The Death of Noah Glass

WINNER

Shortlist year: 2019

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: Text Publishing

The art historian Noah Glass, having just returned from a trip to Sicily, is discovered floating face down in the pool at his Sydney apartment block. His adult children, Martin and Evie, must come to terms with the shock of their father’s death. But a sculpture has gone missing from a museum in Palermo, and Noah is a suspect. Gail Jones's mesmerising new novel tells a story about parents and children, and explores the overlapping patterns that life makes. The Death of Noah Glass is about love and art, about grief and happiness, about memory and the mystery of time.

About the author

Gail Jones

The author of seven novels and two collections of stories, Gail Jones is one of Australia's most celebrated writers. Her work has been translated into twelve languages, awarded several prizes in Australia. Internationally her fiction has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize and shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Prix Femina Étranger.

Judges’ comments

Gail Jones's The Death of Noah Glass opens with a body floating in a swimming pool and remains, at one level, a gripping mystery that investigates an Australian art historian's death and his connection to an Italian art theft. However, Jones's seventh novel also epitomises her talent for writing finely layered fiction that draws on deep knowledge of visual arts, cinema, and literature, including the Italian detective novel, as she lightly drops allusions and images that enrich the narrative. Her restrained, observant prose sensitively plumbs the grief of Glass's adult children—an artist and a philosopher—as they seek to understand their father and thus themselves. The action moves between vivid locales—Sydney, Western Australia, Sicily—and between past and present. This is a highly accomplished novel about the unknowability of others, even those closest to us, and the consolations of art, by an author of distinctive and fully matured style.

Saudade

Shortlist year: 2019

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: Giramondo Publishing

A coming-of-age story set in Angola in the period leading up to the colony's independence, Saudade focuses on a Goan immigrant family caught between complicity in Portuguese rule, and their dependence on the Angolans who are their servants. The title speaks to the melancholy longing for homeland that haunts the characters, and especially the young narrator. Suneeta Peres da Costa's novella captures with intense lyricism the difficult relationship between the girl and her mother, and the ways in which their intimate world is shaken by domestic violence, the legacies of slavery and the end of empire.

About the author

Suneeta Peres da Costa

Suneeta Peres da Costa was born in Australia to parents of Goan origin. She has published and produced widely across the genres of fiction, non-fiction, playwriting and poetry. Her novel Homework was published by Bloomsbury in 1999, and her long-awaited novella Saudade was released with Giramondo in March 2018. She is the recipient of numerous literary fellowships and awards, including a Fulbright Scholarship and the BR Whiting Studio Residency in Rome.

Judges’ comments

Suneeta Peres Da Costa's—Saudade— is a beautifully conceived story told from the perspective of a young Goan migrant who lives with her family in Angola during the last years of Portuguese occupation. The author's eye for vivid and telling details evokes the African setting in all its colour and richness. A sensitive portrayal of the narrator's developing consciousness and her sense of uncertainty about her place in the world, the narrative explores the themes of displacement and belonging on an intimate level, through her relationships with her mother, the more distant figure of her father, and the family's servant, Caetano. Beyond these personal relationships, it develops a nuanced understanding of the workings of race and class within a complex colonial society. Saudade is notable for the gorgeous fluency of its prose style. Its moving story is told with an elegance and concision that exemplify the virtues of the novella form.

Too Much Lip

Shortlist year: 2019

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: University of Queensland Press

Wise-cracking Kerry Salter has spent a lifetime avoiding two things—her hometown and prison. But now her Pop is dying and she's an inch away from the lockup, so she heads south on a stolen Harley. Gritty and darkly hilarious, Too Much Lip offers redemption and forgiveness where none seems possible.

About the author

Melissa Lucashenko is a Goorie author of Bundjalung and European heritage. She has been publishing books with the University of Queensland Press since 1997, with her first novel, Steam Pigs, winning the Dobbie Literary Award and being shortlisted in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Hard Yards (UQP, 1999) was shortlisted for The Courier-Mail Book of the Year and in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and Mullumbimby (UQP, 2013) won the Queensland Literary Award, was shortlisted for the Kibble Literary Award, and was longlisted for the Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. She has also written two novels for teenagers: Killing Darcy (UQP, 1998) and Too Flash (IAD Press, 2002). In 2013 Melissa won the inaugural long-form Walkley Award for her Griffith REVIEW essay ‘Sinking below sight: Down and out in Brisbane and Logan’.

