The Natural Way of Things

WINNER

Shortlist year: 2016

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: Allen & Unwin

Two women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in a broken-down property in the middle of nowhere. Strangers to each other, they have no idea where they are or how they came to be there with eight other girls, guarded by two inept yet vicious armed jailers and a 'nurse'. Doing hard labour under a sweltering sun, the prisoners soon learn what links them—in each girl's past is a sex scandal with a powerful man. They pray for rescue—but when the food starts running out it becomes clear that the girls can only rescue themselves.

About the author

Charlotte Wood

The Australian newspaper has described Charlotte Wood as “one of our most original and provocative writers”. She is the author of five novels and a book of non- fiction. Her latest novel, The Natural Way of Things, won the 2016 Indie Book of the Year and Indie Fiction Book of the Year prizes, has been shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the Victorian Premier's Literary Award, and shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. Charlotte was also editor of the short story anthology Brothers and Sisters and for three years edited The Writer's Room Interviews magazine.

Judges’ comments

Charlotte Wood's The Natural Way of Things is a profoundly disturbing dystopian novel. She has the literary imagination to conjure a future that resonates powerfully with the here and now. The reader is invited to contemplate an ugly and misogynistic future in which a detention centre is owned by a multinational corporation, manned by brutal guards and is filled with women who would more properly be deemed victims in a civil society. If it sounds familiar that is because it is. The inmates are girls whose sexuality has demanded punishment. They include a victim of pack rape by football hooligans, a politician’s lover, a hapless tourist on a cruise ship and the victim of a predatory television producer. The developing relationships, the deepening friendships and alliances between the women inmates will culminate in a thrilling bid for freedom.

This is a novel that works as both a powerfully evocative allegory and a shockingly realist narrative—a remarkable feat in a literary culture that no longer easily accepts the blurring of genres. Wood dares the reader to acknowledge the reality that, despite an increased public awareness the degradation of and violence towards women, is escalating rather than abating. Redemption for the central figures in The Natural Way of Things is found in the natural world. Despite the remote and harsh setting, the bush offers physical and psychological relief, refuge and sustenance for this group of women who are determined to survive. Though the novel is bleak and might lead the reader to despair, the stylistic elegance that Wood brings allows us a glimpse of a future that might just allow for hope.

The Life of Houses

WINNER

Shortlist year: 2016

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: Giramondo

The Life of Houses explores, with a poet’s eye for detail, the hidden tensions in one of Australia’s establishment families. These tensions come to the surface during a week in summer when Anna sends her daughter Kit to stay with her parents, and the unmarried sister who cares for them, in their old and decaying house by the sea. Kit barely knows her grandparents; her mother is estranged from the family and hasn't taken her to visit them. Recently separated from her husband, Anna sends Kit to them now so she can pursue a new love affair.

About the author

Lisa Gorton

Lisa Gorton wrote a PhD on the poetry of John Donne from the University of Oxford. She is a poet and novelist, essayist and reviewer. Her first poetry collection Press Release won the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry; her second, Hotel Hyperion was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal. She is the author of Cloudland, a novel for children.

Judges’ comments

Lisa Gorton, in The Life of Houses, has written a highly original novel in which she has made the background of her narrative the foreground. She has taken a common place and made it mysterious and profound. Over a century ago the French novelist Gustave Flaubert said that he would like to write a book with no content, a book that was nothing but style. Lisa Gorton has gone some considerable way toward realising this essentially modernist ambition. She avoids all sensation, and the high points of her narrative all occur off stage, or are spoken of in the most low-key manner. These moments include a mother’s consideration of beginning an affair, a young girl’s failure to make a connection with a gay painter who is interested in her as a person, a ghost that never appears and the death of the girl’s grandfather. All these incidents, and others, typify what might be called the author’s contribution to the “a car went by” school of writing (walking to the beach one day it is noted that “a car went by” without any import or symbolism to this phrase).

