – Clare Wright
The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Australian history
Published by: Text Publishing
Ten years in the research and writing, irrepressibly bold, entertaining and often irreverent in style, Clare Wright’s The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka is a fitting tribute to the unbiddable women of Ballarat—women who made Eureka a story for us all.
About the author
Clare Wright
Clare Wright is a historian who has worked as a political speechwriter, university lecturer, historical consultant and radio and television broadcaster. Her first book, Beyond the Ladies Lounge: Australia’s Female Publicans, garnered both critical and popular acclaim. Her ground-breaking second book, The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka won the 2014 Stella Prize. In 2016 Clare was awarded the Society of Women Writers Alice Award for her distinguished, long-term contribution to Australian Literature. Clare researched, wrote and presented the ABC television documentaries Utopia Girls and The War that Changed Us. She lives in Melbourne with her husband and three children.
First Victory: 1914 – Mike Carlton
First Victory: 1914
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Australian history
Published by: Penguin Random House
HMAS Sydney's hunt for the German raider Emden.
When the ships of the new Royal Australian Navy made their grand entry into Sydney Harbour in October 1913, a young nation was at peace.
Under a year later Australia had gone to war in what was seen as a noble fight for king, country and Empire. Thousands of young men joined up for the adventure of having ‘a crack at the Kaiser’. And indeed the German threat to Australia was real, and very near – in the Pacific islands to our north, and in the Indian Ocean.
In the opening months of the war, a German raider, Emden, wreaked havoc on the maritime trade of the British Empire. Its battle against the Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney, when it finally came, was short and bloody – an emphatic first victory at sea for the fledgling Royal Australian Navy.
This is the stirring story of the perilous opening months of the Great War and the bloody sea battle that destroyed the Emden in a triumph for Australia that resounded around the world.
In the century since, many writers have been there before Mike Carlton. Most were German, some of them survivors of the battle, others later historians, and they have generally told the story well. British accounts vary in quality, from good to nonsense, and there have been some patchwork American attempts as well. Curiously, there has been very little written from an Australian point of view. This book is – in part – an attempt to remedy that, with new facts and perspectives brought into the light of day.
About the author
Mike Carlton
In a working life of more than 50 years, Mike Carlton became one of Australia's best-known media figures. He has been a radio and television news and current affairs reporter, foreign correspondent, radio host and newspaper columnist.
He was an ABC war correspondent in Vietnam in 1967 and 1970, and for three years was the ABC's Bureau Chief in Jakarta. He also reported for the ABC from London, New York and major Asian capitals. In television, he was one of the original reporters on the ABC's groundbreaking This Day Tonight in the 1970s. He also worked for Nine Network News, and A Current Affair.
In 1980 Mike turned to talk radio, first at Sydney's 2GB with a top-rating breakfast program, and then for four years in London at Newstalk 97.3FM, where he won a coveted Sony Radio Academy award in 1993 for Britain's best talk breakfast show. His radio satire on current affairs, Friday News Review, was ‘must listening’ in Australia and the UK.
In television, he reported and hosted Indonesia: A Reporter Returns, a three-part documentary for SBS; he worked on Radio 2UE as a broadcaster for many years and wrote a long-standing column for the Sydney Morning Herald.
Mike has had a life-long passion for naval history and is the author of Cruiser, First Victory and Flagship.
Fiction
WINNER: The Narrow Road to the Deep North – Richard Flanagan
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
WINNER
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Fiction
Published by: Penguin Random House
Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2014. A novel of the cruelty of war, tenuousness of life and the impossibility of love.
August, 1943. In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma death railway, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever.
This savagely beautiful novel is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.
About the author
Richard Flanagan
Richard Flanagan was born in Longford, Tasmania, in 1961. His six novels are published in forty-two countries and have received numerous honours, including the 2014 Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
Judges’ comments
Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North revisits the familiar narrative of the Australian prisoner of war in World War Two, working as a slave on the Thai-Burma railway.
Inspired by the public history of men like Weary Dunlop and the private story of his own father, prisoner 335, this novel makes painful and heart-felt reading. The well-known story is freed from cliché, as it examines the limits of heroism, the meaning of leadership, our capacity for cruelty, ideas of fidelity and loyalty, our savagery, and the flaws that bind together ordinary men and women.
