The Lost Arabs

WINNER

Shortlist year: 2020

Shortlist category: Poetry

Published by: University of Queensland Press

Visceral and energetic, Omar Sakr's poetry confronts notions of identity and belonging head-on. Braiding together sexuality and divinity, conflict and redemption, 'The Lost Arabs' is a seething, urgent collection from a distinct new voice.

About the author

Omar Sakr

Omar Sakr is a bisexual Arab-Australian poet. His debut collection, 'These Wild Houses' (2017), was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and the Kenneth Slessor Prize. His poetry has been published in English, Arabic, and Spanish, in numerous journals and anthologies. He placed runner-up in the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and has also been shortlisted for the ACU Poetry Prize, the Story Wine Prize, and the Fair Australia Poetry Prize. Omar has performed his work nationally and internationally.

Judges’ comments

The vital, energy-driven poems in this collection speak with a clear and fearless voice, a voice that is often passionate and sometimes angry, but always lucid and warmly human. Omar Sakr, an Arab-Australian-born poet, writes of things that concern us all: love, fear, family, exile, sex, culture, and war. He explores the themes of freedom and violence, of banishment and forgiveness, of the realities of the body and the idea of home. These poems are at once complex and accessible, using a wide range of poetic techniques and forms, and employing richly evocative language. They emphasise the interconnectedness of human affairs: sexuality and spirituality, ethnicity and identity, courage and terror. Some of them are grounded in rage, others in compassion and gentleness, but all of them acknowledge the complexities of their subject matter, and many of them are works of great subtlety and beauty.

The Future Keepers

Shortlist year: 2020

Shortlist category: Poetry

Published by: Fremantle Press

The poems in 'The Future Keepers' honour ecosystems and the custodians of future ecologies. They navigate the poet's own embodied experiences of change and succession—of family, community and place. From the research scientists, gardeners, birds and plants of Kings Park, to the activism and ecosystems of the Beeliar Wetlands, to the poet's own inherited landscapes, these poems evoke mutuality and exchange in speaking of the gifts we receive from being open to encounters with other species, and the reciprocity that these gifts imply.

About the author

Nandi Chinna

Nandi Chinna is a writer and environmental activist. Nandi has written a PhD on walking and the lost wetlands of Perth.

Judges’ comments

The six sections of 'The Future Keepers' are composed of poems that present lucid images of the natural world, focus on epiphanies, and balance narrative and lyric elements. The poems explore the relationships between humans and the environment, and humans and animals, as well as between First Nations people and more recent arrivals. These relationships culminate in the idea of the future, so vital to Chinna's poetics. The poems conceive of the natural world and generations of First Nations people as stretching back into deep time, and the importance of an awareness of the past in imagining a future. They dwell on specific and carefully-described locations: the sea on the way to Bald Island, Perth's Kings Park, and Wardandi Country, as well as on the fragility of the human body. Though the poems are beautifully transparent in their narratives and in their unfolding towards their final lines, the accretion of moments—both in dramatic scenes of protest and in quiet periods of contemplation—resonate far beyond each artfully-constructed poem.

Empirical

Shortlist year: 2020

Shortlist category: Poetry

Published by: Empirical

In the hallucinatory first sequence of 'Empirical', Lisa Gorton seeks to understand how the feeling for place originates, and how memory and landscape fold in and out of each other. The collection then opens up into poems that track through chains of influence and a phantasmagoric procession of images, the trade between empire, commodities and dreams of other places. Through this method, landscapes are mirrored and refracted in the contemporary baroque style for which Gorton is celebrated.

About the author

Lisa Gorton

Lisa Gorton has 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. Her novel 'The Life of Houses' was the joint winner of the 2016 Prime Minister's Award for fiction. She is the author of 'Cloudland', a novel for children.

Judges’ comments

Lisa Gorton's 'Empirical' is a collection of poems that opens up a distinctively imagined world of urban Melbourne landscape and life. In long, carefully-paced lines Gorton shows us someone thinking about the entirely unremarkable world around her: factories, train lines, building rubble, tyre tracks, milkweed. Her view is empirical, privileging the evidence of the senses, rather than some poetic idea of landscape or fine feeling. These poems are like clear panes of glass on someone seeing and thinking, partly because of the pinpoint accuracy of individual words, partly because of the unencumbered syntax. In another sense of 'empirical,' the collection also includes documentary poems about the colonial history of Melbourne's modern civic space, full of careful quotation, catalogues of people and language from the past, as well as geographical references. These are poems that seem free of any predictable topic or theme, open to the immediacy of a perceptive mind.