Too Much Lip won the 2019 Miles Franklin Literary Award; was shortlisted for the Stella Prize, two Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and a NSW Premier’s Literary Award; and was longlisted in the Australian Book Industry Awards.

Judges’ comments

Melissa Lucashenko's Too Much Lip is a comic novel with a serious purpose. Set in the fictional town of Durrongo in northern New South Wales, the novel's protagonist, Kerry Salter, is an unforgettable creation: a sassy, spunky, motorbike-riding anti-hero, who often seems to find herself on the wrong side of the law. Lucashenko depicts the rough-and-tumble home life of Kerry's extended family with an affectionate humour and pokes gentle fun at the ructions within the local Indigenous community. The counterweight to this element of generous comedy is the novel's awareness of the violence and dysfunction that invariably accompany the experience of dispossession and marginalisation, the colonial origins of which give an added layer of significance to the various thefts and shady dealings that propel the story. Smartly plotted and written with demotic verve, Too Much Lip is a novel about family, community and cultural lore, and a passionate affirmation of the unbreakable Indigenous connection to Country.

Beautiful Revolutionary

Shortlist year: 2019

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: Scribe Publication

Following her conscientious-objector husband Lenny to the rural Eden of Evergreen Valley, California, Evelyn wants to be happy with their new life. It's the summer of 1968, and Evelyn Lynden is a woman at war with herself. Enter the Reverend Jim Jones, the dynamic leader of a revolutionary church called Peoples Temple. Meticulously researched, elegantly written, and utterly engrossing, Beautiful Revolutionary explores the allure of the real-life charismatic leader who would destroy so many. In masterful prose, Woollett painstakingly examines what happens when Evelyn is pulled into Jones's orbit.

About the author

Laura Elizabeth Woollett

Laura Elizabeth Woollett was born and raised in Perth, Western Australia. In 2012, she completed an honours degree in creative writing at the University of Melbourne. In 2014, she was awarded a Wheeler Centre/Readings Foundation Hot Desk Fellowship and the John Marsden/Hachette Prize for Fiction, and was chosen as one of the 2015 Melbourne Writers Festival's '30 Under 30'. Her short-story collection, The Love of a Bad Man (Scribe, 2016), was shortlisted for the 2017 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction and the 2017 Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction.

Judges’ comments

Laura Elizabeth Woollett's novel, Beautiful Revolutionary,explores cult psychology and the dangerous lure of the utopian ideology that attracted disciples to Jim Jones's infamous Peoples Temple. Charting the cult's dissolution from its heady socialist beginnings to mass suicide in a Guyanese compound, Woollett's vision moves beyond the charismatic figure of Jones to imagine the lives of his followers and their ultimate complicity in his crimes. Woollett achieves psychologically complex portraits of her two protagonists—minister's daughter Evelyn and conscientious objector Lenny—as they are indoctrinated into a degrading system of punishment and reward that delivers dire consequences for their marriage and sense of selfhood. Wry and incisive, but also imbued with great empathy for the trauma Jones wrought, Beautiful Revolutionary compels the reader to consider the conditions and compromises that allow groupthink to overpower individual responsibility and agency.

A Stolen Season

Shortlist year: 2019

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: Picador an imprint of Pan Macmillan

Adam's life has been ruined by war...A veteran of the Iraq conflict who has suffered such extensive bodily trauma that he can only really survive by means of a mechanical skeleton. Marianna's has been ruined by men...A woman who has had to flee the country after her husband lied to the wrong people. John Philip's by too much money...Until he receives a surprise inheritance in the evening of his own life. Rodney Hall presents the story of three people experiencing a period of life they never thought possible, and, perhaps, should never have been granted at all...

About the author

Rodney Hall

Rodney Hall is one of our foremost authors. He left school at sixteen for family reasons, already determined to become a writer and to educate himself by experience. Two years later he was called up for National Service. Afterwards, he set out to walk around Europe. He was thirty-one when he enrolled at university, where he studied while supporting himself as an ABC radio actor and scriptwriter. He has won two Miles Franklin Awards, his novels have been widely published and translated into many languages, and he has been twice presented with the gold medal of the Australian Literature Society.

