Border Districts

WINNER

Shortlist year: 2018

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: Giramondo Publishing

Conceived as Gerald Murnane's last work of fiction, Border Districts was written after the author moved from Melbourne to a small town on the western edge of the Wimmera Plains, near the border with South Australia. The narrator of this fiction has made a similar move, from a capital city to a remote town in the border country, where he intends to spend the last years of his life. It is a time for exploring the enduring elements of his experience, as these exist in his mind, not as an integral landscape now, but as image-fragments.

About the author

Gerald Murnane

Gerald Murnane was born in Melbourne in 1939. He is the author of 11 works of fiction, including Tamarisk Row, The Plains, Inland, Barley Patch, A History of Books, A Million Windows, and Border Districts, and a collection of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs. He is a recipient of an Emeritus Fellowship from the Australia Council, the Patrick White Literary Award, the Melbourne Prize for Literature, the Adelaide Festival Literature Award for Innovation and the Victorian Premier's Literary Award.

Judges’ comments

In Border Districts, Gerald Murnane has distilled the various elements of his inimitable literary sensibility into a perfectly formed short work. The logic of this unique book is associative rather than narrative. Styled as a 'report' on the images that strike the mind of its narrator, it has him relating scenes from his childhood and adolescence, reflecting on the books he has read, remembering old acquaintances, and taking in the landscape of the small borderland town where he has come to live. The narrative is an exquisite prism of introspection, in which a life's experiences are carefully ordered and transformed into art by virtue of the patterns they come to form in the mind and the profoundly evocative qualities they have acquired. Rendered in crystalline prose and touched with an elegiac pathos, Border Districts is the crowning achievement of a singular literary career.

First Person

Shortlist year: 2018

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: Penguin Random House

A young and penniless writer, Kif Kehlmann, is rung in the middle of the night by the notorious criminal, Siegfried Heidl. About to go to trial for defrauding the banks of $700 million, Heidl proposes a deal: $10,000 for Kehlmann to ghost write his memoir in six weeks. As he writes, Kehlmann begins to fear that he is being corrupted, he becomes ever more unsure if he is ghost writing a memoir, or if Heidl is rewriting him. Everything that was certain grows uncertain as he begins to wonder: who is Siegfried Heidl—and who is Kif Kehlmann?

About the author

Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan was born in Tasmania in 1961. His novels Death of a River Guide, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Gould's Book of Fish, The Unknown Terrorist, Wanting and The Narrow Road to the Deep North have received numerous honours and are published in 42 countries. He won the Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North in 2014.

Judges’ comments

First Person by Richard Flanagan is a powerful and comic examination of the life of a writer. Flanagan takes us inside the mind of the writer as he tries to understand his craft, his subject and the world in which he writes. The author's alter ego, Kif Kehlmann, is commissioned to ghost write the memoir of a con man and the intersection of his life with that of his subject provides the momentum for an exploration of morality, capitalism and contemporary times. The loss of moral certitude in the face of financial reward looms large. Flanagan takes it all on in this compellingly biting satire.

Taboo

Shortlist year: 2018

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: Pan Macmillan

Taboo tells the story of a group of Noongar people who revisit, for the first time in many decades, a taboo place: the site of a massacre that followed the assassination, by these Noongar's descendants, of a white man who had stolen a black woman. They come at the invitation of Dan Horton, the elderly owner of the farm on which the massacres unfolded. He hopes that by hosting the group he will satisfy his wife's dying wishes and cleanse some moral stain from the ground on which he and his family have lived for generations.

About the author

Kim Scott

Kim Scott is a multi-award winning novelist. Benang was the first novel by an Indigenous writer to win the Miles Franklin Award and in 2011 That Deadman Dance also won the Miles Franklin Award, among many other honours. Proud to be one among those who call themselves Noongar, Scott is founder and chair of the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Story Project, which has published a number of bilingual picture books. He received an Australian Centenary Medal and was 2012 West Australian of the Year. He is currently Professor of Writing in the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts at Curtin University.

