2024 PMLA winners, shortlist and judges

Judges 2024

Fiction

Dr Debra Adelaide is the author or editor of 18 books, including fiction, non-fiction, edited collections and reference works. Her 2018 novel, The Household Guide to Dying, was published to acclaim in Australia and around the world, and was short- and long-listed for several literary awards, including the former international Orange Prize, now the Women’s Prize, for fiction. Other fiction includes Letter to George Clooney (2013), which was shortlisted for the Nita B. Kibble Award, The Women’s Pages (2015), and Zebra (2019), winner of the short story category in the Queensland Literary Awards. Her most recent books are The Innocent Reader: reflections on reading & writing (2019) and Creative Writing Practice: reflections on form & process (ed with Sarah Attfield, 2021). Debra Adelaide taught creative writing for 20 years and is now an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Technology Sydney. She lives and writes on Bidjigal country in Sydney’s inner west.

Melinda Harvey is a book critic who has written for a wide variety of Australian newspapers and magazines since 2004. She has been a Walkley Awards finalist for her criticism and has served on numerous judging panels, including the Miles Franklin Literary Award (2017-2021). She co-coordinates the Stella Count, which assesses the extent of gender bias in Australia’s book pages annually. She is Lecturer in English at Monash University.

Nam Le is the author of The Boat, On David Malouf, and 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem. His work, which appears in modern classics series, has received major awards in Australia, America and Europe, and is widely translated and taught. He lives in Melbourne.

Tara June Winch is a Wiradjuri writer born in 1983. She is the author of Swallow the Air (UQP 2006), After the Carnage (UQP 2016), and The Yield (Penguin Random House 2019). She is the recipient of numerous honours, including the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award.

Children's literature

Melissa-Jane Fogarty (she/her) is an Aboriginal (Mununjali) freelance editor, proofreader, author and illustrator. Most recently, she has had the privilege of working with the publisher Thames & Hudson on books written by Bruce Pascoe, Marcia Langton and Alison Page. Melissa’s debut picture book will be coming out in 2025. Most days you can find her working away on Darkinjung Country in between spending time with her husband, two children and two fur children.

Shirley Marr is a first-generation Chinese Australian living in Perth and an author of young adult and children’s fiction, including YA novels  Fury and  Preloved, and children’s novels  Little Jiang,  All Four Quarters of the Moon, Countdown to Yesterday and the CBCA award winning A Glasshouse of Stars. She describes herself as having a Western mind and an Eastern heart, writing in the space in the middle where they both collide, basing her stories on her own personal experiences of migration and growing up in Australia, along with the folk and fairy tales from her mother. Arriving in mainland Australia from Christmas Island as a seven-year-old in the 1980s and experiencing the good, the bad and the wonder that comes with culture shock, Shirley has been in love with reading and writing from that early age. She is a universe full of stars and stories and hopes to share the many other novels that she has inside her.

Kirrin Sampson is active across many Australian literary and literacy focused organisations. Currently a board member for both the National Centre for Australian Children’s Literature (NCACL) and Raising Literacy Australia, she has also been a long-term committee member and Vice President of the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) ACT, and Chair of the Love2Read Network in the ACT. She has acted as an advisor to the Copyright Agency’s Reading Australia project since its earliest days, and as a judge for the children’s categories of the ACT Writers’ Centre awards and the Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIAs), as well as the CBCA Picture Book of the Year.

Currently with the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth (ARACY), Kirrin previously worked for the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) for twelve years, where she supported the development of many library-based literary and literacy programs, and advocacy initiatives, including ALIA’s National Simultaneous Storytime, and the National Early Language and Literacy Coalition. Dividing her time between Canberra ACT and Braidwood NSW, Kirrin has a master’s degree in education and an undergraduate degree in economic history.

Fiona Stager, OAM is the co-owner of Avid Reader, Riverbend Books and Where the Wild Things Are, which are three leading independent bookshops located in Brisbane. She was recently awarded the Lloyd O’Neil for a lifetime of service to Australian literary culture and in 2020 Fiona was awarded the Dame Annabelle Rankin for Distinguished Services to Children’s Literature. Fiona lives in West End with her family, three chickens and a native beehive.

Young adult literature

Kate Eltham is the Chair of LoveOzYA, a national charity promoting Australian youth literature, supporting diverse representation and own voices in Australian YA. LoveOzYA centres the experiences and aspirations of Australian teen readers and aims to connect them with great Australian YA books and authors. Kate has spent twenty years in Australian arts and creative industries, leading organisations and festivals in the writing and literature sector, including Brisbane Writers Festival and Queensland Writers Centre. She has managed public programs for government and institutions, including Queensland Literary Awards and the black&write! Indigenous Writing and Editing Program, and held artform and sector development and advocacy roles such as her current position as Co-CEO and Business Director of BlakDance.