Birth Plan

Shortlist year: 2020

Shortlist category: Poetry

Published by: Vagabond Press

Birth Plan, LK Holt's fourth full-length collection is a generous, sharp-edged, technically masterful and expansive collection from one of Australia's foremost female poets. These poems are transformative, fiercely feminist, unrelenting in their clarity, and display a rare mastery of the musicality of language. Exploring the realities of mothering and loving in the late Anthropocene, Holt's work is rigorous in its exploration and evocation of psychological truths and half-truths. Fearless and darkly humorous, these are poems that turn on a phoneme and give full life and song to the shimmering uncertainties and hard realities of selfhood.

About the author

LK Holt

LK Holt lives in Melbourne, Australia. Her previous full-length collections are 'Man Wolf Man' (2007), 'Patience, Mutiny' (2010), and 'Keeps' (2014). She is a recipient of the Kenneth Slessor Prize and the Grace Leven Prize, and has been longlisted for the Literature Society Gold Medal.

Judges’ comments

Linguistically supple and engaged in experimentation with language, Holt's poems take the reader to locations as diverse as the Arapiles, Kangaroo Island and Barcelona. While apparently encompassing such experiences as childbirth, marriage, raising children and the death of a parent, Holt's collection explores too the curiosities of the natural world, juxtaposing human culture, in the form of music and art, with animals and birds. The poems connect the present with a long history of western artistic production. They place art and music in proximity with physical experiences, while also interrogating life with technology: the ubiquity of mobile electronic devices and Siri. Formally ranging from prose poems to sonnets that challenge readers' expectations about rhyme and rhythm, the poems in this volume contain arresting imagery. While titles are as diverse as 'She was Told to Have a Birth Plan' and 'I Don't Know', each poem, with its extended metaphors and precise yet original language, drives towards a new and more complete view of contemporary life, and its connections to the past.

Heide

Shortlist year: 2020

Shortlist category: Poetry

Published by: Giramondo Poets

'Heide' is an epic poem about history, painters, patrons—the people who made modern art happen in Australia, and those who opposed it. There is a particular focus on the artists gathered around Sunday and John Reed at Heide in Melbourne. The poet's extraordinary technique—his use of historical facts, quotations, numbers, and the visual form of the poem—generates both the book's encyclopaedic reach, and its Anarchist perspective. The effect is one of exuberance and lightness. 'Heide' is emphatic in asserting the centrality of art to human experience.

About the author

π.o.

π.o. is a legendary figure in the Australian poetry scene, born in Greece and brought up in Fitzroy, the chronicler of Melbourne and its culture and migrations, a highly disciplined Anarchist who has worked as a draughtsman for forty years to support his family and his art. He is the publisher of 'Unusual Work' by Collective Effort Press, a long-time magazine editor, a pioneer of performance poetry in Australia, and the author of many collections, including 'Panash', 'Fitzroy Poems', 'Big Numbers: New and Selected Poems', and two epic works '24 Hours' and 'Fitzroy: The Biography'. 'Heide' completes this monumental trilogy.

Judges’ comments

π.o.'s 'Heide' is a poetic history of art in Australia seen from the viewpoint of Melbourne and Victoria. It stretches from the time of Cook's voyages to Aboriginal leader William Barak, whose portrait hangs in the Victorian Parliament, up to the bohemian set at Heide. Like a gigantic exhibition of portraits and scenes the book is epic in its ambitions for poetic form and for our understanding of the centrality of art in Australian life and history. In accessible, playful and always vibrant language each portrait or scene depicts individual artists, artists' family, friends and relations, wealthy art patrons, landscapes, cultural events or Modernist controversy. This series of poetic portraits builds up a democratic and powerfully imagined life of art in society, all moving towards the richly detailed and very personal depiction of the artists and patrons at Heide: John and Sunday Reed, Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, and Joy Hester.