Judges’ comments

In his ambitious third novel, Taboo, Kim Scott attempts a fictional act of reconciliation on West Australian land scarred by a historic massacre of Indigenous people. Members of the Noongar community return to honour the ghosts of their dead ancestors and to meet land owners who may still wish them ill. At the centre of the story Tilly, a teen-age girl, seeks to understand her complicated heritage. Scott writes with urgency about his people's need to reclaim their land, history and language while recognising their place in contemporary Australia. The novel is a skillful blend of fable and thriller, Dreamtime magic and Canterbury Tales road trip. Goodwill and brutality wrestle for dominance among a band of vivid and sometimes comic individuals who represent the complexity of human nature. Taboo is a haunting, original and important contribution to Australian literature.

The Life To Come

Shortlist year: 2018

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: Allen & Unwin

Set in Sydney, Paris and Sri Lanka, The Life to Come is a mesmerising novel about the stories we tell and don't tell ourselves as individuals, as societies and as nations. Pippa is a writer who longs for success. Celeste tries to convince herself that her feelings for her married lover are reciprocated. Ash makes strategic use of his childhood in Sri Lanka but blots out the memory of a tragedy from that time. Driven by riveting stories and unforgettable characters, here is a dazzling meditation on intimacy, loneliness and our flawed perception of other people.

About the author

Michelle de Kretser

Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka and emigrated to Australia when she was 14. Educated in Melbourne and Paris, Michelle has worked as a university tutor, an editor and book reviewer. She is the author of The Rose Grower, The Hamilton Case, and The Lost Dog, which won a number of awards, including the 2008 ALS Gold Medal and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her last novel, Questions of Travel, received 14 honours, including winning the 2013 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Prime Minister's Literary Award for fiction.

Judges’ comments

The Life to Come by Michelle de Kretser is a sophisticated and cosmopolitan novel about lives displaced by trauma and travel. Five sections set in Sydney, Paris and Sri Lanka follow an ensemble of characters loosely connected by the striving Australian writer, Pippa Reynolds. The intricate narrative observes contemporary urban life at both macro and micro levels, from the politics of colonialism and immigration to the faux pas of tourists and the smell of a doomed spice shop in Sydney's inner-west. De Kretser is a perfectionist in her crafting of precise sentences, exquisite imagery and subtly shifting perspectives. Her laser-beam satire sees through pretension and ignorance, while paying respect to the lost and lonely. The Life to Come portrays Australia's multi-faceted identity with tremendous wit and insight.

A Long Way From Home

Shortlist year: 2018

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: Penguin Random House

Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in western Victoria. Together they enter the Redex Trial, a brutal race around the ancient continent over roads no car will ever quite survive. This thrilling, high-speed story is often funny and always a page-turner, even as you learn a history these characters never knew themselves. Set in the 1950s amid the consequences of the age of empires, this brilliantly vivid and lively novel reminds us how Europeans took possession of a timeless culture—the high purpose they invented and the crimes they committed along the way.

About the author

Peter Carey

Peter Carey was born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, and now lives in New York. He is the author of fourteen novels (including one for children), two volumes of short stories, and two books on travel. Amongst other prizes, Carey has won the Man 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

Peter Carey's A Long Way From Home heralds the novelist's return to the fertile stomping grounds of Bacchus Marsh, his childhood home and frequent literary touchstone. Carey's rollicking, technicolour imagination is at full throttle in his descriptions of the Redex Trial: a bone-rattling and perilous trip around Australia that brings his three companions into contact with the vast continent in a way they have never experienced before. But the resulting journey becomes something far larger, stranger and more powerful than a car race across Australia's plains: it morphs into an interrogation of what home is, what it can mean, and how history can rarely be settled by maps or narratives found in books. A Long Way From Home shows Carey in high form, balancing the antic and the deadly serious on a knife's edge, and marks a powerful contribution to his oeuvre.

Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria

WINNER

Shortlist year: 2018

Shortlist category: Poetry

Published by: Giramondo Publishing

Suffering from a fatal disease, Lucien Gracq travels to Paris to complete the epic poem he is writing. He joins a secret writers' society, le club des fugitifs, that guarantees to publish the work of its members anonymously, thus relieving them of the burdens of life and the disappointments of authorship. Gracq finds himself crossing paths with a parade of masters of identity, connoisseurs of eroticism and theorists of game. He flees from the deathly allure of the Fugitives—but it may be too late. Blindness and Rage throws down a challenge to the limits of the novel form.

About the author

Brian Castro

Brian Castro is the author of the prize-winning Australian classic Shanghai Dancing and recipient of the 2014 Patrick White Literary Award. His recent novels include The Garden Book and The Bath Fugues, both shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and Street to Street, loosely based on the life of the poet Christopher Brennan. He is Professor of creative writing at Adelaide University.

Judges’ comments

Blindness and Rage is a verse novel—composed of thirty-four cantos—notable for its mordant wit, its rich allusiveness and the invigorating fluency of its verse. Characterised by its author as a 'phantasmagoria', it describes the adventures of a terminally ill poet from Adelaide named Lucien Gracq, as he undertakes a final journey through the seamy underbelly of the literary world in the hope of realising his desire to complete his own epic poem. Blindness and Rage displays the formal inventiveness that has long been a feature of Brian Castro's work, but it is also an extremely funny book, packed with jokes and wordplay that wrings considerable delight from Gracq's gloomy outlook. Blindness and Rage is a wicked satire on pretension and futility, a poem about ambition and literary endeavour as paths to frustration and failure, but it is itself a poem that manages to avoid these pitfalls and achieve a brilliant success.

Archipelago

Shortlist year: 2018

Shortlist category: Poetry

Published by: Vagabond Press

His most personal poetry to date, Adam Aitken's Archipelago is entirely preoccupied with the experience of living and marrying in France. Much of it written while resident at the Keesing Studio in Paris, and then in the south during a seriously cold spring, many of the poems deal with art, romantic and modernist writing and writers, and concepts of nostalgia, spirituality, revolution and resistance.

About the author

Adam Aitken

Adam Aitken is a London-born teacher and writer who migrated to Sydney after spending his early childhood in Thailand and Malaysia. He has published five full length collections of poetry. In One House, was nominated in The Australian as one of the best poetry collections for 1996; Romeo and Juliet in Subtitles was shortlisted for the John Bray South Australian Literary Festival Award, and runner-up for The Age Book of the year poetry prize; Eighth Habitation shortlisted for the same award in 2010, and most recently Archipelago, shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Award for 2018.

Judges’ comments

In Adam Aitken's Archipelago, the poet is 'alive and speeding' in his partner's 'tiny French car' through the South of France. 'If you could buy the wind and store it forever,' he enthuses, 'you would'. Archipelago is a love poem not only to France—its light, food, poets, and aesthetics—but also to Nella, the poet's partner, whom he wishes to marry 'again and again'. Aitken is intent on constructing his own textual landscape: 'Paris, in my version,' he writes, is 'spireless' with 'more rotundas'. Likewise, his version of southern France is punctuated less by lavender and more by 'rusted cans of tuna, some local brand' and 'crushed plastic shot-gun cartridges'. Notre-Dame is a 'stone machine of anti-gravity' and the Seine as 'a limpid green gutter / in which the stars will shine', but these images only compel Aitken to delve deeper into bigger issues, often surprising himself along the way. Archipelago is a striking collection that finds Aitken at his splendid best.

Transparencies

Shortlist year: 2018

Shortlist category: Poetry

Published by: Black Pepper

Stephen Edgar's nimble-footed Transparencies extends his exploration of the world's visual aspect, both in itself and as a screen for the mind's projections. He questions whether reality coincides always with its appearances. The transparencies of the title are both the day lit images of the natural world and the occasions they offer us to look through them, or into the world within this one. Edgar's poems look out and reach in. They probe yet have an exquisite ear. As well as moving poems on his late mother, Transparencies has many pleasures like waiting for the delayed rhyme on 'David Attenborough'.