While this is not a novel for every reader, those who enjoy observation will find it a book of exquisite precision. It is a work of realism taken to the point where that immemorial style is renewed for the modern reader. Some may remember the French novelist who caused a stir in the 1950s, Alain Robbe-Grillet, who concentrated on the physical objects informing his work. Like him, Lisa Gorton has written a book whose virtues are all in its details, but she has an unpretentious, clean and warm style which makes her remote from her similar predecessor.

Forever Young

Shortlist year: 2016

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: HarperCollins Publishers

Forever Young is set against the tumultuous period of change and uncertainty that was Australia in 1977. Whitlam is about to lose the federal election, and things will never be the same again. The times they are a changing. Radicals have become conservatives, idealism is giving way to realism, relationships are falling apart, and Michael is finally coming to accept that he will never be a rock and roll musician.

About the author

Steven Carroll

Critically acclaimed, award-winning author Steven Carroll was born in Melbourne and grew up in Glenroy. He went to La Trobe University and taught English in high schools before playing in bands in the 1970s. In 2008, his Glenroy novel The Time We Have Taken won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize and was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Award and the Age Book of the Year Award. In 2014, his novel A World of Other People was co-winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award.

Judges’ comments

Steven Carroll’s Forever Young continues his cycle of novels that began with The Art of the Engine Driver (2001). The sequence—often referred to as the Glenroy novels—explores the reshaping of Melbourne’s suburban landscape through the lives of a single family: Vic, Rita and their son Michael. This latest instalment is set in 1977, with the optimism and promise of the Whitlam years finally extinguished at the polls in December of that year. Mirroring the country’s loss of political innocence, Michael, now in his early 30s, begins to cast aside those things he associates with his youth—the music he plays with his band and his girlfriend Mandy—in preparation for a journey to France, ostensibly to write a novel. It is a year of change for many of the novel’s characters, with some enriched and others diminished by time’s march.

Throughout the Glenroy series, Carroll has forged a distinctly original style, fully on display here in Forever Young. Delivered in a prose that is at once rhythmic and repetitious, Carroll’s narrative continually circles back upon itself, allowing the reader to view events from multiple viewpoints, as if to show that time is anything but a straight line. Taking his title from a Bob Dylan song, Carroll’s novel explores the broader themes of nostalgia, place and longing; and the difficult, and sometimes painful, journeys we undertake in pursuit of growth and change.

The World Repair Video Game

Shortlist year: 2016

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: Island Magazine Inc.

Forty two-year old Kennard Stirling, son of a wealthy family, has spurned his inheritance in favour of a small town on the rural NSW coast, where he spends his days helping the elderly and needy members of the community. In his spare time he works on his own hobby—a project to rejuvenate various bush blocks, which are fertilised by the murdered remains of itinerants, drifters and economic losers that Stirling has judged not to offer anything to society.

The World Repair Video Game enters the articulate, philosophical, but ultimately unsettling reflections of Kennard Sterling, as he holds modern Australian culture to our gaze.

About the author

David Ireland

David Ireland AM was born in 1927 in south-western Sydney. His first novel, The Chantic Bird, was published in 1968. In the next decade he published five further novels, three of which won the Miles Franklin Award: The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (1971), The Glass Canoe (1976) and A Woman of the Future (1979).

David was made a member of the Order of Australia in 1981. In 1985 he received the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal for his novel Archimedes and the Seagull. The World Repair Video Game(2015) is Ireland’s first published novel in more than 18 years.

Judges’ comments

The publication of David Ireland’s The World Repair Video Game, his first novel to appear in almost 20 years, is something of a literary event. It confirms, above all, that the imaginative powers of this three-time Miles Franklin Award winner remain undiminished. The novel is framed in the form of a journal or diary written by 42-year old Kennard Stirling. Though born to a wealthy Sydney family, Stirling now chooses to spend his days living a modest and solitary existence, with his dog Jim, in a small coastal town in NSW. The novel covers just a few brief months in his life, recording his largely uneventful days spent planting trees, and helping out the town’s elderly residents—mowing their lawns, delivering meals, or ferrying them to medical appointments.