Cooee Mittigar: A Story on Darug Songlines

WINNER

Shortlist year: 2020

Shortlist category: Children's literature

Published by: Magabala Books

'Cooee Mittigar', meaning 'Come Here Friend', is an invitation to 'yana' (walk), on Darug Country. In this stunning picture book, Darug creators Jasmine Seymour and Leanne Mulgo Watson tell a story on Darug Songlines, introducing children and adults-alike to Darug 'Nura' (Country) and language.

Greeted by Mulgo, the black swan, readers are welcomed to 'Nura'. Journeying through the seasons, Mulgo describes the land, skyscape, birds, animals and totems. It is a gentle guide to how Darug people read the seasons, knowing when it is time to hunt and time to rest.

About the author

Jasmine Seymour

Jasmine Seymour is a Darug woman and descendant of Maria Lock, who was the daughter of Yarramundi, the Boorooberongal elder who had met Governor Phillip on the banks of the Hawkesbury River in 1791. Maria was the first Aboriginal woman to be educated by the Blacktown Native Institute. She was married to carpenter and convict, Robert Lock and their union resulted in thousands of descendants who can all trace their Darug heritage back past Yarramundi. Jasmine is a member of the Darug Custodian Aboriginal Corporation.

About the illustrator

Leanne Mulgo Watson

Leanne Mulgo Watson is a Darug artist-educator and is the daughter of Aunty Edna Watson. She has been a director of the Darug Custodian Aboriginal Corporation for many years. 'Cooee Mittigar' is her first book. She says "I had always wanted to create books to share our knowledge, as education is the key to our culture staying strong".

Judges’ comments

Whilst it is not in any way new for culture and languages to be introduced to young readers through picture books, 'Cooee Mittigar' by Darug women Jasmine Seymour and Leanne Mulgo Watson, approaches this objective in a style that is at once moving, informative, immersive, welcoming and potentially healing. After traversing the organic and tactile design and muted colours of the cover, the reader is led into a textually and visually rich world which, despite being in English and Darug, is in fact a love song to the natural beauty of wider Australia, and the proud traditions of its original inhabitants.

Unlike most other books featuring words from languages other than English, each page of text in this book includes its own mini-glossary, which offers the reader a more seamless experience of understanding the meaning in the text. This means that a very real sense of rhythm is achieved, which is in keeping with the full title: 'Cooee Mittigar—a Story on Darug Songlines'. However, it is in sharing of this book with the very young reader that the textual magic really happens: within the space of a few pages the child is taking in and understanding lines of text which include Darug words they only heard moments earlier. They are, quite literally, learning language as they read.

But of course 'Cooee Mittigar' is about far more than learning words of a language. It is a work of art that is beautiful and accessible, and with wonder on each new page for children and adults alike. In keeping with the promise contained in the full title, it lifts us on the rhythms of days and seasons, and carries us on a journey across Darug country and far beyond in a respectful, reverent paean to a land which two centuries ago boasted hundreds of distinct languages and dialects, most of which have since become extinct. In addition to the wonderful depictions of flora and fauna, the sky is a constant throughout this book, subtly reminding the reader of the enormity of what we still have, and its beauty that we can ill afford to spurn. It is noteworthy that the human inhabitants of the country are not explicitly depicted—they are simply woven into the text as custodians of and partners with the natural world. They are, in keeping with the invocation to 'tread softly on our lands' on the final page, part of the land without claiming dominion over it.

'Cooee Mittigar' is a book that the author and illustrator, publisher, Indigenous people, and in fact all Australians, should feel proud to acknowledge and share. As any teacher or communicator will readily explain, didacticism alienates one's audience, but story and beauty draw the audience closer, and facilitate understanding and acceptance. Any book which can reach our youngest minds with such gentleness and generosity of spirit should be applauded by all Australians.

Catch a Falling Star

Shortlist year: 2020

Shortlist category: Children's literature

Published by: Walker Books

It's 1979 and high above Frankie Avery, one of the world's first space stations is tumbling Earthward. Rushing back with it are old memories. Things Frankie thought she'd forgotten. Things her mum won't talk about, and which her little brother Newt never knew. Only ... does he? Because as Skylab circles closer, Newt starts acting strangely. While the world watches the sky, Frankie keeps her eyes on Newt. Because if anyone's going to keep him safe, it's her. But maybe this is something bigger than splinters, spiders and sleepwalking. Maybe a space station isn't the only thing heading for calamity.