Allowing space to understand both Australian prisoners and their Japanese guards, Flanagan argues for understanding rather than forgiveness. Past and present, war and peace, Australia and Japan, illicit and sanctioned passions are interwoven to show the complexity of human experience. This is a novel that is grand in both its ambitions and its achievement.
WINNER: A World of Other People – Steven Carroll
A World of Other People
WINNER
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Fiction
Published by: Harper Collins
A World of Other People is a life-affirming evocation of love in war time, when every decision, and every day, matters.
Set in 1941 during the Blitz, Steven Carroll's cinematic new novel traces the love affair of Jim, an Australian pilot in Bomber Command, and Iris, a forthright young Londoner, finding her voice as a writer. Haunted by secrets and malign coincidence, the couple struggles to build a future free of society's thin-lipped disapproval. Iris shares rooftop fire watching duties with the poet TS Eliot, who unwittingly seals their fate with his famous verse 'Little Gidding'.
About the author
Steven Carroll
Steven Carroll's latest novel Forever Young (2015) continues his award winning Glenroy series. He is the author of nine novels including A World of Other People (2013)—joint winner of the Prime Minister's Literary Award—and The Spirit of Progress (2011). He won the Miles Franklin Award for The Time We Have Taken in 2008. Steven lives in Melbourne with his partner, the author Fiona Capp, and their son.
Judges' comments
A World of Other People is a powerfully imagined, elegiac homage to love, heroism and poetry.
It is an entirely unexpected book to have been written with such committed seriousness by an Australian writer at this time. Set during the Second World War in burning London, this tightly structured, emotionally finely-tuned novel is concerned with an Australian airman, a young female public servant and T.S Eliot, an expatriated American publisher, who is in the process of being recognised as the finest poet of his age.
The coincidental encounters between the three central characters produce an intimate private drama, set against the immense and tragic backdrop of European civilization tearing itself apart.
Coal Creek – Alex Miller
Coal Creek
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Fiction
Published by: Allen & Unwin
Bobby Blue is caught between loyalty to his only friend, Ben Tobin, and his boss, Daniel Collins, the new constable at Mount Hay. Bobby understands the people and the ways of Mount Hay; Collins studies the country as an archaeologist might, bringing his coastal values to the hinterland.
Miller's exquisite depictions of the country of the Queensland highlands form the background of this simply told but deeply significant novel of friendship, love, loyalty and the tragic consequences of misunderstanding and mistrust.
About the author
Alex Miller
Alex Miller is twice winner of Australia's premier literary prize, The Miles Franklin Literary Award, first in 1993 for The Ancestor Game and again in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country. He is also an overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, in 1993 for The Ancestor Game.
His fifth novel, Conditions of Faith, won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the 2001 New South Wales Premier's Awards. In 2011 he won this award a second time with his novel Lovesong. Lovesong also won the People's Choice Award in the NSW Premier's Awards, the Age Book of the Year Award and the Age Fiction Prize for 2011.
In 2007 Landscape of Farewell was published to wide critical acclaim and in 2008 won the Chinese Annual Foreign Novels 21st Century Award for Best Novel and the Manning Clark Medal for an outstanding contribution to Australian cultural life. It was also short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award, the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, the ALS Gold Medal and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
The Night Guest – Fiona McFarlane
The Night Guest
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Fiction
Published by: Penguin Random House
One morning Ruth wakes thinking a tiger has been in her seaside house. Later that day a formidable woman called Frida arrives, looking as if she's blown in from the sea. In fact, she's come to care for Ruth. Frida and the tiger: both are here to stay, and neither is what they seem. Which of them can Ruth trust? And as memories of her childhood in Fiji press upon her with increasing urgency, can she even trust herself?
About the author
Fiona McFarlane
Fiona McFarlane was born in Sydney, and has degrees in English from Sydney University and Cambridge University, and an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was a Michener Fellow. Her work has been published in Zoetrope: All-Story, Southerly, the Best Australian Stories and the New Yorker, and she has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Phillips Exeter Academy and the Australia Council for the Arts. The Night Guest, her debut novel, has sold into fifteen territories around the world. She lives in Sydney.