About the author

Stephen Edgar

Stephen Edgar was born in 1951 in Sydney, where he grew up. His collections are: Queuing for the Mudd Club, Ancient Music, Corrupted Treasures, Where the Trees Were, Lost in the Foreground, Other Summers, History of the Day, Eldershaw (which was shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Award 2013, co-winner of the Colin Roderick Award 2013 and shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Awards 2014) and Exhibits of The Sun (shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Awards 2015).

Judges’ comments

Stephen Edgar's Transparencies is a commanding demonstration of the poet's signature formal control. In poems that follow strict metrical and stanzaic patterning of his own invention, Edgar demonstrates that formal verse can house great originality and surprise, often through his comic and unexpected detonations of rhyme. But the poems here move beyond mere technical accomplishment into the emotive and tender territory of grief and loss. His self-imposed constraints provide a moving frame through which we see a son's heartache at a mother with 'only one day' remaining to her, 'waiting through the weight of each dead minute'. The poems also rove elsewhere—through film and literature, art and place—always questioning the angles of perception and whether we can trust what we see. This scepticism is frequently turned inward, and we are presented with complex instances of self-portraiture, where the poet looks into the mirror and finds a mortal and fragile subject: 'the holder / of an expiring lease'. Transparencies demonstrates that the immense control Edgar has developed across his body of work and how it has matured into fluid grace.

Domestic Interior

Shortlist year: 2018

Shortlist category: Poetry

Published by: Giramondo Publishing

Anxiety lurks in domestic spaces, inhabiting the most ordinary objects, like a drillbit or a phone charger, drawing our attention to the bruised body and its projecting parts. The elements of language take on new intensity in a series of 'overheard' poems fraught with their speakers' vulnerability and their attempts at resolution. Wright walks us through the places where this drama unfolds, in shopping centres, cafes, hospitals and bedrooms, in the inner-city and south-west suburbs of Sydney, presenting them as sites of love as well as sadness, and succour and strength as well as unease.

About the author

Fiona Wright

Fiona Wright is a writer, editor and critic from Sydney. Her book of essays Small Acts of Disappearance: Essays on Hunger won the 2016 Nita B. Kibble Award for Women Writers, the Queensland Literary Award for non-fiction, and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the NSW Premier's Douglas Stewart Award. Her first poetry collection, Knuckled, won the 2012 Dame Mary Gilmore Award. She has recently completed a PhD at Western Sydney University's Writing & Society Research Centre. Her poems and essays have been published in The Australian, and in the literary journals Meanjin, Island, Overland, The Lifted Brow, Seizure and HEAT.

Judges’ comments

Domestic Interior by Fiona Wright invites us to observe Australian life through the lens of the suburban domestic. Wright's aim is not to replicate notions of domestic space as one that inhibits its female occupants, but rather one that, if properly calibrated to the moment, is copious in its catalogue of energies. Wright's meditation on domestic interiors extends to the interiority of the self as she turns her gaze outdoors. 'Sometimes a reorientation', she says, 'presents another face to the sea'. In 'Winter Pastoral' she juxtaposes the concrete imagery of road kill—'dead wombats bouldered / and wild-eyed wallabies / vaulted the boundary fence'—against the unexpected marvel of the sky: 'I'd forgotten how stars giddy / out here,' she says. Finding herself in Berlin, the poet is disoriented but enthralled inside a foreign language: a woman on a train hands her 'the word Pfingsrosen, / a peony plucked from her own front yard'. The poet later recalls 'a white lace dress. We're drinking gin,' she says, 'muddled with cherries'. Intoxicating in its imagery, Domestic Interior affirms language, even its smallest components, as the prime constituents of our inner world.

Chatelaine

Shortlist year: 2018

Shortlist category: Poetry

Published by: Giramondo Publishing

Chatelaine is a collection of poems whose personae, like a family portrait, resemble one another in foxed, latent ways. Its voices stalk across time and space, inhabiting genres of riddle, fragment, confession, lyric and ekphrasis, returning to images of metamorphosis and possession. A chatelaine is the mistress of a castle or ancestral household, but in this collection's elegant but unruly house mysterious transformations occur, dreams project strange apparitions and landscapes, words twist and turn, references to tradition go hand-in-hand with sci-fi special effects and cinematic staging. The poems ask: who does this place belong to? Who comes as a visitor?

