One Minute's Silence

WINNER

Shortlist year: 2015

Shortlist category: Children's literature

Published by: Allen & Unwin

In One Minute's Silence you can imagine sprinting up the beach in Gallipoli in 1915 with the fierce fighting Diggers, but can you imagine standing beside the brave battling Turks as they defended their homeland from the cliffs above...

In One Minute's Silence, you are the story, and the story is yours to imagine, remember and honour the brothers in arms on both sides of the conflict, heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives.

A moving and powerful reflection on the meaning of Remembrance Day.

About the author

David Metzenthen

David Metzenthen lives in and loves Melbourne. He was an advertising copywriter and a builder's labourer before turning to fiction.

He tries to surf, fly-fish, and is a keen environmentalist. The natural world is where he likes to spend his time, and he endeavours to write books that are thoughtful and well-crafted.

He is married to Fiona, has two children, two parrots, and a good Irish Terrier dog.

About the illustrator

Michael Camilleri

Michael Camilleri is a Melbourne artist who creates books, comics and visual theatre.

His illustration work features in The Devil You Know by Leonie Norrington and on the album art and accompanying picture book for Martin Martini's Vienna 1913.

He lives with his partner Katherine and their son Ruben.

Judges' comments

When we pause to reflect on the experiences of Australian soldiers at war, we may well wonder what the experience was really like. One Minute's Silence opens with a diverse group of high school students seated in rows as the clock ticks towards eleven. One student puts his head on the desk and begins to imagine. But the soldiers and people fighting this war are not others, they are us.

Writer David Metzenthen retells the failed Gallipoli campaign in words that call to us to reflect and imagine 'when twelve thousand wild colonial boys dashed across the shivering Turkish sand in the pale light of a dairy farmer's dawn lashed with flying lead'. Uniquely, this picture book tells the story from Australian and Turkish perspectives.

Michael Camilleri's illustrations dramatise the text by showing us teenagers from that same classroom transposed onto a foreign shore to suffer and endure what we can only imagine. His images track the battle and work like an exploded diagram, breaking down to detail the fighting and death so that we can't look away.

Metzenthen and Camilleri plunge us deep into the conflict and then go further, closing with Kemal Atatürk's famous words:'After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well'. This is a book that stays long in the memory, a powerful combination of resonant language and raw, human images.

Withering-by-Sea

Shortlist year: 2015

Shortlist category: Children's literature

Published by: ABC Books (HarperCollins Publishers)

High on a cliff above the gloomy coastal town of Withering-by-Sea stands the Hotel Majestic.

Inside the walls of the damp, dull hotel, eleven-year-old orphan Stella Montgomery leads a miserable life with her three dreadful aunts.

But one night, Stella sees something she shouldn't have ... something that will set in motion an adventure more terrifying and more wonderful than she could ever have hoped for ...

About the author

Judith Rossell

Judith Rossell has been an illustrator and writer of children's books for more than twelve years. Before that, she worked as a government scientist and also for a cotton spinning company.

She has written eleven books and illustrated more than eighty. Her books have been published in the UK and the USA and have been translated into more than ten languages.

Rossell lives in Melbourne with a cat the size of a walrus.

Judges’ comments

Withering-by-Sea is a fantastic romp of a novel, written and strikingly illustrated by Judith Rossell.

It takes an old-world seaside setting, adds a brave and tenacious orphan-as-heroine, her three mad maiden aunts, a hint of dark magic, and a cluster of criminals to come up with a witty, page-turning delight.

Stella Montgomery is a guest at the Hotel Majestic where, trying to avoid her aunts one long and boring afternoon, she spies an old man furtively hiding a small package in an enormous Chinese urn.

Later that night Stella tiptoes downstairs and while recovering the package, witnesses a serious crime.

The concealment of the package, and the true nature of its contents are at the heart of Stella's adventure as she fights to escape the long and threatening arm of The Professor.

Along the way Stella finds allies including Ben and Gert, (children of a similar age), and the enigmatic Signor Capelli and his troupe of educated cats. Judith Rossell builds up a detailed and convincing portrait of the Victorian era, laced with humour, satire and adventure.

Rossell's highly accomplished illustrations (with just a touch of Edward Gorey), and the book's stylish design, immerse the reader in this world of mystery and end-of-the-pier excitement.