Occasionally, the darker side of Stirling’s character surfaces, as he pursues his unconventional scheme to regenerate the landscape of his bushland property on Big Hill. Then there is the voice of Pym, which habitually interjects itself into Stirling’s narrative, and which may be an element of Stirling’s consciousness, or may be something else entirely. David Ireland’s novel, shot through with philosophical asides, irony and dark humour, ultimately presents a bleak vision of our modern world. While Stirling’s response to the realities of economic rationalism, community breakdown and environmental degradation, is blatantly absurd, his strategies to repair the world ultimately present themselves as beyond good and evil. In a novel largely devoid of conventional character and storytelling, David Ireland has given us a complex, challenging and deeply committed work.

Quicksand

Shortlist year: 2016

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: Penguin

Aldo Benjamin, relentlessly unlucky in every aspect of life, has always faced the future with despair and optimism in equal measure. His latest misfortune, though, may finally have brought him undone. There's still hope, but not for Aldo. 

His mate Liam hasn't been doing much better—a failed writer with a rocky marriage and a dangerous job he never wanted—until he finds inspiration in Aldo's exponential disaster. What begins as an attempt to document these improbable but inevitable experiences becomes a profound exploration of fate, fear and friendship.

About the author

Steve Toltz

Steve Toltz was born in Sydney and has lived in several different countries. He currently lives in New York with his French-born wife, artist Marie Peter-Toltz and their three-year-old son. His first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award. 

Judges’ comments

Quicksand, Steve Toltz's second novel, is a tour de force of one liners and gags. At its heart is a dialogue between Liam, a cop with writer’s block, and his subject, Aldo, the wheelchair-bound ex-criminal. A 21st century black comedy, reminiscent of a Beckett play, this novel is a catalogue of scams, failed marriages, broken bodies, prison rapes, botched suicides and bad jokes. Toltz's main characters suffer from verboseness, but words are their way of making sense of themselves and the world they must endure. It is an argument for life and art, when death seems far more sensible. Quicksand is structurally inventive. It is exhausting at times, ranging across extended excerpts from Liam’s incomplete novel, trial documents, transcripts from police interviews and more or less significant essays on the importance of creativity. This is a courageous novel, filled with energy and panache.

Sister Heart

WINNER

Shortlist year: 2016

Shortlist category: Children's literature

Published by: Fremantle Press

A young Aboriginal girl is taken from the north of Australia and sent to an institution in the distant south. There, she slowly makes a new life for herself and, in the face of tragedy, finds strength in new friendships.  Poignantly told from the child's perspective, Sister Heart affirms the power of family and kinship.

About the author

Sally Morgan

Sally Morgan was born in Perth, in 1951. She has published books for both adults and children, including her acclaimed autobiography, My Place. She has also established a national reputation as an artist and has works in many private and public collections

Judges’ comments

Sister Heart is a story about children of the Stolen Generation quietly told in verse. This is a powerful, deeply personal story that will stay in the minds and hearts of readers for a long, long time. As a young child Annie is taken from her family in North West of Western Australia, perhaps to Moore River, though the specific place is never stated. Here she endures all of the cold and cutting kindness of state care. Annie befriends Janey, a girl from the south, and her younger brother Tim. Together the children share the hardships and do their best to care for each other. Sally Morgan tells their stories with terse lines eerily catching the cadence of each child's voice.

Sister Heart is a story of friendship, tragedy and remembering. And in that remembering, sorrow is redeemed and hope delivered. The historic scar of the Stolen Generation gave us a great book in Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence. It has given us one more in Sister Heart.

The Greatest Gatsby : A Visual Book of Grammar

Shortlist year: 2016

Shortlist category: Children's literature

Published by: Penguin Random House Australia

Introducing a new, visually engaging way of presenting grammar. Appealing to the senses and the emotions with colour, texture, humour and drama, this book seeks to make the subject of grammar not only more intelligible to more people, but more memorable.