Belomor – Nicolas Rothwell
Belomor
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Fiction
Published by: The Text Publishing Company
A spellbinding meditation on art and life that travels from Eastern Europe to Northern Australia, from World War II to the present. In this entrancing book from one of our most original writers, we meet European dissidents from the age of postwar communism, artists in remote Australia, snake hunters, opal miners and desert magic healers. Belomor is a meditation on time, and loss: on how the most bitter recollections bring happiness, and the meaning of a secret rests in the thoughts surrounding it.
About the author
Nicolas Rothwell
Nicolas Rothwell is the award-winning author of Belomor, Heaven & Earth, Wings of the Kite-Hawk, Another Country, The Red Highway and Journeys to the Interior. He is a senior writer for the Australian.
Young adult literature
WINNER: The Incredible Here and Now – Felicity Castagna
The Incredible Here and Now
WINNER
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Young adult literature
Published by: Giramondo Publishing
Michael’s older brother dies at the beginning of the summer he turns 15, but as its title suggests The Incredible Here and Now is a tale of wonder, not of tragedy. Presented as a series of vignettes, in the tradition of Sandra Cisneros’ Young Adult classic The House on Mango Street, it tells of Michael’s coming of age in a year which brings him grief and romance; and of the place he lives in Western Sydney where ‘those who don’t know any better drive through the neighbourhood and lock their car doors’, and those who do, flourish in its mix of cultures.
Through his perceptions, the reader becomes familiar with Michael’s community and its surroundings, the unsettled life of his family, the girl he meets at the local pool, the friends that gather in the McDonalds parking lot at night, the white Pontiac Trans Am that lights up his life like a magical talisman. Suitable for young readers from 14 years of age.
About the author
Felicity Castagna
Felicity Castagna spent her youth living and travelling around Asia and North America before moving to Parramatta, where she has worked as a teacher, arts worker and editor for the past ten years. Her collection of short stories Small Indiscretions (Transit Lounge, 2011) was highly praised. She has won the Josephine Ulrick Literature Award and the Qantas Spirit of Youth Award.
Judges’ comments
When Michael's beloved older brother Dom dies in a car crash, Michael and his family are left with aching grief.
What an aptly titled novel this is: a vivid portrait of a teenage boy, his family and community in Sydney's western suburbs learning about life, death and love.
Writer Felicity Castagna exploits a series of vignettes to create a wholly satisfying, moving story: its short, sculpted chapters capture Michael's thoughts, moods and insights in quickening moments. Michael has the outward reticence of a teenage boy, but so much happening beneath the surface.
This is a splendid portrayal of a boy on the cusp.
Life in Outer Space – Melissa Keil
Life in Outer Space
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Young adult literature
Published by: Hardie Grant Egmont
Sam Kinnison is a geek, and he’s totally fine with that. He has his horror movies, his nerdy friends, World of Warcraft – and until Princess Leia turns up in his bedroom, worry about girls he won't. Then Sam meets Camilla. She’s beautiful, friendly and completely irrelevant to his life. Sam is determined to ignore her, except that Camilla has a plan of her own – and he seems to be a part of it! Sam believes that everything he needs to know he can learn from the movies. But perhaps he’s been watching the wrong ones.
About the author
Melissa Keil
Melissa Keil is a writer, children’s editor and compulsive book-buyer. She has lived in Minnesota, London and the Middle East, and currently resides in her hometown of Melbourne. Her debut young adult novel, Life in Outer Space, was published in 2013 – the inaugural winner of the Ampersand Prize, Hardie Grant Egmont’s initiative for debut authors. The Incredible Adventures of Cinnamon Girl was published in 2014 and was shortlisted for the CBCA Book of the Year (Older Readers) and the Gold Inky.
Girl Defective – Simmone Howell
Girl Defective
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Young adult literature
Published by: Pan Macmillan
It's summer in St Kilda. Fifteen-year-old Sky is looking forward to great records and nefarious activities with Nancy, her older, wilder friend. Her brother - Super Agent Gully - is on a mission to unmask the degenerate who bricked the shop window. Bill the Patriarch seems content to drink while the shop slides into bankruptcy. A poster of a mysterious girl and her connection to Luke, the tragi-hot new employee sends Sky on an exploration into the dark heart of the suburb. What begins as a toe-dip into wilder waters will end up changing the frames of Sky's existence. Love is strange. Family Rules. In between there are teenage messes, rock star spawn, violent fangirls, creepy old guys and accidents waiting to happen. If the world truly is going to hell in a hand-basket then at least the soundtrack is kicking.