Judges’ comments

Rodney Hall's A Stolen Season interleaves three provocative stories of characters who are grasping at life from extremis: an Australian soldier severely wounded in Iraq survives in a mechanical exoskeleton and renegotiates his collapsed marriage; a wealthy bachelor wields an inherited art collection against social propriety; and a dance teacher seeks salvation from her husband's crimes in the mysticism of Mayan culture. In a finely balanced narrative pyramid, the links between stories are subtle, sinister, and finally devastating. Hall's chiselled sentences glint with controlled anger and wit, satirising Kafkaesque institutions of power while intimately depicting the victims of war, greed, corruption, and fateful decisions. A master novelist, Hall portrays the intersection of global issues and human nature in a complex, moving work that teases and troubles the reader long after the book ends.

His Name was Walter

WINNER

Shortlist year: 2019

Shortlist category: Children's literature

Published by: Angus and Robertson an imprint of Harper Collins

Once upon a time, in a dark city far away, there lived a boy called Walter, who had nothing but his name to call his own ... The handwritten book, with its strangely vivid illustrations, has been hidden in the old house for a long time. And when four kids and their teacher find the book the haunting story of Walter will be read - right to the very end ... From one of Australia's most renowned children's authors, comes an extraordinary story within a story - a mystery, a prophecy, a long-buried secret.

About the author

Emily Rodda

Emily Rodda's first book, Something Special, was published with Angus & Robertson in 1984. It marked the beginning of a career that has seen her become one of the most successful, prolific and versatile writers in Australia. Emily has written or co-authored over ninety books. Her children's books include the award-winning Rowan of Rin series as well as the outstandingly successful Deltora Quest fantasy series. Emily has won the Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year award a record six times, the most recent being for the extraordinary His Name Was Walter in 2019.

Judges’ comments

Emily Rodda has crafted a perfectly paced and resolved work in this quality hardcover novel for children and readers of all ages. She is in complete control of her sophisticated narrative construct. His Name Was Walter is a consummately composed mise-en-abyme or story within a story, where the inner story is embedded inside the framing story. The inner story follows the life of Walter. Walter's tale has fairy tale elements that conceal a deeper core truth. His story impinges on the framing story, where the reader enters the novel.

In the framing story, set in the 'real world' in the present, new boy Colin is on a school history excursion when the bus breaks down and he and three other students and their teacher find themselves stranded in a deserted house for the night. Colin finds an old illustrated book hidden in a secret desk drawer. This book is called 'His Name Was Walter'. The children read parts aloud, becoming absorbed in Walter's tale and becoming part of a haunted house story themselves. This highly original ghost story draws on Walter's story, entwining intricate layers to form an imaginative, metaphorically rich allegory.

In the fairy tale, Walter grows up as an orphan in a beehive before living in a rabbit warren while working in a counting house. He is unassuming and kind. As a young man he falls in love with Sparrow, a lonely girl who shapeshifts into a bird. A number of characters are shown in the guise of an animal so that they are not recognised in their own place and time, a time between two great wars when a shadow looms over the land.

Word play, visual imagery, foreshadowing and dramatic irony enhance this mesmerising tale. Themes of war, entrapment and homelessness highlight the impact of the past on the present. Characters mature and gain insight into each other as they face guilt, forgiveness and truth. All is flawlessly exposed in an audacious and satisfying final reveal.

Waiting for Chicken Smith

Shortlist year: 2019

Shortlist category: Children's literature

Published by: Little Hare an imprint of Hardie Grant Egmont

'Every year, I stay in the same cabin at the beach with my family, and every year Chicken Smith's here too, with his Dad and his dog, Jelly. But this year, something's different.' As we hang on the words of the narrator, we learn of the legendary Chicken Smith and the beachside town that has been the backdrop to their school-holiday adventures for years. But will Chicken Smith turn up this year? Or will a friendship of a different kind blossom. A story about childhood friendship, the inevitability of change and the magic of anticipation.