Two Wolves

Shortlist year: 2015

Shortlist category: Children's literature

Published by: Random House Australia

Tristan Bancks is a children's and teen author with a background in acting and filmmaking.

His books include Two Wolves, the My Life series (weird-funny-gross short stories featuring Tom Weekly) and Mac Slater, Coolhunter.

His short films as writer and director have won a number of awards and have screened widely in festivals and on TV.

About the author

Tristan Bancks

Tristan Bancks is a children's and teen author with a background in acting and filmmaking.

His books include Two Wolves, the My Life series (weird-funny-gross short stories featuring Tom Weekly) and Mac Slater, Coolhunter.

His short films as writer and director have won a number of awards and have screened widely in festivals and on TV.

Judges’ comments

Thirteen-year-old Ben Silver's family has never taken a holiday together, so when his parents arrive home and bundle Ben and his sister into the car and head up the highway, he knows something isn't right. And here begins a suspenseful and morally charged journey into the Australian bush and into a family's dark past.

Author Tristan Bancks reinvents the survival story for a new generation of readers. Two Wolves offers the intensity that young readers hunger for, while also mapping a moral universe that his readers will relate to and explore.

A remote cabin in a forest, a bag full of cash and mind set for survival are the elements powering this dramatic novel for older children. Ben Silver dreams of growing up to be a policeman: his father sarcastically nicknames him 'Cop', and Ben makes short animated films about crime and capture.

But faced with the real life demands of his threatening father, a need to protect his young sister, and his own survival as the children escape into the bush, can Ben make the pieces of his life fit together?

My Dad is a Bear

Shortlist year: 2015

Shortlist category: Children's literature

Published by: New Frontier

Charlie's dad is tall, round and soft. Sometimes he growls. Could he be a bear? Luckily for Charlie there's one thing bears do best.

About the author

Nicola Connelly

Nicola Connelly is an emerging Australian author and My Dad is a Bear is her first book.

Connelly writes stories based on real life experiences and books she liked to read as a child.

She is a primary school teacher in Queensland, which means she is constantly surrounded by books for young children.

About the illustrator

Annie White

Annie White is a freelance illustrator who has drawn all her life. After studying art and design, she worked in advertising before moving full-time into illustration.

Annie's work has appeared on cards, posters, homepages, magazines, rubber stamps and murals, and she has illustrated over fifty children's books.

Judges’ comments

Making a simple picture book that appeals to and satisfies young readers is far, far harder than most people think. Simplicity is the result of refinement and a keen understanding of the medium.

Here is a perfectly paced book that is a pleasure to read aloud and share between parent and child.

Writer Nicola Connelly and illustrator Annie White achieve all of these goals with My Dad is a Bear, which celebrates the bond between a child and their father. A dad is like a bear in so many ways from how big and round he is, to his love of fishing, and even for sleeping.

The text benefits from a pattern of repetition and clever variation while always exploring the central idea.

The warm, soft textures of White's illustrations convey a sense of comfort and ease. What bears and dads do best of course is give bear hugs, and parents and children will delight in reading and rereading this picture book. The simple pleasures of My Dad is a Bear are a pure delight.

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.

Poems 1957–2013

WINNER

Shortlist year: 2015

Shortlist category: Poetry

Published by: UWA Publishing

Winner

This substantial volume, Poems 1957–2013, contains all of the poetry written by Geoffrey Lehmann considered by the poet to be worthy of inclusion.

He has taken the prerogative of the mature artist looking back to revise poems, sometimes substantially, and to restore lines and passages he had removed from earlier versions. Displaying the breadth and depth of his poetry, Lehmann explores human nature in settings as diverse as ancient Rome and rural New South Wales, from searing satire to the domestic life of a family.

About the author

Geoffrey Lehmann

Geoffrey Lehmann is an Australian poet and former taxation lawyer.

He grew up in Sydney and attended the University of Sydney where he completed a combined degree in Arts and Law. He also co-edited the university journals Arna and Hermes with fellow student and poet Les Murray.

Lehmann's poetry was first published in The London Magazine when he was eighteen and he was the first Australian poet to be published by the London publishing house Faber and Faber with his first volume of poetry The Ilex Tree, published jointly with Les Murray, which went on to win the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry in 1965. He was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 1994. Since then he has published seven further collections of poetry, as well as a Selected Poems (1976) and a Collected Poems (1997), which won his third Grace Leven Poetry Prize, after Nero's Poems: Translations of the Public and Private Poems of the Emperor Nero also won in 1981.