About the author

Bonny Cassidy

Bonny Cassidy is a poet, essayist and critic, whose first collection, Certain Fathoms, was shortlisted for the 2012 Western Australian Premier's Poetry Award. Her poetry has featured in the John Leonard Press Young Poets Anthology, and in Black Inc's Best Australian Poems four years running. She is the recipient of an Asialink literary fellowship, a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship and the Australian Poetry Ireland Tour fellowship.

Judges’ comments

Chatelaine by Bonny Cassidy puts the word centre stage. Cassidy's poetry is rooted in her investigations of language, an interest in a feminist consciousness, and her capacity for renewing meaning as a virtual space of desire. The reader enters a poetic world of 'noisy secrets' in which 'riddles multiply' to generate a reading experience in which it is more rewarding to ask than to answer: 'Question nearly everything, read it again,' the poems command. 'Why do you do this?' and 'who else owns your body?' From pilgrims to daleks, a shimmering heath to a basement carpark, Cassidy tunnels in opposite directions—accelerating through time, dreams, myth and person—to stake a territory beyond the language of the familiar. The poems in Chatelaine coalesce in a dream in which Cassidy renovates the ancestral household into an audacious new architecture of meaning.

Pea Pod Lullaby

WINNER

Shortlist year: 2018

Shortlist category: Children's literature

Published by: Allen & Unwin

Words sing over the pictures in this evocative story: a beautiful lullaby about what we can be for each other. A mother and baby, a boy and a dog run for their lives. A little boat carries them across the sea. A polar bear, too, has come adrift. When will they find land? Where will they find friends? Who will welcome them in? The Pea Pod Lullaby is an inspiring and timely story of courage, endurance, and hope... for a world in which we can reach out and embrace one another.

About the author

Glenda Millard

Glenda Millard is a highly respected author who writes for children of all ages. Her novel A Small Free Kiss in the Dark was the winner of the 2009 Queensland Premier's Award for young adults, Honour Book in the 2010 Children's Book Council of Australia (CBCA) awards for older readers, shortlisted for the 2010 NSW Premier's Literary Awards and included on the Honour List for the 2012 International Board on Books for Young People. Books from her popular Kingdom of Silk series have also received individual awards. Her novel, The Novice, was chosen for a White Raven Award in 2006. Glenda has also written many picture books, including The Duck and the Darklings, illustrated by Stephen Michael King, which was winner of the 2016 WA Premier's Literary Awards for children's books and shortlisted in the 2015 CBCA awards. In 2017, her young adult book, the Stars of Oktober Bend was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Awards.

About the author

Stephen Michael King

Stephen Michael King is an internationally bestselling illustrator who has illustrated over eighty books. He's been nominated for, and won sometimes, a whole bunch of awards. His books have been drawn in, chewed and thoroughly enjoyed throughout the world. He has also written over fifteen books. Books he has both written and illustrated include Milli, Jack and the Dancing Cat, Emily Loves to Bounce, Mutt Dog, You and Leaf. Several of his books have been shortlisted by the CBCA, and they frequently appear in children's choice awards. Stephen lives with his family on a coastal island in the Manning Valley of New South Wales (NSW).

This book grew from a poem Glenda wrote when Stephen and Glenda were preparing their contribution to the Hush Treasure Book for the Hush Foundation. They developed the words and pictures for this story together when Stephen was doing a residency at Manning Regional Art Gallery

Judges’ comments

'I am the lullaby/ you are the melody/ sing me'.

These opening words introduce Pea Pod Lullaby, a gentle but thought-provoking hymn to how we should live in harmony, connecting with each other and caring for our world. Glenda Millard and Stephen Michael King both acknowledge that the original idea for the lullaby was inspired by a Leonard Cohen song, and conceived when contributing to a publication to raise money for the Royal Melbourne Children's Hospital Children's Cancer Centre.