About the author

Meg McKinlay

Meg McKinlay is a children's writer and poet. She has published seventeen books for children, ranging from picture books through to young adult novels, and a collection of poetry for adults. Her work has won the Prime Minister's Literary Award, the Queensland Literary Award, the Davitt Award for Crime writing and the Aurealis Award for Speculative Fiction and been shortlisted for numerous other awards.

Judges’ comments

The last time twelve-year-old Frankie Avery saw her father was the night Skylab space station was launched. Six years later and Skylab is falling to earth, heading straight for Frankie's hometown in the south coast of Western Australia. As Skylab draws near, it unearths Frankie's grief and memories of her father, of their nights observing the infinite stars from their Space Shack, a shed with an opening in the roof. Skylab's descent also captures the attention and imagination of Frankie's scientifically gifted eight-year-old brother Newt, who is searching for answers of his own. While their mother works long hours as a nurse at a hospital, Frankie struggles under the weight of juggling school, looking after Newt and the silence surrounding her father's death.

Frankie's voice is wise and full of sharp observations. In her world a myriad of things fall from the sky, from birds, planes, shooting stars, to her father and her brother Newt. These insights into the various ways of 'falling' work beautifully to symbolise Frankie's lack of control over her life. She wisely states at one point ''I wonder what it would be like to be someone who thinks you actually have control over things. Who believes that if you want to, you can keep them from crashing to the ground''. Meg McKinlay's prose is poetic and lyrical, rich with imagery that captures Frankie's emotions while weaving an authentic landscape of Australia in the late 70s. Skylab's descent to earth serves as a catalyst for Frankie's healing and finding her way back to herself and her family.

Winter of the White Bear

Shortlist year: 2020

Shortlist category: Children's literature

Published by: Dirt Lane Press

'Winter of the White Bear' blurs the boundaries between fable, folk tale and social realism. It tells of a small forest bear who is orphaned and enslaved by a polar bear, then forced to fish in dangerous icy seas. When the little bear nearly drowns, an ancestral dream puts her in touch with her inner strength so that, with cunning and initiative, she finds a way to break away and return home to freedom.

About the author

Martin Ed Chatterton

Martin Chatterton was born in Liverpool (UK) and attended art college in London. He has worked in publishing and design as an author and illustrator. He has written many children's books for a variety of age ranges and has illustrated more than a hundred books for other writers, including Tony Bradman, Julia Donaldson and Michael Rosen. In 2017 he completed his PhD on the legacy of the 'Atlantic Slave Trade in Liverpool'. A full-time writer, illustrator, film-maker and performer, Martin also collaborates extensively with best-selling author James Patterson, and writes adult crime-fiction for screen under the name Ed Chatterton.

Judges’ comments

This is a powerful picture book, one which at first glance appears deceptively simple but which carries a strong political message. It is a striking example of an important component of the picture book genre in Australia, books for older readers. It deals with the issue of slavery and forced labour. Although many believe that slavery ended in the 19th century, in fact it still continues and this book emphasises the fact that slavery is not just something that happened in the past. The language used in the book is poetical and lyrical and the book as a whole reads almost like a fable.

Little Bear's father is killed by White Bear who then captures Little Bear and takes her far from her home and forces her to fish for him. Although Little Bear's father is killed early in the story, he remains an important figure in Little Bear's life and is the inspiration and guidance for her eventual escape.

The illustrations are stunning, depicting vast, lonely landscapes which highlight Little Bear's powerlessness and tiny size in contrast to both White Bear and the surrounding countryside. Seascapes also serve to emphasise Little Bear's dislocation from all she knows and her loneliness in this alien world. In addition, the illustrations reflect Chatterton's own fine art practice as well as his homage to some of his favourite artists.

Slavery and forced labour are group exercises, involving many people affecting people the world over. But this book effectively highlights the plight of the many forced into slavery by focussing on Little Bear who becomes emblematic of every person in this position just as White Bear is symbolic of all slavers. The book thus becomes a metaphor for slavery as a whole.

From the front cover, we have a picture of the unequal relationship between the two bears with the blurred outlines of White Bear towering over the tiny figure of Little Bear, alone in the wintry landscape. The journey Little Bear is forced to take is depicted by the vastness of the landscape she has to travel through, taking her further and further from everywhere she knows and from where she lived happily with her father before he was killed by White Bear. Gradually though, as she is forced to work harder and harder for White Bear, her helplessness gradually begins to turn into resourcefulness. Her escape plan is successful but leads to a moral dilemma of whether or not to save White Bear when he falls into the water and starts to drown. The scene will no doubt provoke much discussion amongst readers.