In addition to his poetry, Lehmann has written a novel and edited several anthologies of Australian poetry.

Judges’ comments

Despite the high achievements of his work, and the unquestioning respect accorded to it by his contemporaries, it can be argued that Lehmann has been a neglected figure, not least in regard to the familiar measure of literary prizes.

Poems 1957–2013 is an unusual collection, in that it is not, as at first appears, a standard 'Collected Works' of the author; it is instead a complete reshaping of Lehmann's lifetime of poetry.

Many of the earlier poems have been so substantially re-written as to amount to new poems, while entirely new poems have been added to sequences such as the 'Simple Sonnets' and 'Spring Forest'. At the end of the book are enough new poems to constitute a new collection, while the last of all the poems, 'Why I Write Poetry', is not only one of the very best but a fitting summary of all that has gone before it.

The great strengths of Lehmann's work are his narrative talent and the classical austerity of his style.

Exhibits of the Sun

Shortlist year: 2015

Shortlist category: Poetry

Published by: Black Pepper Publishing

Exhibits of the Sun is Stephen Edgar's tenth collection of poems. This book displays the great range of his work, which marries technique with powerful emotion and intellect.

With a mastery of rhyme, Edgar's poetry embraces the natural world, and encourages the reader to open their eyes to a universe that physicists are starting to realise is becoming more beautiful and complex as it expands.

About the author

Stephan Edgar

Stephan Edgar was born in 1951 in Sydney. In the early seventies he lived in London, in 1974 he moved to Hobart until 2005, then Sydney. He studied Classics and English.

Edgar has won the Harri Jones Memorial Prize, the 2003 Grace Leven prize and the William Baylebridge Memorial Prize twice, the inaugural Australian Book Review Poetry Prize in 2005, the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for excellence in literature and the inaugural Australian Catholic University Literature Award. He has published nine collections including Eldershaw which won the Colin Roderick Award and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry in 2014.

Judges’ comments

Stephen Edgar, who earned a shortlisting in last year's Award, has wasted no time in producing another collection of his intricately constructed and precisely expressed observations of the contemporary world.

Exhibits of the Sun is the tenth book in a career of impressive productivity. From a clothes hoist to the rings of Saturn, from libraries and bed sheets and bodies on the beach to the Eiffel Tower and Sydney Harbour, the essence and the philosophical implications of all these wide-ranging subjects are explored sometimes in complex rhyming forms, and at others in rhythmic yet unconstrained blank verse.

There is a unique drama, for the reader of Edgar's rhyming poems, in seeing how and where the next rhyme will fall, and in the unexpectedness of many of his rhyming words, but the pleasure one can take in this process is only a supplement to enjoying the intelligence with which each poem's underlying ideas are set out.

Towards the Equator: New & Selected Poems

Shortlist year: 2015

Shortlist category: Poetry

Published by: Puncher & Wattman

A substantial volume of poetry by Alex Skovron spanning some thirty years of writing, it opens with the book-length new collection Towards the Equator, then continues with poems selected from his five previous collections, book by book, from The Rearrangement (1988) to the prose-poems of Autographs(2008).

The poetry encompasses a broad range of interests, concerns, styles and techniques. Among the poetry's preoccupations are time, history and memory; music and art, faith and philosophy; the creative impulse and the erotic; and the quest after self-knowledge.

About the author

Alex Skovron

Alex Skovron is the author of six collections of poetry and a prose novella.

Many journals and anthologies in Australia and overseas have published his work, and his novella, The Poet (Hybrid, 2005), was recently translated into Czech.

The numerous public readings Alex has given have included appearances in China, Serbia, India, Ireland, and on Norfolk Island. The Attic, a selection of his poetry translated into French, was published by PEN Melbourne in 2013.

Judges’ comments

Alex Skovron's poetry combines a degree of intellectual sophistication with an atmosphere of unspecified totalitarian menace that is somewhat at odds with the middle class security of his home in Melbourne.

Towards the Equator, Skovron's new collection of poems, is the length of any conventional poetry book, yet it carries on its back a comprehensive collection of the author's previously published works, helping to set the new work in context.