Sky Martin is Girl Defective: funny, real and dark at the edges.
About the author
Simmone Howell
Simmone Howell is an award-winning short story-writer, and screenwriter. Her short film Pity24 won an AWGIE award and has screened at film festivals such as the London Australian Film Festival and Los Angeles Shorts Fest. She is published around the world and has a dedicated following of readers.
The First Third – Will Kostakis
The First Third
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Young adult literature
Published by: Penguin Random House
Life is made up of three parts: in The First Third, you're embarrassed by your family; in the second, you make a family of your own; and in the end, you just embarrass the family you've made.
That's how Billy's grandmother explains it, anyway. She's given him her bucket list (cue embarrassment), and now, it's his job to glue their family back together.
No pressure or anything.
Fixing his family's not going to be easy and Billy's not ready for change. But as he soon discovers, the first third has to end some time. And then what?
It's a Greek tragedy waiting to happen.
About the author
Will Kostakis
Will Kostakis was only 19 when his first novel for young adults, Loathing Lola, was released. It went on to be shortlisted for the Sakura Medal in Japan and made the official selection for the Australian Government's 2010 Get Reading! programme.
In 2005, Will won the Sydney Morning Herald Young Writer of the Year for a collection of short stories.
Will spends his time working as a freelance journalist, writing and touring Australian secondary schools.
His second Young Adult novel, The First Third, was released in August 2013, and was shortlisted for the 2014 Children's Book Council of Australia Awards in the Older Readers category.
Pureheart – Cassandra Golds
Pureheart
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Young adult literature
Published by: Penguin Random House
Gal and Deirdre have forgotten something. something really, really important.
When her grandmother dies, Deirdre is left alone in a crumbling block of flats. Looking out the window one misty night, she sees a boy who seems familiar. Together, he and Deirdre must discover the secret of the old building, before it collapses and the secret is lost forever . . .
A beguilingly beautiful book about what it means to love.
About the author
Cassandra Golds
Cassandra Golds was born in Sydney and grew up reading Hans Christian Andersen, C.S. Lewis and Nicholas Stuart Gray over and over again. Her first book was accepted for publication when she was nineteen years old. She also wrote a monthly cartoon serial, illustrated by Stephen Axelsen, for the NSW School Magazine. She sings for a hobby, has owned a map of Narnia since she was ten, and would like to be an actor if she wasn't a writer – but only if she could be in a production of Hair or Godspell.
Poetry
WINNER: Drag Down to Unlock or Place an Emergency Call – Melinda Smith
Drag Down to Unlock or Place an Emergency Call
WINNER
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Poetry
Published by: Pitt Street Poetry
A little wonder-bomb arrived tonight,
Lobbed wailing into corridors of white;
Distilling all those possibilities:
Only this head, these hands, this nose, these knees:
Unique and irreversible and here.
Serenity explodes. I need a beer.
Judith Wright’s better-known works include poems such as ‘Woman to Child’. Yet, certainly when compared with Melinda Smith’s poems, Wright’s seem distant, as if she is observing her experience rather than living it, and determined to make it universal rather than personal.
Melinda Smith’s poems about motherhood, in contrast, are vital and vivid and clearly the product of the agonies and joys of a woman’s life lived and felt to the full. For those readers accustomed only to the euphemised or sentimentalised views of motherhood which still dominate mainstream culture, some of these poems may come as a shock.
George Thomas, Quadrant
About the author
Melinda Smith
Melinda Smith won the Australian Prime Minister's Literary Award for her fourth book of poems, Drag down to unlock or place an emergency call (Pitt St Poetry, 2013). Her work has been widely anthologised both inside and outside Australia and has been translated into Indonesian, Chinese, Burmese and Italian. She is based in the ACT and is currently poetry editor of The Canberra Times.
Judges’ comments
Readers of Drag Down to Unlock or Place an Emergency Call will be rewarded by a book full of unexpected and richly varied pleasures.
There are poems with a lightness of touch, and a self-deprecating tone, but there are also poems that deal with more serious matters. There are skillfully rhymed poems, haikus and highly experimental free verse.
From its range of technique and tone to its depth of ideas, imagery and emotion, this collection announces the arrival of a major new poet.