Pip Harry is an Australian children’s author living in Sydney. Her  verse novel, The Little Wave, won the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s 2020 Book of the Year Award and the Speech Pathology Australia Book of the Year. It was shortlisted for the 2020 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards – Ethel Turner Prize. Her latest middle grade novel August & Jones won the CBCA Sun Project Shadow Judging Award in 2023, voted entirely by school students around Australia and was shortlisted for the 2023 Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award. Her young adult novels include I’ll Tell You Mine,  Head of the River, Are You There, Buddha?  and  Because of You – shortlisted for the CBCA Book of the Year Awards, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and Queensland Literary Awards. Pip was a judge and mentor for the 2023 Hachette Australia Young Writers’ Prize. She travels widely to present to Australian school students aged from Kindergarten to Year 12 and works as a content specialist for the Property Industry Foundation – a homeless youth charity. 

Erin Wamala is the owner of The Kids’ Bookshop and a Teacher Librarian with over 20 years’ experience working in bookselling and publishing. Throughout her career Erin has been a judge for the Children’s Book Council Awards, the Australian Book Industry Awards and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. She has been a member of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival Board, is a regular reviewer for Books + Publishing and is a contributor to The Kids’ Reading Guide. Erin has a passion for matching books to readers and enjoys nothing more than chatting to kids and their carers about books they will love.

Sean Williams is a #1 New York Times-bestselling, multi-award-winning author of over sixty books and one hundred and twenty shorter publications for readers of all ages. His published works include series, novels, stories and poems that have been translated into multiple languages for readers around the world. He has collaborated with other authors, including Garth Nix, was part of an expedition to Casey research station in Antarctica, and is Discipline Lead of Creative Writing at Flinders University, South Australia. For more info: www.seanwilliams.com

Non-fiction

Debra Dank: I have an amazing family and consider myself beyond fortunate to have three grown children who continue to inspire me. Rick and I also have two totally amazing granddaughters. We come with this place is my first book, resulting from the work I did in completing my PhD that explored the use of polyphony in Aboriginal narrative practices. For almost 40 years I have worked in various roles in primary, secondary and tertiary education in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, and the Northern Territory in urban and remote contexts. I am currently an Enterprise Fellow with the University of South Australia and am working on two more books. Gudanji/Wakaja Country is in the Beetaloo Basin area, so my family continue to work to raise awareness of the devastation that we as a community, are experiencing and will continue to experience through the destruction of our more than ancient homelands and culture.

Eda Gunaydin is a Turkish-Australian essayist and researcher whose writing explores class, intergenerational trauma and diaspora. Her collection Root & Branch: Essays on Inheritance (NewSouth Publishing) won the 2023 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Matt Richell Prize for New Writer of the Year at the 2023 ABIAs. Her essays have been published in the Sydney Review of Books, Cordite, Liminal, Meanjin, and others.

Rick Morton is the author of four non-fiction books, including the critically-acclaimed bestseller One Hundred Years of Dirt which was longlisted for the Walkley Book of the Year 2018 and shortlisted for the National Biography Award (NBA) 2019. He has since been a three-time judge of the NBA. Rick is the senior reporter with The Saturday Paper and 2x Walkley Award winner for his coverage of the Robodebt Royal Commission. He has written the forthcoming Mean Streak about the illegal and fake debt trap set by the Australian government, bureaucratic harm and the fight to put people back into policy. He lives in Queensland.

Jane Rawson writes fiction and non-fiction, primarily about nature, climate change and social justice. She is the author of four novels, including From the Wreck (2017), which won the Aurealis Award for Science Fiction Novel and was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Prize, and A History of Dreams (2022), which was longlisted for the Tasmanian Literary Awards. She is the managing editor of Tasmania’s foremost literary magazine, Island. Her forthcoming book is a creative investigation of our ideas about nature.

Australian history

Anna Clark is an award-winning historian, author and public commentator. An internationally recognised scholar in Australian history, history education and the role of history in everyday life, Anna’s most recent books are The Catch: Australia’s Love Affair with Fishing (Penguin 2023) and Making Australian History (Penguin 2022). She is currently Professor of History at the University of Technology Sydney.

Dr Peter Hobbins is a historian and curator who leads the library, publications and curatorial teams at the Australian National Maritime Museum. Peter has been a professional communicator for 30 years, including time as a medical writer, advertising copywriter, academic historian and museums professional. With a focus on the histories of science, technology and medicine, Peter has authored two books, over 40 academic papers and book chapters, plus more than 80 articles for specialist and mainstream outlets. A passionate supporter of community history, he loves sharing his engagement with the past via public talks and media spots.