At the back of the book Chatterton explains that his home town of Liverpool was one of the largest slave ports in the world and one of the reasons he wrote this book is that his wife and children are descended from some of those slaves.

Cheeky Dogs: to Lake Nash and Back

Shortlist year: 2020

Shortlist category: Children's literature

Published by: Allen & Unwin

Meet deaf artist, Dion Beasley, and the people he calls family. Dodging road trains by day and giant blue monsters at night, Dion weaves his way through life on an electric scooter, collecting rocks and dogs to make art. In his dreams he sees animals from overseas and his mother's country, Lake Nash, but every morning, without fail, he puts on his favourite socks and gets ready to feed the dogs. Is it time yet?

About the author

Dion Beasley

Dion Beasley is the story teller and illustrator of Cheeky Dogs. He lives in Tennant Creek and is well known across the Territory as the artist behind the much loved T-shirt brand, Cheeky Dogs. Dion's formal art career started in 2006 when the first Cheeky Dogs T- shirt line was launched. Since then, his reputation as an accomplished visual artist has grown from strength to strength. Dion's talents are particularly remarkable given he has muscular dystrophy and is profoundly deaf. In 2019 he received the Australia Council National Arts and Disability Award for an Emerging Artist.

About the author

Johanna Bell

Johanna Bell lives in Darwin with her partner, daughter and a backyard full of green tree frogs. Her writing career got off to a bumpy start when she was so busy composing a story in her head that she accidentally drove into the back of a taxi. It was while driving on a bumpy stretch of road outside Alice Springs that the beginnings of the Cheeky Dog books, took shape. Working with Dion has changed the way Johanna sees the world and tells stories. Johanna and Dion's books include 'Too Many Cheeky Dogs' and 'Go Home Cheeky Animals'.

Judges’ comments

'Cheeky Dogs: To Lake Nash and Back' is the memoir of Dion Beasley, a First Nations artist and author with profound deafness and muscular dystrophy, who tells the story of his childhood and youth in terms of the dogs that populated it. Camp dogs are ubiquitous in the author's life, whether in actuality, or on paper, and in 'Cheeky Dogs' they are as conspicuous by their presence as by their absence. Beasley describes in tangible detail the antics of dogs in packs, dogs alone, dogs as companions, dogs as attackers and dogs as art. As a child, Beasley is moved from place to place, home to home, family to family, town to town, but dogs held his life together, and dogs hold this narrative together.

'Cheeky Dogs' leaps back and forth through time, sometimes describing a moment in early childhood, then covering several changes of residence in a few brief lines, then looking back at an even earlier childhood memory. Beasley plays with form and content, beguiling the reader into a new way of seeing his world. Through verbal and visual repetition, vibrantly energetic naïve artwork, onomatopoeia, and simple, straightforward prose, the author weaves a sense of spontaneous immediacy as he records terror, warmth, excitement, grief, toothache. Broad overviews alternate with tiny details, such as the sight and smell—but not the sound—of rain on the roof as he, a small child, is stitched together after being mauled by dogs. The illustrations are a seamless cohesion of multi-media pieces, each an outstanding example of vibrant 'outsider' art, rendered with freshness and spirit, power and cohesion to offer delight and revelation with each turn of the page.

One Careless Night

Shortlist year: 2020

Shortlist category: Children's literature

Published by: Black Dog Books an imprint of Walker Books

Where the mist swallows mountains and winds whisper through ancient trees, a mother and her pup run wild and free. They hunt, but they are also hunted. Carted away. Sold for bounty. And then, one careless night … The last thylacine is gone.

The beautiful but heartbreaking story of Australia's last thylacine (Tasmanian tiger), which died in captivity.

About the author

Christina Booth

Author and illustrator Christina Booth works from her bush studio in Tasmania, Australia. Trained as a teacher and painter, she loves that she makes up stories and colours for a living. Christina started her literary career illustrating for great Australian authors such as Max Fatchen, Colin Thiele, Christobel Mattingley and Jackie French. Many of Christina's previous books are award-winning, including the Environment Award, CBCA Honour Book and CBCA Notables.