About the author

David Mackintosh

David Mackintosh has been writing and illustrating picture books since leaving university where he received the Macmillan Picture Book Prize. His debut work Marshall Armstrong is New to Our School was shortlisted for the Roald Dahl Funny Prize in 2011. The Frank Show was a USBBY (the United States Board on Books for Young People) Outstanding International Book in 2013 and also longlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal. He followed these with Standing In for Lincoln Green, which was shortlisted for the Western Writers of America Spur Awards, and Little Hare's Archie and the Bear, which was named a notable book in the 2018 Children's Book Council of Australia Book Awards.

Judges’ comments

At first reading, this deceptively simple picture book describes a boy waiting for his holiday friend, Chicken Smith, to arrive in the rickety fisherman's shack next door and to fill summer with the adventure, companionship and promise of previous summers. Meanwhile, the boy's sister gets on with embracing the moment, and though she repeatedly invokes him to join her, he takes no notice. The main character, whose name we never learn, dawdles and waits, remembering with seeming hero-worship what Chicken Smith once said and what he once did, oblivious to how his reminiscences reveal what a shallow, flawed and one-sided holiday friendship the relationship had actually been. Eventually, tired of waiting, the boy reluctantly follows his excited sister. She leads him to the headland—where the boy and Chicken Smith had often, unsuccessfully, looked for whales—and gives him his very first whale sighting.

Waiting for Chicken Smith is a powerful example of the potentials of picture-book art. Author-illustrator David Mackintosh tells a salutary story of childhood betrayal, sibling loyalty and the importance of living in the moment without stooping to either articulate or explain. Interweaving three allusive layers of storytelling—the main character's first-person narration, the objective yet humorous illustrations of a typical Australian holiday community, and the dramatic irony that infuses both—Mackintosh creates an overarching narrative that is greater and more profound than the sum of its many parts, and that continues to reveal further depth, nuance and artistry with each subsequent reading.

The Incredible Freedom Machines

Shortlist year: 2019

Shortlist category: Children's literature

Published by: Scholastic Australia

In this sumptuous story of exploration and breaking boundaries, a young girl uncovers her very own freedom machine—a vehicle that carries her to all kinds of wondrous places. A poetic and visual feast from talented debut author Kirli Saunders and multi-award winning illustrator Matt Ottley.

About the author

Kirli Saunders

Kirli Saunders is a proud Gunai woman. She is an award-winning, international children’s author, poet, emerging playwright and artist. Kirli manages Poetry in First Languages and Poetic Learning at Red Room Poetry. Her picture books include Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) nominated and internationally published, The Incredible Freedom Machines (Scholastic Australia) and forthcoming, Our Dreaming and Happy Every After (Scholastic Australia). Her poetry Collection, Kindred was Highly Commended in Black&Write 2018. Kirli was the inaugural winner of the WA 2019 Premier’s Literary Awards – Daisy Utemmorah Award and was Runner-up in the Nakata Brophy Prize 2018. She was guest writer for the Australian Embassy, touring Jakarta and Bali in 2019. She returns as writer in residence at The Literature Centre, Fremantle to perform The Incredible Freedom Machines with Matt Ottley and the Western Australian Symphony Orchestra

About the illustrator

Matt Ottley

Matt Ottley is a multi-award-winning picture book creator and musician. This is Matt's second book with Scholastic Press. His first, Teacup (text by Rebecca Young) was the winner of the Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children's Literature, 2016, and has most recently been named as the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) Australia Honour Book for IIlustration, 2018.

Judges’ comments

This beautiful picture book celebrates creativity and the ability of the imagination to transcend the boundaries of our everyday lives.

While searching for her very own freedom machine, a young girl encounters many visually stunning—and obviously powerful—space-age vehicles that are skilfully juxtaposed against the shabbiness of the caravan park where she lives, a place that is bleak and 'sawn together by boundaries'. Many of these amazing freedom machines are not quite right for her but she persists and ultimately finds a vehicle ready to transport her (and the reader) to places of wonder and unlimited possibility. These 'most abundant untouched places' enable her to realise her dreams and help her return to her own world feeling whole. In a sense her journey mirrors the experience of many readers as they search for the most appropriate stories that will help them find their own identities and a sense of completeness.