Tony Hughes-d’Aeth is the Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His books include Like Nothing on this Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt (UWAP, 2017), which won the Walter McRae Russell Prize for Australian literary scholarship, and Paper Nation: The Story of the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia (MUP, 2001), which won the Ernest Scott and WK Hancock prizes for Australian history. Tony is also the Director of the Westerly Centre, which publishes Westerly Magazine, a literary journal founded in 1956 and is the Chair of the Publishing Board of UWA Publishing.

Professor Lynette Russell AM FASSA FAHA (Sir John Monash Distinguished Professor and ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Professor at Monash University’s Indigenous Studies Centre) is an award-winning historian and Indigenous studies scholar. Her research is broadly anthropological history. Russell has published widely in the areas of theory, Indigenous histories, post-colonialism and representations of race, museum studies and popular culture.

Poetry

Dan Disney’s most recent collection of poems, accelerations & inertias (Vagabond Press, 2021), was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Prize for Poetry and received the N.S.W. Premier’s Prize for Poetry. Originally from Australia, for the past 14 years he has taught with the English Literature Program at Sogang University, in Seoul.

Lucy Dougan’s books include Memory Shell (5 Islands Press), White Clay (Giramondo), Meanderthals (Web del Sol) and The Guardians (Giramondo) which won the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award for poetry. With Tim Dolin, she is co-editor of The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky (UWAP, 2017). Her latest book is Monster Field (Giramondo). She is poetry editor for Westerly, and is currently working with Beverly Taylor on an edition of Anne Brontë’s poetry for Cambridge UP.

Sarah Holland-Batt is an award-winning poet, editor and critic. Her books have received a number of Australia’s leading literary awards, including the Stella Prize for her most recent book, The Jaguar, and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry for her second volume, The Hazards. She is also the author of a book of essays on contemporary Australian poetry, Fishing for Lightning, collecting her poetry columns written for The Australian. She is presently Professor of Creative Writing at QUT.

James Jiang is a writer and critic. He edits the Sydney Review of Books and was previously Assistant Editor at Griffith Review and Australian Book Review. His essays and reviews have appeared in a variety of scholarly and generalist publications in Australia and abroad.

Fiction

WINNER: 'Anam', André Dao

Anam

André Dao

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: Penguin Random House

Anam blends fiction and essay, theory and everyday life to imagine that which has been repressed, left out, and forgotten. The grandson mines his family and personal stories to turn over ideas that resonate with all of us around place and home, legacy and expectation, ambition and sacrifice. As he sifts through letters, photographs, government documents and memories, he has his own family to think about: a partner and an infant daughter. Is there a way to remember the past that creates a future for them? Or does coming home always involve a certain amount of forgetting?

André Dao

André Dao is a Melbourne-based writer, editor and artist. His debut novel, Anam, won the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. His writing has appeared in Meanjin, Sydney Review of Books, Griffith Review, The Monthly, The Lifted Brow, Cordite, The Saturday Paper, New Philosopher, Arena Magazine, Asia Literary Review and elsewhere.

He is the co-founder of Behind the Wire, the award-winning oral history project documenting the stories of the adults and children who have been detained by the Australian government after seeking asylum in Australia. His work for Behind the Wire includes a Quill award winning article for The Saturday Paper and the Walkley Award-winning podcast, The Messenger. He co-edited Behind the Wire’s collection of literary oral histories They Cannot Take the Sky.

Judges’ comments

André Dao’s Anam is an original and compelling exploration of histories full of trauma and exile. The author’s own family, including a version of himself, populate a poignant narrative spanning generations and continents that questions the consequences of political chaos, war, displacement and refuge.

Anam is an intimate examination of the migrant experience and its vulnerabilities, where the idea of one’s country remains suffused with uncertainty and ambiguity. Dao extends the novel form, breaking rules, forming new ones, and demonstrating how the ‘imaginative power of a novel’ is perfect for witnessing uncomfortable truths. While offering reflections on philosophy, history, language and memory, Anam is primarily a story of family relationships. Lovingly domestic in parts, boldly theoretical in others, for a country full of migrants, living amid unresolved questions of place and belonging, Anam is a profoundly relevant novel.

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'Restless Dolly Maunder', Kate Grenville

Restless Dolly Maunder

Kate Grenville

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: Text Publishing

Dolly Maunder was born at the end of the nineteenth century, when society’s long-locked doors were starting to creak ajar for women. Growing up in a poor farming family in country New South Wales but clever, energetic and determined, Dolly spent her restless life pushing at those doors.