This story is sadly all too familiar today: a mother and her children, one a newborn, and their dog flee a war-ravaged land by boat. They journey over the sea to a new beginning. Along the way they welcome a lost polar bear ironically adrift on an empty refrigerator. Deeply evocative, the story can be interpreted as a metaphor for the many difficult and dangerous journeys we might need to take during a lifetime. Themes of courage and resilience are reflected alongside the need to trust and support one another and hold out hope against seemingly insurmountable odds.

This picture book is a seamless collaboration between words and image: beautifully crafted, carefully positioned minimalist couplets overlay the rich and lyrical watercolours that convey much of the narrative. Each image uses colour and light skilfully and each opening depicts different possibilities that can be explored at length and revisited many times. Other literary journeys are alluded to (for example, The Owl and the Pussycat). Interestingly, although we might initially assume it is the mother who is singing to her baby, the 'you' consistently supports or nurtures the 'I' suggesting it is also the baby's lullaby ('I am the small green pea you are the tender pod; I am the diving kite you are the bow-tied tail'). At the same time the choice of 'you' ensures the reader is directly addressed throughout this meditation. While outwardly calm and reflective, this haunting and inspirational picture book is a deeply layered, eloquent exploration of different kinds of love, including the love for a mother and her child, care for the creatures who share our world and deep respect and concern for our environment.

Storm Whale

Shortlist year: 2018

Shortlist category: Children's literature

Published by: Allen & Unwin

A captivating and beautifully illustrated story about three sisters who find a stranded whale on the beach. With a powerful, poetic text, wonderful to read aloud, and illustrations full of life and movement, Storm Whale celebrates the majesty and vulnerability of nature and our place in it.

About the author

Sarah Brennan

Sarah Brennan is the Hong Kong-based, Tasmanian-born author and publisher of the best-selling Chinese Calendar Tales as well as the hugely popular Dirty Story series for kids. Her books have regularly appeared on bestseller lists in Hong Kong, where at one point, two of her titles outsold the (then) latest J.K.Rowling and Stephenie Meyer titles for 6 weeks running! Two titles have previously been long-listed for Singapore's Red Dot Children's Book Awards, and her 2015 title, The Tale of Rodney Ram, was short-listed for the Golden Dragon Book Awards 2016.

About the author

Jane Tanner

Jane Tanner has a fine art and teaching background and began illustrating picture books full-time in 1984. She loves working for children and drawing their attention to the natural world in all its awe and wonder. She is the acclaimed illustrator of the best-selling picture books There's a Sea in my Bedroom, The Fisherman and the Theefyspray, and The Soldier's Gift. She is the author and illustrator of Playmates, Isabella's Secret, Ride with Me, Just Jack, and Love from Grandma. She has won or been shortlisted for many prestigious awards, including the Children's Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Book of the Year Awards.

Judges’ comments

Cleverly expressed in verse, Storm Whale dramatically tells the story of three young sisters who, on a wet and windy day, find a stranded whale on the beach. The children spend the day tipping buckets of water over the whale and trying, unsuccessfully, to get it to move. The girls leave the beach at dusk as a storm comes in, broken-hearted at their lack of success. Next morning, however, this turns to joy as they find the storm has been the whale's friend, sweeping it back out to sea. This is a book about caring for the natural world and evokes our compassion without the whale being anthropomorphised.

The verse form works very well for this story; it almost mimics a sea shanty, songs that were often used to provide rhythm for tasks on sailing ships. Here too, the rhyming couplets seem to evoke the rhythmic bucketing of the water over the whale. There is richness in the text, which uses wonderful imagery to conjure up scenes such as the 'wrack and wreck' strewn across the beach after the storm.

The carefully constructed written text is wonderfully enhanced and complemented by the illustrations. These are full of emotion, colour and movement. They are realistic, almost brutal at times and add to the drama of the tale. The colour palette, as well as reflecting the changes in the weather, also evokes the girls' moods: grey as they trudge home believing they have failed in their task; joyful blues and greens when they find the whale has gone. There is a sense of wonder conveyed in that particular illustration which the viewer shares, placed as we are behind the girls. The illustrations also portray a loving relationship between the siblings and a real sense of family as they and their mother huddle by firelight through the storm. The story covers a short time frame but runs through a gamut of emotions and beautifully constructs a beach holiday with a difference.