A seamless collaboration between words and surreal, often whimsical images, this book is a work of art. From the outset the cover communicates the courage and determination of the young girl with her bold stance and outward gaze. While the words are minimalist, each is eloquent and thoughtfully chosen by first-time Indigenous author Kirli Saunders. Coupled with the vibrant images, many reaching across double pages, the story creates a sense of the vastness and beauty of the Australian landscape. Colour and light are used skilfully and each opening reveals additional layers and ambiguities that can and should be explored at length. Multiple readings are a must. The images are brilliantly rendered by award-winning illustrator Matt Ottley, who has embedded inter-pictorial references to his own work as well as to that of a number of other famous Australian artists including Russell Drysdale, Fred Williams and Shaun Tan.

Sonam and the Silence

Shortlist year: 2019

Shortlist category: Children's literature

Published by: Allen and Unwin

In Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, Sonam's world is dark and silent. Then one day, she follows a magical melodious sound to a walled garden, and her world is silent no more. The sound is music, and it lifts her up amongst the stars and takes her deeper than the tree roots in the earth. How can she hold on to this feeling in a world where music is forbidden?

A lyrical fable-like story by the well-known musician, author and broadcaster Eddie Ayres, about the irrepressible power of music.

About the author

Eddie Ayres

Eadric (Eddie) grew up in England, studied music and has adventured throughout the world as a viola and cello player. Eadric's big desire in life is to introduce classical music to as many different people as possible, so for ten years he worked as a broadcaster with the ABC, ultimately presenting the popular breakfast programme. Eventually Eadric's adventurous spirit demanded more, and he moved to Afghanistan to teach music there for a year. Eadric was born Emma, and transitioned just before his fiftieth birthday.

About the illustrator

Ronak Taher

Ronak Taher is an Iranian-Australian artist born in 1984. She finished her bachelor of Graphic Design at the University of Tehran, also holds a Master of Illustration and Animation from the Azad University of Tehran. In 2013 she was celebrated as one of the 300 upcoming world talents in film industry at the Berlin Film Festival. Ronak also works in the fields of graphic design, illustration and sculpture. She has had over six solo and group visual art exhibitions and has illustrated more than eight books for children and young adults.

Judges’ comments

This beautifully written and illustrated picture book is a critique of the silencing of the music and its importance, a celebration of the arts in our humanity, as well as paying tribute to what Andrew Upton (in conversation with Robyn Ewing in 2013), has called the Arts as disobedience. Both the writing and the illustrations are multi-layered.

As the author's note makes clear, this is a book based on fact. In the grim years following the triumph of the Taliban in Afghanistan, all forms of music were banned. This book imagines one small girl—Sonam—meeting an old man who defies the ban and plays music, because, he says, when it is forbidden, is the time 'when we need it most'. The old man represents harking back to the older culture and the importance of holding on to traditions. From him, Sonam learns to play the rubab, a traditional instrument made from the wood of a mulberry tree.

Eddie Ayres worked for a year in Afghanistan, teaching music in the National Institute of Music and one of his pupils there was called Sonam—the inspiration for this book. Adding further depth to this story are the rich, sophisticated and beautiful illustrations. These are by Ronak Taher, an Iranian-Australian illustrator. She has used a mixture of media to give layers and texture to her illustrations. The layout of double-page spreads throughout allows a panoramic view of each scene. There are symbols of freedom, joy and play with gardens, birds, Sonam running, her hair flying and sitting in a stylised pomegranate tree, making music on her rubab.

Things change, however, when her brother hears her humming the music she has learnt from the old man. He takes away the rubab and she becomes withdrawn, illustrated by her bound in a long chord, the pomegranate tree no longer a safe haven but with fruit scattered everywhere. The colours change from the rich greens, purples and blues to brown and black as a menacing image of war with planes, bombs and shouting soldiers symbolises the invasion of Afghanistan. There is noise, lots of noise but, without music, it seems silent to Sonam who goes to look for the old man, only to find him gone and the pomegranate tree withered. As a symbol of life, though, there is just one fruit on the tree from which Sonam can grow more trees. Even better, as a wonderful surprise to her and to the reader, as she digs she discovers buried beneath the tree, a box with her rubab, carefully concealed and protected by her brother. This is another symbol of new life and love. She plays the instrument again, bringing back the music and the precious memories of the old man who will always be with her through the music she plays. The music here is metaphoric for language.

The story is written in the present tense, highlighting the fact that a story like this can and does happen at all times. The book gives a voice to children enduring war and is dedicated by the illustrator to 'all kids experiencing war who will never have a chance to read this book'.