Judges’ comments

'One Careless Night' is an extraordinary picture book that speaks to the endangerment endemic we face in Australia. It welcomes young readers to empathise with a thylacine as it is captured and neglected in captivity, confronting us to consider our own actions.

Goose-bump inducing poetic prose throughout prompts the reader to lament the loss of the great Tasmanian Tiger. Accompanying the text are intentionally monochromatic illustrations that carefully interlace foregrounded ferns with crow feathers, distancing the audience from the thylacine and welcoming us into a very real world of fear and loss. The exquisite cover sees the thylacine exit stage right on the front, without re-appearing on the rear cover; instead she is replaced with a wash of darkened textures and we are made hauntingly aware that 'the last thylacine is gone'.

'One Careless Night' is the deeply moving call to action we need in an age of extinction in our nation.

How it Feels to Float

WINNER

Shortlist year: 2020

Shortlist category: Young adult literature

Published by: Pan Macmillan

Biz knows how to float. She has her people, posse, her mum and the twins. She has Grace. And she has her dad, who tells her about the little kid she was, and who shouldn't be here but is. So Biz doesn't tell anyone anything. Not about her dark, runaway thoughts, not about kissing Grace or noticing Jasper, the new boy. And she doesn't tell anyone about her dad. Because her dad died when she was seven. And Biz knows how to float, right there on the surface—normal okay regular fine.

About the author

Helena Fox

Helena Fox mentors and runs writing workshops for young people, and is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in the U.S. Helena has travelled and lived all around the world, but of all her adventures, working with young people and helping them find and express their voice has brought her the greatest joy. 'How It Feels to Float' is her debut novel.

Judges’ comments

'How it Feels to Float' is a debut novel by Helena Fox. It is a beautifully written, poetic and heart-breaking portrayal of grief, trauma, guilt and mental illness. Biz, the main character, is endearing, nuanced and convincing. Her isolation and disassociation from reality is sensitively handled. She has constructed a world in which she believes she doesn't need to tell anyone anything as she tries to convey an image of self-sufficiency. The title refers to Biz's feeling she can float above everything and survive; as she tells teachers and counsellors and anyone else who cares to ask she's 'fine'. The first-person narrative allows the reader to develop a special rapport with Biz and understanding of her relationships with others. There is a gradual revealing of the background to Biz's state of mind and the author uses each word and wonderfully-crafted sentence to portray an unravelling of the tapestry of Biz's grief and depression, fusing the past and present until she is holding on by a thread. The disclosure of her father's death, when she was a little girl, and her feeling of guilt about this is distressing and revealing.

As readers, we find out just how long Biz has been using this ability to 'float' to cover up her real feelings. For her, a relatively minor event escalates overnight into something major. The episode of her breakdown is shocking and believable and the author's skill makes the reader feel Biz's pain. The road trip that Biz and her friend Jasper take is a clever authorial device for bringing about this climactic deterioration in Biz's mental health. Although confronting and hard to read at times, it is ultimately a book about hope, resilience and survival.

The Surprising Power of a Good Dumpling

Shortlist year: 2020

Shortlist category: Young adult literature

Published by: Allen & Unwin

Anna Chiu has her hands full looking after her siblings and helping out at her dad's restaurant, all while her mum stays in bed. Dad's new delivery boy, Rory, is a welcome distraction and even though she knows that things aren't right at home, she's starting to feel like she could just be a normal teen.

But when Mum finally gets out of bed, things go from bad to worse. And as Mum's condition worsens, Anna and her family question everything they understand about themselves and each other.

A nourishing tale about the crevices of culture, mental wellness and family.

About the author

Wai Chim

Wai Chim is a first-generation Chinese-American from New York City. She grew up speaking Cantonese at home and absorbing Western culture through books, TV and school. She spent some time living in Japan before making Sydney, Australia, her permanent home. Her previous books include the 'Chook' series and 'Shaozhen', part of the 'Through My Eyes: Natural Disaster Zone' series. Her novel 'Freedom Swimmer' was shortlisted for the inaugural Readings Young Adult Book Prize and the Sakura Medal, and was a Children's Book Council Notable Book. In addition to writing, Wai works as a digital producer for Starlight Children's Foundation.