About the author

Tohby Riddle

Tohby Riddle is an award-winning writer, illustrator, cartoonist, designer and sometime editor based in Sydney. He has written and illustrated numerous well-loved picture books, written a novel (published as a young adult book), was the cartoonist for Good Weekend (the Saturday magazine of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age) for nearly 10 years, and is a former editor of The School Magazine, a literary magazine for children published by the NSW Department of Education.

Judges' comments

In The Greatest Gatsby author and illustrator Tohby Riddle produces a skilfully designed information book about English grammar that is a delight to read and look at. The guiding principle is simple: 'Words put together properly are able to carry meaning. Grammar gives words names…and groups them into word classes.' Tohby Riddle explains this in what may be the simplest and clearest definition of every schoolchild's nightmare.

The Greatest Gatsby shows that grammar is mostly a game that has rules and then smartly demonstrates what those rules look like—literally—using a string of visual puns. Rather than give us rules and their tedious exceptions, Riddle virtually performs the concepts in visual terms.

Riddle's design draws upon letterpress, text written on an old typewriter, collage and found images. Riddle has shown in numerous books already that he is the sly master of diversity and he makes light work of one of the heaviest topics known to schoolchildren everywhere and in all times. Here at last is a book for young people about grammar that is, astonishingly, both a pleasure to look at and to read.

Adelaide's Secret World

Shortlist year: 2016

Shortlist category: Children's literature

Published by: Allen & Unwin

Adelaide leads a quiet life in the midst of the city. At night she listens to the song of the stars, but during the day she watches over the others like her—the still ones, the quiet ones, those who dance and dream alone.

Little does Adelaide know her secret world will soon be transformed into something unexpected and full of joy.

About the author

Elise Hurst

Elise Hurst is an illustrator and author of children's books, as well as a traditional artist. She has illustrated more than 50 books over the years. The Night Garden (ABC Books), which she wrote and illustrated, was shortlisted for a Children's Book Council of Australia award in 2008. She lives in Melbourne with her husband, Peter, and their twin boys.

Judges’ comments

In Greek mythology the 'red thread' helps a king escape from the labyrinth. In Chinese tradition the red thread joins people who will one day meet and help each other. In Adelaide's Secret World, by writer and artist Elise Hurst, a red thread ultimately brings together two lonely dreamers and revives a world once full of bustling wonders. Adelaide lives alone in a place that had once been a creative haven. To escape her loneliness, Adelaide ventures into the city where she encounters a creator just like herself. And when she comes into possession of their special book, Adelaide knows just what to do.

Artist Elise Hurst creates a richly imagined world with a palette of velvety reds, deep blues and her anthropomorphic characters include a hare, bears, a lion, foxes, cats and even the occasional human. Her sumptuous images render the line between fancy and realism permeable and enchant the reader more with each reading. Adelaide's Secret World contains enigmas that invite the reader to imagine other realities and a rich inner world.

Perfect

Shortlist year: 2016

Shortlist category: Children's literature

Published by: Hardie Grant Egmont

On a perfect day, the hours stretch endlessly ahead. Scribbling with chalk, running with kites, digging for shells, paddling, climbing, and dreaming. Hour unfolds upon hour, with reassuring comfort and sleep beckoning at the end.

Children's Book Council of Australia (CBCA) shortlisted author, Danny Parker captures the simplicity, spontaneity and freedom of an idyllic childhood. Kate Greenaway and multiple CBCA winner Freya Blackwood's paintings of three children roaming a rolling beachside idyll capture the light—and even the smell and feel—of a perfect summer day.

About the author

Danny Parker

Danny lives with his wife and two children in sunny Perth. They have two dogs (Barney and Charlie) and a cat (Tiny). Danny arrived here from the UK on something of an adventure and is glad to say it's turned out to be an awfully big adventure.

About the illustrator

Freya Blackwood

Freya grew up in Orange, New South Wales, and produced many illustrated books as a child. She loves creating characters, giving them emotions and their own small world to live in. She lives in Orange with her divine daughter Ivy, a rather naughty whippet called Pivot and four noisy chickens.