The Feather

Shortlist year: 2019

Shortlist category: Children's literature

Published by: Little Hare an imprint of Hardie Grant Egmont

A story about hope, kindness and redemption set in a grey dystopian world. When a great feather drifts from the leaden sky, two children recognise its extraordinariness and take it to the village for its protection. The villagers, however, want to encase it, upon which the feather loses its radiance. The children take it home and care for it through the night. In the morning it is again radiant, and when they set it free it leaves behind the first signs of blue sky and colour. The ambiguous ending invites multiple interpretations about the effects of selflessness and kindness.

About the author

Margaret Wild

Margaret Wild was born in 1948 in Eschew, a small town in South Africa, and came to Australia in 1972. Before becoming a full-time writer, Margaret was a journalist for newspapers and magazines and then she worked for sixteen years as a book editor in children's publishing. Margaret's books explore a diverse range of themes, but she is particularly noted for exploring issues of identity, trust, and death. Margaret latest picture books with Little Hare include The Stone Lion (illustrated by Ritva Voutila), No More Kisses (Nina Rycroft) and Hush, Hush (illustrated by Bridget Strevens-Marzo).

About the illustrator

Freya Blackwood

Freya Blackwood was born in Edinburgh and grew up in Orange in NSW. After graduating from University of Technology Sydney in Visual Communications, Freya worked in the film industry. She began illustrating picture books in 2002 and has since been shortlisted for, and won many prestigious awards, including the Kate Greenaway Medal in 2010. Freya works and creates in her backyard studio.

Judges’ comments

A feather, a poignant symbol of hope, as epitomised in the well-known Emily Dickinson's poem, is at the centre of this thought-provoking and moving allegory.

When a feather falls from the darkened sky, Maria and Nico are seized by the wonder of it. The feather is huge, but also soft and light, and the children's joy of discovery has them hurtling to the village to share their miraculous find, so full of possibility. Here, in the grey world of a timeless village, the people gather. For some, the feather conjures up memories of light-filled days gone by, but to the people of power it is something to be shut away. Soon the feather becomes stained and is reviled as a 'hideous object'. But not to Maria and Nico. They can still see the hope and possibility in it. They haul it home, nurture it and ultimately help to set it free.

The compelling cover art and intriguing endpapers draw the reader in to this powerful work, where words and pictures work seamlessly together to tell a layered and evocative tale. Margaret Wild's text is spare, poetic and carefully chosen. It is rich in symbolism and metaphor and explores themes of hope, freedom, joy and possibility. The children's ability to accept the ambiguity and magic of the feather, to nurture it when it is sullied and never to lose hope makes a powerful statement, especially when juxtaposed with the narrow view and disdain of the townsfolk. The ending is cleverly open, granting readers the chance to ponder and to draw their own conclusions.

Freya Blackwood's art is stunning: considered and assured, and with much to discover from repeated viewings. Her figure drawing is wonderfully loose and emotive, and she uses colour, light and shade, perspective and scale to great effect, enriching the text and the symbolism of the feather. The feather itself is enormous—larger than the children—which immediately creates a sense of possibility, power and magic. The children are depicted as beacons of hope for the future through the stark contrast of the vast greyness of the village with the small pockets of oranges and reds of the children's clothing and the circle of light that surrounds them. The reader is gifted with three wordless spreads, where a shift from dark to light speaks volumes.

This is a magnificent picture book, brought to life through the collaboration of two masterful storytellers, consummate experts in their fields.

Sun Music: New and Selected Poems

WINNER

Shortlist year: 2019

Shortlist category: Poetry

Published by: Giramondo Publishing

Beveridge is an exacting poet, and the form of her poems contains and intensifies their expression of emotion. Their clarity and drama, their musical language and often playful metaphors, give them an immediate appeal. This is poetry of wonder and enchantment, compassionate in its identification with the ungainly and the vulnerable, the simple and the poor, and insistent in its emphasis on the dignity and self-possession of all that it observes.