Eldershaw – Stephen Edgar
Eldershaw
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Poetry
Published by: Black Pepper
A children’s game in an overgrown garden is the first hint of a troubling presence in the old house ‘Eldershaw’. But is the haunting a memory of the past inscribed in the stonework or a discord the occupants have brought with them?
Eldershaw is a brilliant piece of ‘uncanny’ fiction… alive and convincing at every point, crackling with engagement and intensity.
Martin Duwell, Australian Poetry Review
[A] wonderful love poem and elegy… [of] almost unbearable poignancy. The final dateless narrative, ‘The Pool’, is a high point of Australian poetry.
Geoffrey Lehmann, The Weekend Australian
About the author
Stephen Edgar
Stephen Edgar, born 1951 in Sydney, studied Classics and English at the University of Tasmania.
Lost in the Foreground won the 2003 Grace Leven prize and the William Baylebridge Memorial Prize. He won the inaugural ABR Poetry Prize in 2005 for ‘Man on the Moon’, which appears in Other Summers. In 2006 he won the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal. In 2009 a second William Baylebridge Prize for History of the Day.
Having published 10 collections, the last four with Black Pepper, he has twice been shortlisted for the PM’s literary award. His new book ‘Transparencies’ will be published in 2017.
Chains of Snow – Jakob Ziguras
Chains of Snow
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Poetry
Published by: Pitt Street Poetry
Jakob Zigura’s poetry is born out of that high style of address where intellect and scholarship meet demanding form and produce feeling. He moves through both time and space, from the ancient philosophers through to contemporary observation. He is an elegant and authoritative poet. ‘What will suffice’ begins one poem, quoting Wallace Stevens, ‘will, finally, not suffice; unless a puddle with a petrol spill / suffice to read the gestures of the wind.’ These gestures involve a straight back and firm steps. The halls resound, the petrol spills, and, as Emily Dickinson put it, ‘a formal feeling comes’. Which is, after all, the point.
About the author
Jakob Ziguras
Jakob Ziguras was born in Poland in 1977 to Polish and Greek parents and came to Australia in 1984. He studied fine arts before switching to a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Sydney. His poetry has appeared in journals in Australia and internationally. His debut collection Chains of Snow (Sydney: Pitt Street Poetry 2013) was shortlisted for the 2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. His poetry has appeared in a number of anthologies, including: Contemporary Australian Poetry (Sydney: Puncher & Wattmann 2016), The Best Australian Poems (Melbourne: Black Inc. 2014, 2015) and Incroci di poesia contemporanea 2010-2015 (Mestre: Amos Edizioni 2015). In 2016, he was awarded a place at the Château de Lavigny International Writers Residency. He will spend January 2017 on a writing fellowship at Hawthornden Castle. For the past two years he has lived in his birthplace, Wrocław, where he is at work on his third book Venetian Mirrors and translating various Polish poets.
Tempo – Sarah Day
Tempo
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Poetry
Published by: Puncher & Wattmann
Time and motion are undercurrents in these new poems by Sarah Day. Her subjects encompass the commonplace in the Australian landscape: the remnant beak of a raven, tree shadows in urban streets, industrial cranes and mowing-machines, as well as the exotic or peculiar: the world seed bank in Norway, artefacts in Pompeii, Graeco-Egyptian funeral portraits, the landscape paintings of John Glover, the Earth as seen from elsewhere in the Milky Way. These poems, individually and collectively, invite questions about the enigmatic nature of past, present and future.
About the author
Sarah Day
Sarah Day lives in Tasmania. She emigrated from England to Australia with her family as a child. Awards for her work include the Anne Elder, the Queensland Premier’s Award and the University of Melbourne Wesley Michel Wright Prize. The Ship was joint winner of the ACT Award. Her books have also been short-listed for the NSW Premier’s and the CJ Dennis awards. Her New & Selected Poems (Arc UK) received a UK Poetry Society special commendation. She has been a member of the Literature Board of the Australia Council and was Poetry Editor of Island for seven years. She lives with her family in Hobart where she teaches Creative Writing and English as a Second Language to year twelve students.