Judges’ comments

Anna Chiu's mother suffers from mental illness and Anna is often required to take on parental duties and care for her younger brother and sister, Lily and Michael. Their father is in denial and refuses to recognise that his wife's illness is serious, even when she retreats to her bedroom for months at a time. The issue of mental illness is well-handled and the depiction of the perceived stigma of mental health in families with an Asian background is culturally sensitive.

The family runs a restaurant and the presence and importance of food runs throughout this book. Beyond the actual nourishment that food supplies, there is a real feeling throughout the book of the non-physical, almost spiritual nourishment gained from consuming food served by family and eaten with the family.

Anna is an endearing and nuanced character. She is determined and resilient, coping with bullying and racism. She is also trying to straddle two cultures and dealing with the complexities of being the family's main carer, while also expected by her father to be submissive. Anna is the one the younger children call on when something goes wrong at home and sometimes the responsibility is overwhelming and there are times when Anna simply wants to be a 'normal' teenager. Schoolwork can also be a problem as she copes with the other demands on her time but her friendship with Rory helps with that as he supports her homework with Walt Whitman and Shakespeare.

Trust is another strong theme throughout the book as Anna's father must learn to trust her, Rory develops sufficient trust in Anna to reveal his own background and Anna must learn to trust all those around her to give her support and for her to acknowledge that she can gradually allow others to take over some of the responsibilities she has been burdened with.

The book also celebrates love in its many forms. Anna loves her family, despite all the challenges that brings, she loves the family's restaurant and wants it to succeed and she loves the other workers in the restaurant—workers who give her support and affection in return. These peripheral characters are all strongly drawn and some, like Ah Jeff, provide moments of comic relief. Then there is Rory, her first boyfriend, who doesn't come from the same cultural background as she does but provides a loving relationship nonetheless.

The Honeyman and the Hunter

Shortlist year: 2020

Shortlist category: Young adult literature

Published by: Allen & Unwin

When sixteen-year-old Rudra Solace dredges up a long-hidden secret in his father's trawl net, his life in the sleepy fishing village of Patonga shifts dramatically. It is not long before Rudra is leaving Australia behind, bound for India on a journey of discovery and danger.

A wonderfully compelling tale of belonging and loss, of saltwater and mangroves, of migration and accepting change; a story of decisions that, once made, break through family histories like a cyclone swell.

About the author

Neil Grant

Neil Grant was born in Glasgow, Scotland. He spent many years slouching through Europe and Asia with a stack of notebooks until, in 2001, Allen & Unwin agreed to publish his first novel, 'Rhino Chasers'. This was followed by 'Indo Dreaming' in 2005, which saw him researching traditional whale-hunting, surf culture and two-minute noodles in Indonesia. In 2009, he travelled to Afghanistan to gather material for a book on asylum seekers, a journey that changed his life; 'The Ink Bridge' was published in 2012. 'The Honeyman and the Hunter' is based partly in India—the birthplace of his mother.

Judges’ comments

'The Honeyman and the Hunter' is an intricate and elegantly crafted novel that celebrates the rich potential of language, and that utilises the power of the novel to express rather than expound. The story explores identity and belonging, two common enough tropes in young adult fiction, but these ideas are granted new relevance with a combination of terse, nuggety dialogue, minimal internal discourse, and a wealth of succinct and expressive imagery.

Rudra is as Australian as the surf, and he belongs as surely to the beachside suburb of Patonga as does the creek flowing into the bay. That his mother is from India should be irrelevant, as should the fact he is named after an Indian deity, so when others call him 'curry-muncher' and tell him to 'go back to where he came from', he has to stifle 'the big wrongness punching through doors inside him'. That his father is a brute is less irrelevant, but Rudra has learnt to both dodge and sometimes even find a way to justify his father's cruelty.

Rudra doesn't talk much. He often can't find the speech marks to put around what he feels, and though he is largely taciturn, remains silent about his emotions and brushes off probing questions, he nonetheless feels intensely. But instead of focusing on the dissection of Rudra's state of mind and heart, 'The Honeyman and the Hunter' harnesses the imagery of water to suggest emotion. Ripples, waves, surf, waterways, creeks, currents and tides; water as barrier, water as friend, water as refuge, water as danger, water as cleanser, and water as concealer of a hidden past are intensely integral to meaning throughout this novel. When Rudra is impelled to face the materiality of his Indian heritage by the unexpected arrival of his tiny but formidable grandmother, he travels to India to encounter a whole new perception of water and, ultimately, of himself.