About the author

Judith Beveridge

Judith Beveridge is one of Australia most acclaimed poets, taught in high schools and universities, winner of the NSW and Victorian Premiers' Awards, a highly regarded critic, editor and teacher of poetry. She has published six collections of poetry which have won major prizes. She is a recipient of the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal and the Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement in poetry. She was poetry editor for Meanjin from 2005 to 2015, and co-editor of the anthology Contemporary Australian Poetry (Puncher & Wattmann, 2016). She teaches in the postgraduate writing program at the University of Sydney.

Judges’ comments

With joyous fluency and formal mastery, Beveridge's Sun Music: New and Selected Poems draws the reader into an electrifying encounter with language, guiding us through its flexure and torsion, its exacting grace. The selection of new poems in Sun Music linger on both the human and animal worlds, from the delicate texture of Banaras silk sari to cane toads to the act of juicing sugar cane, and are marked by their clarity of perception and attentiveness to textural and sonic detail. The titular elegy, 'Sun Music', is one of several where the poet turns to more personal territory, mourning the loss of a father who found redemption from drinking through bird-watching, finding himself 'intoxicated / by the sea, the sky, the spindrift a new / spell he could steer his life by'. Beveridge takes a similarly ecstatic pleasure in the elements in many of these new poems, which balance the clamouring external landscape with a meditative, introspective interior world that increasingly seeks a language for loss and grief.

Viva the Real

Shortlist year: 2019

Shortlist category: Poetry

Published by: University of Queensland Press

Viva the Real is Jill Jones' eleventh book of poetry. It is lyrical, haunting and urgent. The poems explore body and place through a lively mix of the playfully inventive and more formal poetic forms, and celebrates resilience and continuity in ordinary experience in ways that are intimate, comic and elegiac.

About the author

Jill Jones

Jill Jones was born in Sydney and has lived in Adelaide since 2008. She has published ten full-length poetry books and a number of chapbooks, including The Beautiful Anxiety, which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2015, and Breaking the Days, which won the Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize in 2014 and was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize in 2017. She has also won the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize and the Mary Gilmore Award. Her work is published widely in Australian and international anthologies, magazines and periodicals, and has been translated into Chinese, Dutch, French, Italian, Czech, Macedonian and Spanish. She has worked as a film reviewer, journalist, book editor and arts administrator. In 2014 she was poet-in-residence at Stockholm University. She currently teaches at the University of Adelaide where she is also a member of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice.

Judges’ comments

Viva the Real by Jill Jones is an heroic celebration of the everyday: doors, floors, a fence are each the thing itself and the word's resonance in the mind of the reader. For Jones the poem is an artefact freeze-framing thought: she is interested in the connections between the quotidian, attentiveness, and the resourcefulness of the poem to make legible our familiar. The mundane may be ordinary, monotonous even, but it needn't be boring: 'What kind of reveries do you think you deserve?' the collection asks, before delivering you 'dreams lean as leopards,' 'blossoms that pour like stars,' and 'flames, fruit, tea leaves and the sound of news pages turning side by side.' An antidote to distraction, Viva the Real is a marvellous contribution to the poetics of everyday life: it magnifies the moment and resonates long after reading.

Newcastle Sonnets

Shortlist year: 2019

Shortlist category: Poetry

Published by: Giramondo Publishing

Once considered a masculine working-class heartland, Newcastle is now acclaimed as one of the hipster cities of the world. In the sequence of sonnets that compose her homage to Newcastle, Glastonbury celebrates the city's oddities and contradictions, remixing the material effects of post-industrial gentrification with the vernacular of social media. An antipodean, regional, queering of Ted Berrigan's New York-based The Sonnets, Glastonbury's poems embrace the city's DIY chutzpah and the swipes, likes and filters of internet culture. This is Newcastle in cosplay mode, part eggs benedict, part pebblecrete, where a coal ship named 'Fiction' is being towed into the harbour.

About the author

Keri Glastonbury

Keri Glastonbury is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle. Her poems have been widely published in magazines and collections. She has been the recipient of the Australia Council's BR Whiting Residency in Rome and an Asialink Literature Residency in India. Her previous poetry collections include Grit Salute (Papertiger, 2012).