Judges’ comments

Three small children pass a perfect day as they play, explore and discover the domestic and the natural world around them. Remarkably, and rather delightfully, these adventures take place without the hovering presence of adults. Children truly are the centre of the world in this book. Only a stripy grey cat is there through the day. They make cakes and draw on pavements with chalk, dig holes at the beach, climb on a rock walls and a tree, wave at a yacht, fly kites and revel in the coast and farmland that surrounds them.

There is lightness and strength in Freya Blackwood's images of children. She designs her pages and paces the book with a filmmaker's eye, exploiting unusual angles and tracking her young characters in the world. There is softness, almost a silence surrounding the children. Danny Parker's rhymed text offers clear navigation and leaves more than enough space for young readers and their elders to explore their world again and again and again. Perfect.

Mr Huff

Shortlist year: 2016

Shortlist category: Children's literature

Published by: Penguin Random House Australia

Award-winning and much-loved author and illustrator Anna Walker gives us a gentle, poignant, affirming and wise picture book sure to delight all ages. Mr Huff is a story about the clouds and the sunshine in each of our lives.  Bill is having a bad day. Mr Huff is following him around and making everything seem difficult. Bill tries to get rid of him, but Mr Huff just gets bigger and bigger! Then they both stop, and a surprising thing happens…

About the author

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 as author/illustrator with Penguin, Mr Huff, is an exploration of how kids deal with the worrying feelings that can accompany a bad day.

Judges’ comments

Nothing is going right today for Bill. His favourite socks are missing and his cereal is soggy. That cloud of concern has grown bigger and turned into its own depressing presence. Mr Huff is an exquisitely drawn and designed book about a child's anxiety, depression and resilience. Anna Walker's seamless images—digitally composed from etchings, gouache, pencil and collage—produce an arrangement so light and right to explore a child's experience of anxiety, depression and resilience.

In rendering those grey feelings into the shape-shifting figure of Mr Huff, here is a picture book that allows young readers to see and name a nameless dread. The interplay between Bill and Mr Huff is perfectly weighted. Mr Huff is first a stranger, then an unwelcome guest, then a deep enemy and something to be confronted. Bill's world is laced with tenderness and profound empathy.
As a storyteller Walker shows young readers that in his struggle, Bill's feeling will pass, and that a day that starts out cloudy with a chance of showers can be followed with the chance of sunshine.

The Hazards

WINNER

Shortlist year: 2016

Shortlist category: Poetry

Published by: University of Queensland Press

Charged with fierce imagination and swift lyricism, Holland-Batt’s cosmopolitan poems reflect a predatory world rife with hazards both real and imagined. Opening with a vision of a leveret’s agonising death by myxomatosis and closing with a lover disappearing into dangerous waters, this collection careens through diverse geographical territory—from haunted post-colonial landscapes in Australia to brutal animal hierarchies in the cloud forests of Nicaragua. Engaging everywhere with questions of violence and loss, erasure and extinction, The Hazards inhabits unsettling terrain, unafraid to veer straight into turbulence.

About the author

Sarah Holland-Batt

Sarah Holland-Batt is the recipient of the WG Walker Memorial Fulbright Scholarship, Yaddo and MacDowell fellowships, and an Australia Council Literature Residency at the BR Whiting Studio in Rome, among other honours. Her first book, Aria (UQP, 2008), won a number of literary awards. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from New York University, and First Class Honours in Literature and a Master of Philosophy in English from the University of Queensland. She is presently a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Queensland University of Technology. The Hazards is her second collection of poetry.