Most women like her have disappeared from view, remembered only in family photo albums as remote figures in impossible clothes, or maybe for a lemon-pudding recipe handed down through the generations. Restless Dolly Maunder brings one of these women to life as someone we can recognise and whose struggles we can empathise with.

In this compelling new novel, Kate Grenville uses family memories to imagine her way into the life of her grandmother. This is the story of a woman, working her way through a world of limits and obstacles, who was able—if at a cost—to make a life she could call her own. Her battles and triumphs helped to open doors for the women who came after.

Kate Grenville

Kate Grenville is one of Australia’s most celebrated writers. Her international bestseller The Secret River was awarded local and overseas prizes, has been adapted for the stage and as an acclaimed television miniseries, and is now a much-loved classic. Grenville’s other novels include, The Lieutenant, Dark  and the Orange Prize winner The Idea of Perfection.

Her recent non-fiction includes One Life: My Mother’s Story, The Case Against Fragrance and Elizabeth Macarthur’s Letters. Her most recent novel is the bestselling A Room Made of Leaves. She has also written three books about the writing process. In 2017 Grenville was awarded the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.

Judges’ comments

What begins as the unassuming and diligent account of the author’s grandmother’s life ends in a sense that this life has been afforded, in language, an almost miraculous fullness of dignity. Dolly Maunder is an Australian woman in the early twentieth century. She, like every other woman, is trapped by place, time, law, manners and mindset. Worse, hers is the ‘hinge generation’: ‘The door had been shut tight, and when it started to swing open, my generation was the hinge that it had to be forced around on, one surface grinding over another. No wonder it was painful.’

Grenville imagines herself into this pain and gives it a voice – a voice that is faithful to the understatement, emotional elision and stoicism of its time, but a voice that also lets in lovely frequencies of humour and irony.

This is a powerful book about an ordinary life, accretive in its power, profoundly open-eyed and steady and moving.

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'Edenglassie', Melissa Lucashenko

Edenglassie

Melissa Lucashenko

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: UQP

When Mulanyin meets the beautiful Nita in Edenglassie, their saltwater people still outnumber the British. As colonial unrest peaks, Mulanyin dreams of taking his bride home to Yugambeh Country, but his plans for independence collide with white justice.

Two centuries later, fiery activist Winona meets Dr Johnny. Together they care for obstinate centenarian Granny Eddie, and sparks fly, but not always in the right direction. What nobody knows is how far the legacies of the past will reach into their modern lives.

In this brilliant epic, Melissa Lucashenko torches Queensland’s colonial myths, while reimagining an Australian future.

Melissa Lucashenko

Melissa Lucashenko is a Goorie (Aboriginal) author of Bundjalung and European heritage. Her first novel was published in 1997 and since then her work has received acclaim in many literary awards. Killing Darcy won the Royal Blind Society Award and was shortlisted for an award.

Her sixth novel, Too Much Lip, won the 2019 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Queensland Premier’s Award for a work of State Significance. It was also shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Stella Prize, two Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, two Queensland Literary Awards and two NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.

Melissa is a Walkley Award winner for her non-fiction, and a founding member of human rights organisation Sisters Inside. She writes about ordinary Australians and the extraordinary lives they lead. Her latest book is Edenglassie.

Judges’ comments

‘Edenglassie’ was the name given by white settlers to the first penal colony of Magandjin/Brisbane in 1824. Melissa Lucashenko chooses to tell the story of this place by interweaving two narratives over 150 years apart. The first is uproarious and contemporary, centring on Yagara elder Granny Eddie Blanket’s stay in a city hospital. The second, set in 1854-55, details the tragic love affair between Yugambeh man Mulanyin’s and Ngugi woman Nita in the context of land theft and colonial violence.

Ambitious and generous, Edenglassie stages an intervention into prevailing myths of race relations in this country. In a riotous literary style that conjoins slang and wit with rage and bite, this is a novel about opportunities lost and regained. It is remarkable for its humour and its willingness to hope, in spite of past atrocities and intergenerational trauma suffered by First Nations people. The stakes are high: nothing short of harmony and understanding, and a form of reconciliation that is audacious and original.

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'The Carnal Fugues', Catherine McNamara

The Carnal Fugues

Catherine McNamara

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: Puncher & Wattmann

A wayward, wanton selection of stories grounded in displacement, desire, and the wish coursing through us to accede to the state of love. There is torment and illness, crude reality and distant fragrant places, peopled by characters that reside close to our bones, our psyches, our flesh. A Japanese soprano has lost her voice and seeks repose on a sailing boat in Corsica. A South African advertising executive learns the ropes at his Accra office; a Sydney swimming champion falls from grace. Destructive lovers interview a renowned musician in dusty Bamako. Lovers meet, fade, delude. We are weak and defiant beings, ever-learning, ever-lustful.