Figgy Takes the City

Shortlist year: 2018

Shortlist category: Children's literature

Published by: Scholastic Australia

This is the third and final story in the award-winning Figgy series. Both Nana and Figgy, receive scholarships to attend the Hope College in Ghana's big city, Accra. Figgy and Nana will have to leave behind the village and family they love, meet lots of new people and learn new things. Figgy does not want to go, but Grandma Ama says she must. But Nana begins acting strange and he will not tell Figgy what he is doing when he disappears from school on the weekends.

About the author

Tamsin Janu

Tamsin Janu was born and raised in Sydney. When she is not writing, Tamsin is studying Law. Her first novel, Figgy in the World, was written after a three-month stay in Ghana in 2009. Many of the places and the children she met there inspired her novels. She has won or been shortlisted for several literature awards.

Judges’ comments

Fans will be aware that this is the third tale about the ebullient Figgy and her exuberant family, and their experiences in their home country of Ghana. Like its predecessors, it can be read independently, with great satisfaction. In this episode, Figgy and Nana earn scholarships, which take them to Hope College in the big city, Accra. On one of his 'thinking walks', Nana befriends a family group living in the great city slum. Figgy soon discovers this and much to her astonishment finds he has been helping them harvest the rubble tip to find saleable items that might provide them with income. It isn't long before Figgy finds herself fighting for their right to survive as well.

This story is remarkable for its sparkling characterisation, authentic voices and evocation of setting. These elements leap from the very first pages and readers quickly become comfortable with the people and places that will carry the story forward. Figgy's family is surrounded by love, nurtured by their wonderful matriarch, Grandma Ama. Love, not obligation, is the ultimate determinant by which decisions are made by her devoted family. Despite their impoverishment, Grandma Ama has imbued a social conscience in her charges, which is the springboard for their adventures.

One of the promises of fiction is to take readers to places they may never see for themselves. This book certainly delivers on that. With confidence and authority, the author creates a believable sense of place. Readers will be surprised at the social conditions existing in Accra, where extreme poverty prevails and basic utilities do not exist. Yet at no time does authorial intervention impinge on this revelation. Despite this depressive setting, optimism pervades the telling. Even small opportunities are not taken for granted. There is always hope, and gratitude for opportunities provided, a salutary model for this readership.

Hark, It's Me. Ruby Lee!

Shortlist year: 2018

Shortlist category: Children's literature

Published by: Hachette Australia

Ruby Lee is a little girl with a very big imagination. Every week Ruby's teacher, Mrs Majestic-Jones, asks special people to do special jobs in her class. Ruby would do anything to be the messenger, as she's the best in her class at announcing. But will her wild imagination get in the way? A delightful story about an adorable and irrepressible heroine from CBCA award-winning author Lisa Shanahan and Illustrators Australia award-winner Binny.

About the author

Lisa Shanahan

Lisa Shanahan is an award-winning writer of picture books and fiction for young people. Some of her well-loved books include Gordon's got a Snookie, Bear and Chook and Daddy's Having a Horse. Her picture book Bear and Chook by the Sea, illustrated by Emma Quay, won the CBCA Book of the Year for Early Childhood in 2010 and BIG PET DAY, illustrated by Gus Gordon, won the Speech Pathology Book of the Year Award for the 5–8 age group in 2015.

About the illustrator

Binny Talib

Binny Talib is an award-winning illustrator and designer whose hand-drawn and playful illustrations can be found widely across the US, UK, Japan and Australia in major children's clothing brands, children's toys, interior design, books, album covers and greeting cards. Her illustration career has flowed on from a design background as an agency art director and creative director and an honours degree in Visual Communications. She is the creator and illustrator of the app Sneaky Sam. Her authorial debut, Origami Heart, was published by Hachette in 2016.