Judges’ comments

Sarah Holland-Batt, in The Hazards, writes about birds and animals and plants in closely focused detail. Many of her poems also respond to paintings and other artworks. The settings she depicts range over the world like a travel brochure. Yet the strength of her writing is not in its content, or its choice of subject matter, but in the rich texture of the language she uses to express ideas one might otherwise find unremarkable. She describes a toucan in the Costa Rican jungle, “in the macheted ferns and quashed nests,/ the dark tribunal of the trees”. The densely-packed echoing consonants suggest the atmosphere of a particular scene with sensual effect. Holland-Batt is a poet with as much feeling for the sound of words as she has for imaginative metaphor and simile. Portraying a vulture, she writes “his flawed throat/ makes nightmare music: a feline hiss,/ the monstrous grunt of sex, all of it hatched/ by a mind without pitch/ brought keeling down to perch/ at the swell of rot and bloat”. The internal rhyme convinces us that her writing has been elevated to the highest level of accomplishment, far above any of her previous achievements.

The Ladder

Shortlist year: 2016

Shortlist category: Poetry

Published by: Puncher & Wattmann

The Ladder is Simon West's third collection of poetry, and his first in four years. Many earlier preoccupations return—the natural environment, Italian art and the dimensions of place. There is a new focus on worldly and artistic responsibility and a fascination with the certain poise of being in between. At the collection's heart are the building blocks of language, along with the more literal ones of Rome, where some of these poems were written during a residency at the Whiting studio in 2012.

About the author

Simon West

Simon West is a poet and honorary fellow at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of First Names (Puncher & Wattmann 2006), shortlisted for the 2007 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards— the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize—and winner of the William Baylebridge Memorial Prize. The Selected Poetry of Guido Cavalcanti (Troubador Publishing, 2009) and The Yellow Gum’s Conversion (Puncher & Wattmann 2011) were shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards. Other awards include the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, BR Whiting Residency and the Poetry Australia Tour of Ireland 2014. He is represented in anthologies including Thirty Australian Poets (UQP) and Young Poets: An Australian Anthology (John Leonard Press).

Judges’ comments

In Simon West’s third collection of poems, The Ladder, language, and “speech itself”, have an almost physical presence. The “names of trees” having the same effect as the “effigies the eye now saw”. Thus there are a number of poems in this collection that explore “the elusive charity of words”, and derive from the poet’s experience of art and literature, particularly in his work as a translator. Watching “with pen poised, mind and will alert”, the poet is a witty, yet profound, guide to the suggestions implicit in language, sculpture and painting, though he also recognizes a “duty/ to the world in whose reality/ we cannot disbelieve”. He writes about “pylons towering over empty ground”, a “silver birch tossed silently in wind” and an empty sports oval. But “the grace in holding gravity at bay”, achieved by the ancient Romans in their bridges, lies behind all his meditations, which can at first seem opaque and mysterious even while one has a sense of their intensely contemplated meaning.

Waiting

Shortlist year: 2017

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: Puncher & Wattmann

'Waiting' is a story of two odd couples.

Big is hefty cross-dresser and Little is little. Both are long used to the routines of boarding house life in the inner suburbs of Melbourne but Little, with the prospect of an inheritance, is beginning to indulge in the great Australian dream. Little's cousin Angus is a solitary man who designs lake-scapes for city councils, and strangely constructed fireproof houses. Angus meets Jasmin, an academic who races in ideas as much as her runners.

About the author

Philip Salom

Philip Salom is a contemporary Australian poet. He has published fourteen books - twelve collections of poetry and two novels.

Major awards (apart from the two Commonwealth Poetry Book Prizes in London) include the Western Australian Premiers Prize (twice for Poetry and once for Fiction) and the prestigious Newcastle Poetry Prize (in 1996 and again in 2000). He has received several major Australian Council Fellowships.

In 2003 Philip Salom was recognised with the Christopher Brennan Award - a prize given for lifetime achievement in poetry, recognising a poet who produces work "of sustained quality and distinction". 

Judges’ comments

Philip Salom’s Waiting is a reflective and subtly powerful novel that focuses on the lives of four very different characters: Big and Little, Angus and Jasmin. Big and Little are central to this novel, and their relationship and the issues they face are the focus of the world that Salom presents with a sharp eye for detail and the nuances of personal connections.