Catherine McNamara

Catherine McNamara grew up in Sydney, ran away to Paris to write and ended up co-running a bar in Ghana, working in Mogadishu and Milan along the way. She is the author of the short fiction collections The Carnal Fugues, The Cartography of Others, Love Stories for Hectic People and Pelt and Other Stories, and her stories have been widely published. She is Flash Fiction Editor and a Masterclass tutor for Litro Magazine, and was Guest Editor for the Best Small Fictions Anthology 2023. Catherine lives in Italy.

Judges’ comments

The sentences in The Carnal Fugues are darkly brilliant, biting, vital, comic. They flash along, discharging an energy that is full of sex and savagery. Different people from different places are all captured in these same currents of desire, laid bare to their own bodies, their sensual minds.

The sentences make up longer stories – intricately structured, narratively complex – as well as micro-stories less than a page long; these are very different difficulties, and Catherine McNamara surmounts them both with skill. What is most delicious in these stories is the element of surprise: at no moment as a reader can we be sure where we’re being taken; at no moment do we feel we’re in anything but masterly hands.

Gathered over a decade of writing, Catherine McNamara’s short stories in The Carnal Fugues are a repository of energy and eros that should power writers and readers for generations to come.

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'Stone Yard Devotional', Charlotte Wood

Stone Yard Devotional

Charlotte Wood

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: Allen & Unwin

A woman abandons her city life and marriage to return to the place of her childhood, holing up in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of the Monaro.

She does not believe in God, doesn’t know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive life almost by accident. As she gradually adjusts to the rhythms of monastic life, she finds herself turning again and again to thoughts of her mother, whose early death she can’t forget.

Disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations.

With each of these disturbing arrivals, the woman faces some deep questions. Can a person be truly good? What is forgiveness? Is loss of hope a moral failure? And can the business of grief ever really be finished?

A meditative and deeply moving novel from one of Australia’s most acclaimed and best loved writers.

Charlotte Wood

Charlotte Wood is the author of ten books – seven novels and three non-fiction works. She has won the Stella Prize and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, among others, and her features and essays have appeared in The Guardian, New York Times, Sydney Morning Herald, The Monthly, Saturday Paper and others. She lives in Sydney.

Judges comments

In Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, a woman chooses to retreat from the world and live with a closed community of nuns on the remote Monaro plains. The austere rhythms of the convent give her the opportunity to breathe, become still and pay attention. Three intrusions from the outside – a mouse plague, the skeletal remains of a murdered sister and the ‘celebrity nun’ Helen Parry – exhort the narrator to revisit past events, especially the death of her own mother.

Written in the form of a diary, this novel delivers the best of what this form has to offer: immediacy, intimacy and deep reflection. In stripped-back prose, it probes the connections between daily existence and greater purpose. As a reading experience, Stone Yard Devotional has the quality of a meditation itself. Elegiac in mood, it refuses easy salves and is open to mystery and wonder.

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Children's literature

WINNER: 'Tamarra: A Story of Termites on Gurindji Country,' Violet Wadrill and co-creators Topsy Dodd Ngarnjal, Leah Leaman, Cecelia Edwards, Cassandra Algy, Briony Barr, Felicity Meakins, Gregory Crocetti

Tamarra: A Story of Termites on Gurindji Country

Violet Wadrill and co-creators Topsy Dodd Ngarnjal, Leah Leaman, Cecelia Edwards, Cassandra Algy, Briony Barr, Felicity Meakins, Gregory Crocetti

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Children’s Literature

Published by: Hardie Grant Explore

Tamarra: A Story of Termites on Gurindji Country is a fascinating, illustrated science book that takes kids inside the life of termites through storytelling from the Gurindji People.

Did you know there are four types of termite poo? Or that a warm paste made from termite mound is used to strengthen a Gurindji baby’s body and spirit? Or that spinifex (which termites eat) is one of the strongest plants in the world?

Created as a collaboration between over 30 First Nations and non-Indigenous contributors, the story and artworks explore how termites and their mounds connect different parts of Country, from tiny Gurindji babies and their loving grandmothers, to spiky spinifex plants growing in the hot sun.

Written in traditional Gurindji, Gurindji Kriol and English (with a QR code to an audio version spoken in language), Tamarra is a truly original story with beautiful artwork that takes readers on an educational and cultural journey through Gurindji Country.