The interface between old and new is smooth and consistent, as both sections of this book contain many poems that allude to the music, philosophy and art of the Old World, evoking cities with cobblestones and bell towers, while 'the bombers are still over the horizon'.

Earth Hour

Shortlist year: 2015

Shortlist category: Poetry

Published by: University of Queensland Press

In this full volume of poetry, David Malouf once again shows us why he is one of Australia's most respected writers. David Malouf's new collection comes to rest at the perfect, still moment of 'silence, following talk' after its exploration of memory, imagination and mortality.

With elegance and wit, these poems move from profound depths to whimsy and playfulness. As Malouf interweaves light and dark, levity and gravity, he offers a vision of life on 'this patch of earth and its green things', charting the resilience of beauty amidst stubborn human grace.

About the author

David Malouf

David Malouf AO is the internationally acclaimed author of novels including Ransom, The Great World(winner of the Commonwealth Writers' prize and the Prix Femina Etranger), Remembering Babylon(winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), An Imaginary Life, Conversations at Curlow Creek, Dream Stuff, Every Move You Make and his autobiographical classic 12 Edmondstone Street.

His Collected Stories won the 2008 Australia-Asia Literary Award. In 2000 he was the sixteenth Neustadt Laureate. Earth Hour is his most recent poetry collection, released for his 80th birthday.

Judges’ comments

The award-winning novelist, essayist, librettist, and short story writer David Malouf began his literary career as a poet, and now, in Earth Hour, he has returned to his beginnings.

In his early books, Bicycle and Neighbours in a Thicket the most striking poems were reminiscences of the author's suburban childhood in Brisbane, while the most striking feature of the writing was its syntax, the long sentences spilling over lines and stanzas while calling up, often in lovingly elaborated lists, the particular sights and sounds and scents of a remembered yet lost age. In his new book he returns to that style of writing, though the memories now lie at a greater distance than before, and he has reached 'the Age of the Seven Pills daily'.

All the same, the poems in this book are as fresh and sharply observed as those that first earned Malouf a reputation, as long as forty years ago; they are intimate, natural, and never self-admiring. Earth Hour is a book that is deeply involved with the human spirit and deeply humane; it is a precious rebuttal to the horrors of our time.

Devadatta's Poems

Shortlist year: 2015

Shortlist category: Poetry

Published by: Giramondo Publishing

Devadatta's Poems complement the sequence Between the Palace and the Bodhi Tree, published in Beveridge's earlier collection Wolf Notes, which followed the travels of Siddhattha Gotama before he became the Buddha.

These poems are written from the viewpoint of Devadatta, Siddhattha's jealous and ambitious cousin, who attempted to murder him three times. They are marked by extraordinary richness of language and detail, and a dedication to sensation.

About the author

Judith Beveridge

Judith Beveridge is the author of four previous collections of poetry which together have won the NSW and Victorian Premiers' Awards for poetry, and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award.

She is the poetry editor for Meanjin and teaches poetry writing at postgraduate level at the University of Sydney. Her poems have been widely anthologised, translated and studied in high schools.

Judges’ comments

Devadatta was the cousin of Siddhattha Gotama, otherwise known as the Buddha, and Beveridge imaginatively recreates his voice to evoke the physical presence, in lush sensuous detail, of a long-distant time and place.

That voice is both rivalrous and lascivious, as Devadatta envies his cousin's achievements as much as he lusts after his wife. Some of these eloquent, image-rich poems intentionally take liberties with what is known of the historic record but in doing so they examine the nuances of a complex familial relationship.

The tension between the cousins supplies a narrative framework for these lyrical glimpses into the mind of a restless and disappointed character.

The Golden Age

WINNER

Shortlist year: 2015

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: Random House Australia

This is a story of resilience, the irrepressible, enduring nature of love, and the fragility of life.

It is 1954 and thirteen-year-old Frank Gold, refugee from wartime Hungary, is learning to walk again after contracting polio in Australia. At the Golden Age Children's Polio Convalescent Hospital in Perth, he sees Elsa, a fellow-patient, and they form a forbidden, passionate bond. The Golden Age becomes the little world that reflects the larger one, where everything occurs, love and desire, music, death, and poetry.