Judges’ comments

Keri Glastonbury's Newcastle Sonnets is a post-industrial love song to the city of Newcastle: once working-class heartland, now a world-topping hipster cities. To Glastonbury's eye the city is a 'chiaroscuro of coal dust and sand'—'plum blossoms line Pinnaroo Drive' while 'a shopping trolley rusts at the rocks'. Glastonbury's sonnets, far from stultifying, are energetic and playful as they enact the associative freedoms of everyday speech. Her tone—wry, not sappy, politically savvy, not didactic—acts as a stabilising force beneath the nervous surfaces of the poems, allowing her to say whatever pops into her head without appearing random. Variously the poems address lovers and friends and frequently incorporate comical cameos from the political class—Tony Abbott, Bob Carr, Penny Wong's speechwriter, and many more—but at least one politically apathetic Novocastrian remains: having none of it, she folds her 'voting slip into an origami crane'.

Click Here for What We Do

Shortlist year: 2019

Shortlist category: Poetry

Published by: Vagabond Press

Click Here for What We Do is a cluster of four loosely connected poems that are not only sceptical of the status quo's serial mendacities and hype but, in a way, they also attempt a coming to terms with the erosion of the idealistic conditions that once made non-mainstream culture, including poetry, so viable and, even, necessary.

About the author

Pam Brown

Pam Brown's many books of poetry include Text Thing, Authentic Local, Home by Dark and Missing Up. She has been writing, collaborating, editing and publishing in diverse modes both locally and internationally for over four decades. Pam Brown's collection Dear Deliria (Salt, 2003) received the annual New South Wales Premier's Award for poetry. She has earned a living in a range of occupations.

Judges’ comments

The four long poems in Click Here for What We Do are constructed from scraps of language, ranging from commonplace phrases to literary allusions, which have been broken down, twisted and rearranged into surprising new shapes. In their wry, accretive fashion, they seem to mimic the disjointed juxtapositions of our technologically mediated relationship to information, like random clicks between websites or the steady drip of a social-media feed. Though the poems appear to unfold casually, almost accidentally, they are artfully patterned and scrupulous in their awareness of the essential strangeness of language itself, allowing the reader to appreciate both the elusiveness and the palpability of the medium. The collection bursts with jokes, wordplay, curious facts, and striking thoughts expressed with the evident delight of an unexpected discovery. Its vibrant and brilliantly angular poems are full of surprising rhythmic effects, their tone by turns playful, arch, knowing and amused.

Blakwork

Shortlist year: 2019

Shortlist category: Poetry

Published by: Magabala Books

A stunning mix of memoir, reportage, fiction, satire, and critique composed by a powerful new voice in poetry. Alison Whittaker's Blakwork is an original and unapologetic collection from which two things emerge; an incomprehensible loss, and the poet's fearless examination of the present. Whittaker is unsparing in the interrogation of familiar ideas—identifying and dissolving them with idiosyncratic imagery, layering them to form new connections, and reinterpreting what we know.

About the author

Alison Whittaker

Alison Whittaker is a Gomeroi multitasker from the floodplains of Gunnedah in NSW. Between 2017–2018, she was a Fulbright scholar at Harvard Law School, where she was named the Dean's Scholar in Race, Gender and Criminal Law. Alison's work has been published in The Sydney Review of Books, Southerly Journal, Seizure, Overland, Westerly, BuzzFeed, Griffith Review, The Lifted Brow, Meanjin and Archer. Her debut poetry collection, Lemons in the Chicken Wire was awarded the State Library of Queensland's black&write! Indigenous Writing Fellowship in 2015 and was published by Magabala Books in 2016.

Blakwork was also shortlisted in the Poetry category for Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards 2019.

Judges’ comments

Exciting, formally ambitious and innovative, Alison Whittaker's Blakwork interrogates the past and present legacy of colonialism through the frames of a range of different kinds of work, including 'whitework,' 'storywork,' 'selfwork,' 'bloodwork,' and 'heartwork.' Blakwork'sfield of vision is broad—its subjects range across Indigenous deaths in custody, Native Title legislation, queer desire, live exports, immigration policies, family history, and the relationship between community and Country—but the poems are united by Whittaker's incisive critique of the ways in which language, as an instrument of policy, can oppress and dispossess. Whittaker repurposes and satirises legal, technological and bureaucratic language, remixing and redacting to disrupt its received usage and allow the reader to see it afresh. Her masterful usage of vernacular, slang, and her forays into the lexicon of the internet, text speak, and emojis bring her lively contemporary voice into crisp focus.