Biographies

Violet Wadrill was born in 1942 and is a traditional owner of Jutamaliny. She has worked extensively with linguists on the documentation of Gurindji language and culture, including a dictionary, ethnobiology and a number of volumes of collected texts including Yijarni: True Stories from Gurindji Country (2016). She also paints her traditional country, Jutamaliny, and makes traditional artefacts such as coolamons and nulla nullas. Her work demonstrates a passion for the maintenance of Gurindji traditions. Violet was a finalist in the ICTV Australian Digital Storytelling Awards 2018 and VIP guest speaker at the NT Writers Festival in 2019.

Topsy Dodd Ngarnjal was born in 1934. She has worked extensively with linguists on the documentation of Gurindji language and culture, including a dictionary, ethnobiology, songs book Songs from the Station (2018) and a number of volumes of collected texts. Topsy paints her Dreaming, the lamawurt (witchetty grub) and makes kawarla (coolamons), kurturu (nulla nullas) and kilkilpkaji (clap sticks). Topsy is also a senior ceremony women who leads Yawulyu and Jarrarta (women’s ceremonies).

Leah Leaman is a Gurindji/Malngin woman, artist and Co-Director of Karungkarni Art. Her artwork has featured in a number of events and exhibitions including the annual exhibition at Charles Darwin University ACIKE Unit commemorating the Vincent Lingiari Memorial Lecture (2015-2018) and the Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair. Leah’s work, Women Collecting Flowers and Bushfood, is currently touring Australia as part of the Karungkarni Art/Brenda L Croft exhibition ‘Still In My Mind: Gurindji location, experience and visuality’. Her painting, ‘Ngumpin Kartiya’, was commissioned by The Plenary to represent its Reconciliation Action Plan.

Cecelia Edwards was born in Katherine to Warlpiri and Gurindji parents. She has been painting since she was a child and is an active member of Karungkarni Art. Cecelia has worked as an assistant teacher at Kalkaringi School. She also works with Felicity Meakins extensively on the documentation of Gurindji and Gurindji Kriol.

Cassandra Algy is a Gurindji/Mudburra woman from Daguragu currently employed as a Karungkarni artworker. Since 2005, Cassandra has assisted linguist Felicity Meakins in numerous Gurindji language projects including Aboriginal Child Language Project; Gurindji history projects (producing 2 books Yijarni and Mayarni-Kari Yurrk); Gurindji bush medicine, bush food projects and sign language projects; and the Karu project based on Gurindji child rearing practices. Cassandra manages scheduling of language speakers, as well as preparation and use of audio and video equipment for recording sessions. In 2020, Cassandra delivered a presentation on Gurindji sign language (takataka) to the Australian Language Conference.

Briony Barr is a non-Indigenous visual-conceptual artist whose work explores emergence and the effect of boundaries and other creative limitations through process based drawing. She regularly collaborates with fellow artists and writers as well as scientists, musicians on projects ranging from collaborative artworks and participatory drawing-installations, to improvisation-performance, to educational workshops, picture books and graphic novels. Briony has exhibited work throughout Australia, in Mexico, America and South Korea and is an honorary fellow of The University of Melbourne’s School of Physics. She is co-founder of art-science collective, Scale Free Network.

Felicity Meakins (FASSA, FAHA) is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Queensland. She is a non-Indigenous field linguist who specialises in the documentation of First Nations languages in northern Australia and the effect of English on these languages. She has worked as a community linguist as well as an academic over the past 20 years, facilitating language revitalisation programs, consulting on Native Title claims and conducting research into First Nations languages. Felicity has compiled a number of dictionaries and grammars, and has written numerous papers on language change in Australia.

Gregory Crocetti is a non-Indigenous microbial ecologist, science educator, writer, advocate for microbes and Director of Scale Free Network: art-science collaborative. His PhD and subsequent post-doctoral research explored the roles of different populations of bacteria in a range of environments, including those found in sponges, seaweeds, stromatolites and sewage. Since 2007, Gregory has collaborated with artists and educators to design and deliver a vast range of art-science workshops, exhibitions and participatory installations for diverse audiences, with a view to visualising the invisible. In recent years, he has also co-created several award-winning picture books and graphic novels about microbes and their symbiotic partnerships with larger life-forms.

Judges’ comments

Tamarra: A Story of Termites on Gurindji Country is a nonfiction, illustrated science book about termites that brought together over 30 contributors. A masterpiece of storytelling, factual information and community, it is written in three different languages: Gurindji, Gurindji Kriol and English, and includes a QR code to hear the story spoken in Gurindji or Gurindji Kriol.