1953 – Geoff Page
1953
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Poetry
Published by: University of Queensland Press
1953 is a unique verse narrative composed of monologues and verse portraits. Together, these build towards the story of an Australian town, Eurandangee, and its people on a particular summer’s day in the 1950s. The poems reflect the perspective of a number of the town’s residents. Rumbling beneath this is the broader examination of a developing post-war Australia, with issues of the lingering effects of war and violence and an accumulation of cultural change.
Vivid and innovative, 1953 is a striking work of narrative poetry, and a magnificent portrait of an Australian town of the period, and a dramatic moment within that.
About the author
Geoff Page
Geoff Page was born 1940 and grew up on a cattle station on the Clarence River in northern New South Wales. He was head of the English department at Narrabundah College in Canberra from 1974 to 2001 and has published nineteen collections of poetry as well as two novels, five verse novels and several other works including anthologies, translations and a biography. He has won several awards, including the Australian Capital Territory Poetry Award and the 2001 Patrick White Literary Award, and selections from his work have been translated into over six languages. Geoff Page lives in Canberra.
Children's literature
WINNER: Silver Buttons – Bob Graham
Silver Buttons
WINNER
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Children's literature
Published by: Walker Books
From the multiple award-winning author-illustrator of How to Heal a Broken Wing and A Bus Called Heaven, comes a powerful and poignant celebration of the small moments in life – moments in which we sense the greatest significance, moments when we can see the big picture. At 9.59 on Thursday morning, Jodie draws a duck. Just as she is about to add one final silver button to the duck's boots, her little brother takes his first step. At this exact same moment, a man buys bread, a soldier leaves home, a baby is being born... Here is a book, a story, a philosophy so simply told and yet – in true and inimitable Bob Graham style – so rich with emotion and meaning.
About the author
Bob Graham
Bob Graham is a Kate Greenaway-winning author-illustrator who has written and illustrated many acclaimed children's picture books including How to Heal a Broken Wing and How the Sun Got to Coco's House. His 2011 title, A Bus Called Heaven, is endorsed by Amnesty International UK and was the winner of the 2012 Children's Book Council of Australia Picture Book of the Year Award - a prize Bob has won an unprecedented six times. In 2014, Silver Buttons was awarded a prestigious Prime Minister's Literary Award in Australia. Bob lives in Melbourne.
Judges’ comments
Silver Buttons is a distillation of Graham's extraordinary sense for the things that matter in the child's world. One moment in a child's life opens onto a whole world in this stunning book.
The 'silver buttons' of the title are found in a child's drawing: a picture of a duck with a top hat, cane and 'boots of the softest leather'. And with that drawing begins a series of interconnected moments in a family's daily life.
Silver Buttons effortlessly connects the reader to a moment of life—from children playing in a room to a family, a neighbourhood, a city and beyond.
My Life As an Alphabet – Barry Jonsberg
My Life As an Alphabet
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Children's literature
Published by: Allen & Unwin
Introducing Candice Phee: twelve years old, hilariously honest and a little . odd. But she has a big heart, the very best of intentions and an unwavering determination to ensure everyone is happy. So she sets about trying to 'fix' all the problems of all the people [and pets] in her life.
Laugh-out-loud funny and wonderfully touching, My Life as an Alphabet is a delightful novel about an unusual girl who goes to great lengths to bring love and laughter into the lives of everyone she cares about.
About the author
Barry Jonsberg
Barry Jonsberg's young adult novels, The Whole Business with Kiffo and the Pitbull and It's Not All About YOU, Calma! were short-listed for the Children's Book Council Book of the Year, Older Readers, awards. It's Not All About YOU, Calma! also won the Adelaide Festival Award for Children's Literature, Dreamrider was short-listed in the NSW Premier's Awards for the Ethel Turner prize and Cassie (Girlfriend Fiction) was short-listed for the Children's Peace Literature Award. Being Here won the QLD Premier's Young Adult Book Award 2011 and was short-listed for the 2012 Prime Minister's award.
Barry lives in Darwin with his wife, children and two dogs. His books have been published in the US, the UK, France, Poland, Germany and China.
Song for a Scarlet Runner – Julie Hunt
Song for a Scarlet Runner
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Children's literature
Published by: Allen & Unwin
Peat is on the run - forced to flee for her life when she's blamed for bringing bad luck to her village. She heads for the endless marshes, where she's caught by an old healer-woman who makes Peat her apprentice and teaches her the skill of storytelling.