They are idiosyncratic and troubled, difficult and loving. They have found each other and a way of life that suits their needs and their sense of self. Angus and Jasmin are different in both their inspiration and aspiration, but they find in each other a sense of what they need to move through their lives. The conceit of “waiting” hangs over all the characters, who are in turn waiting for familial, financial and personal resolutions.

The novel vibrates with the language of the street and the speaking voices of the many characters is brilliantly captured by Salom, whose poetry background is apparent. The suburban rooming house which is central to the novel reverberates with wit and intensity and the cast of characters that live and die in this boarding house is achingly authentic. Their impoverished circumstances, daily struggles with health and mental capacity are all handled with sensitivity and a unique voice.

Waiting is a beautiful telling of the lives of ordinary people.

Cocky’s Joy

Shortlist year: 2016

Shortlist category: Poetry

Published by: Giramondo

Michael Farrell was born and raised in rural NSW and as the title Cocky’s Joy suggests, many of the poems in this collection are rooted in the bush, which they present as connected to the rest of the world in magical and often hilarious ways. Farrell’s experimentalism doesn’t prevent him from offering moving tributes, to women and lovers, and to scenes recalled from the past. In fact, it is precisely his eye for metaphor and the unexpected combination, for punning and the letter—in both its verbal and visual aspects—that gives his poetry its humour and energy.

About the author

Michael Farrell

Michael Farrell’s previous collections include living at the z, ode ode (shortlisted for the Age Poetry Book of the Year Award), BREAK ME OUCH, a raiders guide (published by Giramondo in 2008), thempark and thou sand. His second collection with Giramondo open sesame (2011) was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Award for Poetry. He was the winner of the 2012 Peter Porter Poetry Prize.

Judges’ comments

Michael Farrell’s Cocky’s Joy is a series of deliberate non-sequiturs, of phrases resonant yet unconnected to the words which have gone before, “slowly edging towards Babel in reverse”, as one poem puts it. “We see the world as a black and white golf course. Constellations like buttons on Apollinaire.” While such sentences, on the surface, make no sense, they are nonetheless suggestive of a particular mind at work. Many of the poems in this book are nothing more than lists of items that have been glimpsed in passing by that mind, or consciousness, and as such they help to create an inadvertent self-portrait of a person whose thoughts are endlessly curious, witty, literate, allusive, with a frame of references that range from the domestic to the cosmic, taking in both high culture and popular media on the way.

Net Needle

Shortlist year: 2016

Shortlist category: Poetry

Published by: Black Inc.

Net Needle is the new collection of poems from Robert Adamson—Australia’s foremost lyric poet. David Wheatley, from the TLS (Times Literary Supplement) describes Net Needle as ‘one of the finest Australian poets at work today’. He has avidly followed Bob Adamson’s work since his early days, as he has probed the inner and outer landscapes of his environment with inspirited precision.

About the author

Robert Adamson

Robert Adamson is the author of The Golden Bird (winner of the CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry in the 2009 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards) and Net Needle. He has published numerous volumes of poetry in Australia and overseas. His previous volume of poems, The Goldfinches of Baghdad, won the Age Book of the Year Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the NSW and Queensland Premier’s Awards. His memoir, Inside Out (2004), was shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year Award, the NSW Premier's Literary Award, the State Library of NSW Biography Award and the Queensland Premier's Award.

Judges’ comments

The poems in Robert Adamson’s Net Needle are inspired. First, by the natural world, in particular the birds and plants and land-forms of the Hawkesbury River—a region of childhood memory the poet returns to unceasingly. Then by the abstract regions of literature, as many of the poems are responses to the lives and works of other poets. The book’s title refers to the “bone net needles”, some “carved from tortoise shell”, used by Blues Point fishermen in one of many poems that employ precisely remembered imagery to bring a distant time back to life. Elsewhere, the one-time member of the Long Bay Debating Society who grew up to become a professor of poetry, engages imaginatively with poets such as Francis Webb, Randolph Stow, Francis Thompson and Michael Dransfield.