Following the life cycle of spinifex termites on Gurindji Country it describes how a Tamarra (termite mound) is an important ingredient for Gurindji babies who go through a bush medicine treatment called karu kamparnup.

There are layers of meaning and significance woven into the book: the importance of a small creature and its big impact on its own world and system, on Gurindji Country, generating waves of impact far and wide. There’s a message of interconnectedness and harmony with Country that might seem small but are great, big termite mounds of significance.

There’s a beautiful balance between the art, photography, scientific facts and storytelling with additional information in front matter and backmatter that feels like a treasure trove. All this achieved while highlighting themes of family, tradition and caring for Country.

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'Etta and the Shadow Taboo', JM Field and Jeremy Worrall

Etta and the Shadow Taboo

JM Field and Jeremy Worrall

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Children’s Literature

Published by: Hardie Grant Children’s Publishing

“Where is theirs?
And where is mine?
To hurt a shadow
Is surely a crime

When Etta steps on Baawaa’s (her sister’s) shadow, she learns of the Shadow Taboo, and learns to value the personal space of others, as well as her own.

Written by Gamilaraay author JM Field and illustrated by Ngarabal/Gomeroi artist Jeremy Worrall, Etta and the Shadow Taboo will invite readers to follow a Gamilaraay tradition where one must avoid stepping on the shadows of others.

JM Field and Jeremy Worrall

JM Field grew up on waterfall country, in a small town along the Great Dividing Range on Dharug land. He is, however, a Gamilaraay Guwaymadhaan mari from Moree way, where the red sand meets the black soil. He did his undergraduate studies at the University of Sydney in mathematics and French literature, followed by a doctorate in Mathematical Biology at Balliol College at the University of Oxford. He is still a research mathematician, but fills his spare time writing.

Jeremy Worrall is a Ngarabal/Gomeroi multimedia artist.  As a young First Nations man, Jeremy specialises in First Nations multimedia, working on a range of government and private projects for community. He is also working on a personal project that explores the visual representation of the Dreamtime and provides a platform for First Nations people to share their stories. In 2024 he was shortlisted for the Ena Noël Award for his illustration of  Etta and the Shadow Taboo.

Judges’ comments

Gamilaraay author and academic JM Field has lovingly created an important concept he learned from his mother and grandmother, that is, shadow avoidance which is a lesson in respecting the personal space of others. Together Field and Worrall have created a wise and beautifully illustrated picture book that is an invitation for young ones to learn not just to be aware of their bodies but to be conscious of their bodies in the context of others.

Etta, the charmingly feisty younger sister is a beautifully realised and relatable main character. After standing on her Baawaa’s (sister’s) shadow not once but four times she is in big trouble! The story then becomes Etta’s journey to knowledge and forgiveness.

The red, yellow and brown colour palette with the intricate illustrations reflect traditional artforms in a truly unique and contemporary way.

The rhyming text provides a special flow and rhythm, which will be a joy to read aloud. We can see youngsters enjoying reciting the repeating phrases and then playing with each other’s shadows in the playground.

As a book it’s as much a performance piece and a cultural expression incorporating generously shared memories and language of JM Field’s mother and grandmother.

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'Ghost Book', Remy Lai

Ghost Book

Remy Lai

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Children’s Literature

Published by: Allen & Unwin

Twelve years ago, the boy and the girl lived. But one was supposed to die…

July Chen sees ghosts. But her dad insists ghosts aren’t real. So she pretends they don’t exist. Which is incredibly difficult now as it’s Hungry Ghost month, when the Gates of the Underworld open and dangerous ghosts run amok in the living world. When July saves a boy ghost from being devoured by a Hungry Ghost, he becomes her first ever friend. Except William is not a ghost. He’s a wandering soul wavering between life and death. As the new friends embark on an adventure to return William to his body, they unearth a ghastly truth – for William to live, July must die.

Inspired by Chinese mythology, this resoundingly hopeful tale about friendship, sacrifice and the unseen world of ghosts is a dazzling heir to beloved Studio Ghibli classics.

Remy Lai

Remy Lai writes and draws for kids. She was born in Indonesia, grew up in Singapore and currently lives in Brisbane, Australia. She lives with her two dogs, who sometimes scare her by barking at nothing in the corners of rooms. Remy is also the award-winning creator of Pie in the Sky, Fly on the Wall, Pawcassoand the Surviving the Wild series. www.remylai.com

Judges’ comments

Ghost Book is a spooky, fast-paced graphic novel adventure for middle grade readers. July Chen sees ghosts but pretends they don’t exist. That is, until Hungry Ghost Month when she saves a ghost boy from being devoured by a hungry ghost. The story follows July and William as they become fast friends on a journey to reunite William with his body. Lai has incorporated Chinese mythology into this contemporary story that explores themes of friendship, feeling invisible, grief and family while being a highly entertaining read full of humour that also at times has readers reaching for the tissue box.