About the author

Joan London

Joan London is the author of two prize-winning collections of stories, Sister Ships and Letter to Constantine, which have been published in one volume as The New Dark Age. Her first novel, Gilgamesh, won the Age Book of the Year for Fiction in 2002 and was longlisted for the Orange Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel, The Good Parents, won the 2009 Christina Stead Prize for fiction in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards. Joan London's books have all been published internationally to critical acclaim.

Judges’ comments

The Golden Ageis a novel of great beauty and depth. Wonderfully masquerading as a slight story about a moment in Australian history, and set in the insular and parochial Perth of 1954, it is in fact a large novel writ small. Frank Gold, the young son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, is confined to a convalescent home for polio victims.

Within this severely limited environment, Frank will discover love, death and his vocation as a poet. An encounter with Sullivan, an eighteen year old scholar-athlete who composes poetry in his head, while entombed in an iron lung, will teach Frank about the value of the life of the mind. In recording this young man's poetry on prescription pads, Frank will learn how poetry is made and also about its capacity to make sense of oneself and the world.

Love for a fellow child patient will also shape the poet-in-making, as will the complicated bonds between the protagonist and his deeply deracinated parents wrestling with the trauma of displacement from cosmopolitan Budapest to suburbia. Joan London's novel takes the restricting condition of illness as its starting point and weaves a story of irreducibly powerful emotion.

This is a grand narrative written on a most intimate and modest canvas.

To Name Those Lost

Shortlist year: 2015

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: Allen & Unwin

Summer 1874, and Launceston teeters on the brink of anarchy. After abandoning his wife and child many years ago, the Black War veteran Thomas Toosey must return to the city to search for his son.

He travels through the island's northern districts during a time of impossible hardship—hardship that has left its mark on him too. Arriving in Launceston, Toosey discovers a town in chaos.

Human nature is revealed in all its horror and beauty as Thomas Toosey struggles with the good and the vile in himself and learns what he holds important.

About the author

Rohan Wilson

Rohan Wilson holds degrees and diplomas from the universities of Tasmania, Southern Queensland and Melbourne.

His first book, The Roving Party, won the 2011 The Australian Vogel's Literary Award as well as the Margaret Scott Prize, Tasmanian Literary Awards in 2013, the NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2012, and was shortlisted for the 2011 Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, the 2012 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature Fiction Award, and the 2012 Indie Awards for debut fiction.

Rohan was chosen as one of the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Novelists in 2012.

Judges’ comments

To Name Those Lostcontinues Rohan Wilson’s exploration of Tasmania's dark colonial past, following on from his Vogel award-winning first novel The Roving Party.

Thomas Toosey, who featured as a boy in John Batman's hunting party in the earlier book, returns here as the grizzled veteran of Tasmania’s Black War. Now nearing sixty years of age, and a fugitive from justice, Toosey goes in search of his twelve-year old son William, left abandoned after the sudden death of his wife.

Toosey's journey to Launceston sets him on a collision course with Irishman Fitheal Flynn, from whom he has earlier stolen two hundred pounds. Set against the violent chaos of the anti-railway riots in Launceston in 1874, the novel records Tasmania's emergent society painfully born out of its brutal convict past.

Written in a bold and visceral language, Wilson's book concerns itself with the twin themes of retribution and redemption. As Toosey and Flynn, the fathers, lose themselves to vengeance, it falls to the children to seek forgiveness and forge new beginnings.

Golden Boys

Shortlist year: 2015

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: Penguin Books Australia

Colt Jenson and his brother Bastian have moved to a new, working-class suburb. The Jensons are different.

Their father, Rex, showers them with gifts—toys, bikes, all that glitters—and makes them the envy of the neighbourhood. To Freya Kiley and the other local kids, the Jensons are a family from a magazine, and Rex a hero. Successful, attractive, always there to lend a hand. But to Colt he's an impossible figure in a different way: unbearable, suffocating. Has Colt got Rex wrong, or has he seen something in his father that will destroy their fragile new lives?

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).

Judges’ comments

Golden Boys begins with the arrival of the Jenson family into a working class suburb of Melbourne. Despite their more obvious trappings of wealth, the two Jenson boys, Colt and Bastian, attempt to manoeuvre their way through this unsettling milieu of new families and neighbourhood kids.