This Is How We Change the Ending

Shortlist year: 2020

Shortlist category: Young adult literature

Published by: Text Publishing

Sixteen-year-old Nate McKee is doing his best to be invisible. He's worried about a lot of things—how his dad treats Nance and his twin half-brothers; the hydro crop in his bedroom; his reckless friend, Merrick.

Nate hangs out at the local youth centre and fills his notebooks with things he can't say. But when some of his pages are stolen, and his words are graffitied at the centre, Nate realises he has allies. He might be able to make a difference, change his life, and claim his future. Or can he?

About the author

Vikki Wakefield

Vikki Wakefield writes realist fiction for young adults. Her work explores coming-of-age, family, class, relationships and the lives of contemporary teens. Her novels 'All I Ever Wanted', 'Friday Brown', 'Inbetween Days' and 'Ballad for a Mad Girl' have been shortlisted for numerous awards.

Judges’ comments

In Vikki Wakefield's fifth novel for young adults she plunges headlong into well-trodden young adult territory—the dead-end country town, the absent parent, the blended family, the boy who can't live up to the masculinist expectations of his elders, the shame of being clever in a world of crushing underachievement, the jaded teacher doing his best to boost the main character out of their funk of learned inadequacy—each of these has been explored many times over, but rarely have they resulted in a novel as fine as this.

'This Is How We Change the Ending' embraces all of these tropes and, rather than taking the path most travelled, crashes into the undergrowth, using them like machetes to clear a path to that great emotional motivator and agent for change—hope. Wakefield achieves this through her razor-sharp wit and instinct for subversion, as well as a sense of restraint around the threat of male violence that lurks in the corners. Her ability to take a moment and make it light even whilst shadows drift menacingly past the windows is matched only by her gift for characterisation and, even more impressively, dialogue. There are few writers who can create such dazzling conversation from the most unremarkable situations, all the while raising questions in the mind of the reader, advancing the story, and bringing a smile to the face with the charming effortlessness of it all, even as the tension of Nate's Sisyphus-like existence continues to quiver in the middle distance.

This is a novel which lives on in the mind long after it has been closed. Yes, in its composite parts it is a story that has been told before. But the execution of the elements, and the destination to which it leads, make it utterly remarkable.

When the Ground is Hard

Shortlist year: 2020

Shortlist category: Young adult literature

Published by: Allen & Unwin

Adele loves being one of the popular girls at Keziah Christian Academy, with her best friend Delia at her side. Then Delia dumps her for a new girl with more money, and Adele is forced to share a room with Lottie, the school pariah.

As they share Jane Eyre, Lottie's gruff exterior and honesty grow on Adele, and together they take on bullies and protect each other from the vindictive and prejudiced teachers. When a boy goes missing on campus, Adele and Lottie must work together to solve the mystery, in the process learning the true meaning of friendship.

About the author

Malla Nunn

Born and raised in Swaziland on the far edges of the British Empire, Malla Nunn attended a boarding school specially set up for 'mixed race' children. After her family migrated to Australia to escape apartheid, Nunn graduated with a double degree in English and History and then earned a Master of Arts in Theatre Studies from Villanova University. Faced with a life of chronic under-employment, she dabbled in acting and screenwriting. She married in a traditional Swazi ceremony. Her bride price was eighteen cows.

Judges’ comments

'When the Ground Is Hard' is the book we need now, as, around the world, we awaken to race matters with heart. It explores the marginalisation of people of 'mixed race' and the complexities of race, gender and class with an unparalleled poetic prowess.

Championing matriarchal strength, this engrossing narrative welcomes the reader into the isolated world of a Swaziland boarding school, where two girls from different realms battle bullies, teachers, fires and racism, while creating a sanctuary over a shared copy of 'Jane Eyre'.

Nunn's profound ability to shape compelling characters and relationships allows the reader to witness the truest meaning of friendship and family and her intricately woven ancestral stories and proverbs made this the sort of book that lives on in the reader's thoughts after it is finished. 'When the Ground is Hard' is a poignant coming-of-age novel and an important addition to Australian young adult literature.