Judges’ comments

Hark, It's Me, Ruby Lee! is an engaging and humorous story, well-constructed and layered with emotional depth, a consummate achievement in a picture book intended for young children. The storytelling is enlightening whilst being lively and playful, with rich vocabulary and child-friendly language. The bold manga-influenced illustrations attract attention and abound in visual jokes.

The child protagonists, Ruby Lee and George Papadopoulos, are deftly crafted in few words: they are fully realised and form empathetic alliances with the reader. Ruby Lee declares that she is the best at announcing 'Hark, it's me, Ruby Lee!' and loves helping, 'humming and hopping and handstands at dusk'. Both the words and the bright over-the-top pictures reflect her exuberant free spirit.

At school, class jobs are allocated on Mondays. Imposing teacher Mrs Majestic-Jones favours the word 'special' and rewards passive, polite behaviour. Her name, majestic appearance and speech contribute to the humour. Ruby Lee is desperate to be the class messenger but her noisy, impetuous actions cause her to be overlooked until her endearing, long-suffering friend, George Papadopoulos, tactfully suggests that she be quiet and still. Ruby Lee is imaginative and loves grand adventures. When she is finally given the messenger role she takes George Papadopoulos across the desert (the sandpit) past the 'Spockled Frocklewockle', over the mountains (the stairs) past the 'Squinker' and through the jungle (the monkey bars) past the 'Shlurgle'. On the first two adventures the message is forgotten or lost and, on the third, Ruby Lee somehow loses George Papadopoulos. The illustrations enhance these whimsical episodes, becoming more luxuriant and fanciful. The humour here is laugh-out-loud.

Friendship is a potent theme and the refrain 'Fear not! I am the bearer of good news!'may prompt the reader to wonder what good news Ruby Lee may be announcing. This is open-ended but there is a clear message about being courageous. Boisterous, creative children will find a kindred spirit in Ruby Lee in this empowering, joyous tale; others will cheer her on and perhaps decide to emulate some of her intrepid, imaginative nature.

Feathers

Shortlist year: 2018

Shortlist category: Children's literature

Published by: Scholastic Australia

The story reveals the resilience of the human spirit and the universal importance of home and finding safe shelter. This story of compassion and connectivity is more important than ever, given the current global political climate. Themes: birds, migration, geography, refugees, natural disasters, hope, resilience, home, safety.

About the author

Phil Cummings

Award-winning author Phil Cummings was born in Port Broughton and grew up in the mid-north town of Peterborough in South Australia. The youngest of eight children, he has worked as an apprentice mechanic, a waiter and more recently a primary school teacher. He has published more than 60 books for young readers since his first picture book. Recently, Ride Ricardo, Ride was named an Honour Book by the CBCA, 2016.

About the author

Phil Lesnie

Phil Lesnie is a Sydney-based illustrator of children's books. He is also a children's bookseller. It's almost as if he likes books or something. He works primarily in watercolour because even mistakes look lovely in watercolour.

Judges’ comments

Feathers provides a literal bird's-eye view of world events as the reader follows the migratory journey of a sandpiper, from East Asia to Australia. Taking flight from its seaside location in the chill of autumn, the sandpiper journeys across many borders and over many lands, witnessing much hardship along the way—an earthquake ravished town, refugees fleeing from their homeland, a flooded village. The sandpiper drops a feather in each of these troubled places, and when it is plucked up, it provides a moment of wonder, joy and respite from the tragedy of the people's lives. Finally the sandpiper travels across a stormy sea and arrives 'near Mia's house', presumably in Australia, where it settles at the water's edge, 'safe and warm'. The bird's journey illuminates the plight of different peoples across the planet and, in doing so, highlights how relatively lucky Mia and her family are in Australia, but also works to explore human commonality and connection.

In this beautifully crafted book, text and illustration combine to create a thought-provoking and evocative tale that speaks to the world as we know it. The text is spare, elegant and dispassionate and the watercolour illustrations stunningly beautiful and intensely moving. The symbolism of the bird and the feather is subtle but effective and the reader is left with a broad view of humankind and an opportunity to reflect on wonder, hope and gratefulness.