But a story can be a dangerous thing. It can take you out of one world and leave you stranded in another - and Peat finds herself trapped in an eerie place beyond the Silver River where time stands still. Her only friends are a 900-year-old boy and his ghost hound, plus a small and slippery sleek - a cunning creature that might sink his teeth into your leg one minute, and save your life the next.
About the author
Julie Hunt
Julie Hunt lives on a farm in southern Tasmania and is fascinated by landscapes and the stories they inspire. This interest has taken her from the rugged west coast of Ireland to the ice caves of Romania. She loves poetry, storytelling and traditional folktales, and her own stories combine other-worldly elements with down-to-earth humour. Her picture books include The Coat (illustrator Ron Brooks) and Precious Little (illustrator Gaye Chapman). She's written a three-book series called Little Else about a plucky young cowgirl (illustrator Beth Norling), and a graphic novel called KidGlovz (illustrator Dale Newman).
Kissed by the Moon – Alison Lester
Kissed by the Moon
Shortlist year: 2014
Shortlist category: Children's literature
Published by: Penguin Random House
A lyrical celebration of the natural world and all that it has to offer a child.
May you, my baby, sleep softly at night, and when dawn lights the world, may you wake up to birdsong.
Part poem, part lullaby, this gentle story celebrates a baby's wonder at our beautiful world. From much-loved Australian Children's Laureate Alison Lester comes a timeless book to share and to treasure.
About the author
Alison Lester
Alison Lester (Australian Children's Laureate, 2012-2013) is one of Australia's most popular and bestselling creators of children's books. She has won many awards, including the 2005 Children's Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Picture Book of the Year Award, and the 2012 CBCA Eve Pownall Award. Her picture books include Running with the Horses, One Small Island, Kissed by the Moon and My Dog Bigsy – to name just a few.
Alison lives on a farm in the Victorian countryside. She spends part of each year travelling to schools around Australia, helping students and teachers develop their own stories.
Rules of Summer – Shaun Tan
My Two Blankets
Shortlist year: 2015
Shortlist category: Children's literature
Published by: Little Hare Books (Hardie Grant Egmont)
Cartwheel has arrived in a new country, and feels the loss of all she's ever known.
She creates a safe place for herself under an 'old blanket' made out of memories and thoughts of home. As time goes on, Cartwheel begins to weave a new blanket, one of friendship and a renewed sense of belonging.
It is different from the old blanket, but it is eventually just as warm and familiar.
About the author
Irena Kobald
Irena Kobald was born in an Austrian mountain village.
She always wanted to see the big, wide world and loves travelling.
As an adult she has lived in several different countries, including the former USSR, and has always been fascinated by different languages, cultures, religions and people.
Kobald has made Australia home for more than half her life, but considers herself equally at home in both Australia and Austria.
She currently lives in the desert regions of the Northern Territory of Australia where she works as a teacher of Indigenous students.
About the author
Freya Blackwood
Freya Blackwood was born in Edinburgh and grew up in Orange in New South Wales, Australia.
Blackwood's illustrations for Two Summers won the Crichton Award in 2004 and the book was shortlisted for the Picture Book of the Year Award in the Children's Book Council of Australia 2004 awards.
Emily Rapunzel's Hair was shortlisted in the Early Childhood section of the Children's Book Council of Australia 2006 awards.
Having spent many years living in Wellington, New Zealand Blackwood now lives in Orange with her little girl Ivy.
Judges’ comments
In My Two Blankets we see the migrant's challenges eloquently explored in words and pictures for a new generation.
Irena Kobald's text balances the quotidian and the poetic and creates a space for illustrator Freya Blackwood to portray Cartwheel's nascent life. The 'two blankets' of the title are blankets made of words. Cartwheel's story is one of making a new language and there is simple truth and authenticity at the heart of My Two Blankets.
As Cartwheel struggles in isolation, her loneliness is eased by meeting another girl and a tentative friendship begins.
There is a wonderful visual rhythm to Blackwood's pictures as Cartwheel's new world begins to emerge Blackwood has an extraordinary ability to express the eloquent silence that surrounds Cartwheel and the book communicate emotions beyond language.
My Two Blankets is an intensely child-centred book, where the larger issues are measured in intimate, human scale.