Chief among them are the Kileys, Joe and Elizabeth and their six children, including twelve-year old Freya, whose complex relationship with Colt and his father Rex forms one of the many strands of this short but densely narrated story. Set sometime around 1980, Hartnett's novel depicts a world of childhood that is far from innocent. Her children, away from prying adult eyes, inhabit a timeless domain of backyard swimming pools, bike rides through suburban streets, of cruel teasing and bullying, and all-too knowing conversations.

While the novel touches upon themes of domestic violence, its genuine darkness centres on the ambiguous relationship between Colt’s father, Rex, and the other neighbourhood boys.

Hartnett's beautifully written novel, rendered in a seamless and rhythmic prose, is full of mystery and tension. She evokes not just the uncertainty and confusion of childhood, but also the complicated rituals children act out as they navigate a path to adulthood.

Amnesia

Shortlist year: 2015

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: Penguin Books Australia

When Gaby Baillieux releases the Angel Worm into the computers of Australia's prison system, hundreds of asylum seekers walk free. Worse: an American corporation runs prison security, so the malware infects some five thousand American places of incarceration. Doors spring open. Both countries' secrets threaten to pour out.

About the author

Peter Carey

Peter Carey was born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, and now lives in New York. He is the author of thirteen 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).

Judges’ comments

Amnesia finds Carey looking back to the Australia of his younger days, in particular to the politically charged year of 1975, and the dismissal of the Whitlam Government. But Amnesia is no mere exercise in nostalgia; the novel’s over-arching theme is the complex relationship between Australia and America since the end of World War II.

In the here-and-now, washed-up journalist and hack Felix Moore is engaged by old-friend and shadowy entrepreneur Woody 'Wodonga' Townes to ghost-write the story of Assange-like computer hacker Gaby Baillieux, born in Melbourne on 11&nbps;November 1975. The story of Gaby, her mother and grandmother, takes the reader from the Battle of Brisbane in 1942, the turbulence of the Whitlam sacking, through to recent use of the Internet as a platform to publish classified and secret government information.

Richly told in a bold and colourful vernacular language, and filled with larger-than-life characters, Carey's indefatigable book is big in every sense. By turns comic and angry, and wildly ambitious in scope, Amnesia is a novel that revels in the complexities of Australia's political landscape over the past half-century.

In Certain Circles

Shortlist year: 2015

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: Text Publishing

Zoe Howard is seventeen when her brother, Russell, introduces her to Stephen Quayle. He's unlike anyone she has ever met, 'a weird, irascible character out of some dense Russian novel'. His sister, Anna, is shy and thoughtful, 'a little orphan'.

Zoe and Russell, Stephen and Anna: they may come from different social worlds but all four will spend their lives moving in and out of each other's shadow.

Set amid the lush gardens and grand stone houses that line the north side of Sydney Harbour, In Certain Circles is an intense psychological drama about family and love, tyranny and freedom.

About the author

Elizabeth Harrower

Elizabeth Harrower was born in Sydney in 1928. In 1951 Harrower travelled to London and began to write. Her first novel, Down in the City, was published there in 1957 and was followed by The Long Prospect a year later.

In 1959 she returned to Sydney, where she worked in radio and then in publishing. Her third novel, The Catherine Wheel, appeared in 1960.

Harrower published The Watch Tower in 1966. Four years later she wrote a new novel, In Certain Circles, but withdrew it from publication. It remained unpublished until 2014.

Judges’ comments

In Certain Circles, Elizabeth Harrower's fifth and final novel, explores a series of relationships across two very different social worlds in the glitteringly beautiful Sydney from the post-war period through to the late sixties. Zoe and Russell are the privileged offspring of benign parents.

In a three-act psychological domestic drama, they encounter the orphaned and emotionally abandoned siblings Stephen and Anna. The narrative offers the promise of a love story but leads subtly to the conclusion that one can be reconciled rather than defeated by failure.

The central character Zoe, naively fuelled by the optimism of her class and with the benefit of beauty and talent, will learn the lesson that these attributes are not sufficient to prevail against the dark complexities she encounters in an increasingly unhappy and bitter marriage. In the clash between hope and cynicism, between privilege and disadvantage, these characters' limitations are revealed.

The dynamic between parents and children, siblings, married couples and lovers are explored by Harrower in a spare and economical prose style. In the era of amateur psychologising and self-indulgent introspection, much in the novel is refreshingly left unsaid.