The illustrations and text work seamlessly to convey the story and messages of kindness and sacrifice while maintaining a spooky vibe through the colour palette, with many scenes taking place at night. Ghost Book explores culture and connection in an accessible way through a character who feels (and is literally) ignored and invisible – something that’s relatable for many children in the middle grade age category. This is an outstanding graphic novel, full of fun and adventure while sending a powerful message about embracing who you are and your strengths, no matter how unique and different.

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'Two Sparrowhawks in a Lonely Sky', Rebecca Lim

Two Sparrowhawks in a Lonely Sky

Rebecca Lim

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Children’s Literature

Published by: Allen & Unwin

Thirteen-year-old Fu, his younger sister, Pei, and their mother live in a small rural community in Southern China that is already enduring harsh conditions when it is collectivised as part of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward campaign that ultimately led to economic disaster, widespread famine and millions of deaths.

After tragedy strikes, and threatened with separation, Fu and Pei set out on a perilous journey across countries and oceans to find their father, who left for Australia almost a decade ago. With nothing to guide them but a photograph and some documents in a language they cannot read, they must draw on all their courage and tenacity just to survive – and perhaps forge a better life for themselves.

Rebecca Lim

Rebecca Lim is an award-winning Australian writer, illustrator and editor and the author of over twenty books, including Tiger Daughter (a CBCA Book of the Year: Older Readers and Victorian Premier’s Literary Award-winner), The Astrologer’s Daughter (a Kirkus Best Book and CBCA Notable Book) and the bestselling Mercy. Her work has been shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, Queensland Literary Awards, Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award and Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards, shortlisted multiple times for the Aurealis Awards and Davitt Awards, and longlisted for the Gold Inky Award and the David Gemmell Legend Award.

Her novels have been translated into German, French, Turkish, Portuguese, Polish and Russian. She is a co-founder of the Voices from the Intersection initiative to support emerging young adult and children’s authors and illustrators who are First Nations, People of Colour, LGBTIQA+ and/or living with disability, and co-editor of Meet Me at the Intersection, a groundbreaking anthology of YA #OwnVoice memoir, poetry and fiction.

Judges’ comments

Two Sparrowhawks in a Lonely Sky is a historical middle grade novel, following young siblings Fu and Pei and their life in rural China under Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, who eventually make the perilous journey to find their father in Melbourne, Australia. This freedom is not easily won, as they then face the institutional racism of the White Australia Policy of the 1950s. This book, based on a true story, is a remarkable tale of survival that represents collectively the all too familiar plight of the migrant and refugee in this nation. The title itself serves as a thoughtful analogy of being helplessly stuck between land and sky: a past left behind, and an uncertain future ahead.

An absorbing and unflinching novel, filled with thoroughly researched gut-wrenching histories and convincingly realised characters based on authentic stories belonging to the family of the author, it teaches lessons in the resilience of the human spirit, the compassion and kindness of strangers, and is a celebration of our national identity. This book should have a place in every classroom as a learning and discussion tool for lessons from our past, and for the active prevention of the racist anti-Asian sentiment that saw a resurgence during the COVID pandemic.

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'Millie Mak the Maker,' Alice Pung & Sher Rill Ng

Millie Mak the Maker

Alice Pung & Sher Rill Ng

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Children’s Literature

Published by: HarperCollins Publishers

Nine-year-old Millie Mak has discovered she has a superpower!

Using everyday objects, Millie turns them into something new, beautiful and useful. Who would ever think that a sunhat could be made from an old bedsheet, a skirt from a tea-towel, or some hair scrunchies from a scarf?

Through her creativity and clever thinking, Millie also deals with different friendships, tricky family challenges, and contributes to the school fete.

You can make the special objects Millie creates from the detailed and yet easy-to-follow instructions included in the book. And best of all, nothing needs to be bought!

From award-winning author-illustrator team, Alice Pung and Sher Rill Ng, comes the first book in an inspiring new series for young and old makers.

Alice Pung & Sher Rill Ng

Alice Pung is the bestselling author of the memoirs Unpolished Gem and Her Father’s Daughter. Her debut novel Laurinda won the Ethel Turner Prize at the 2016 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and her second novel, One Hundred Days, was shortlisted for the 2022 Miles Franklin Award and has been optioned for a film. She is the author of children’s books, including the award-winning dual language picture book, Be Careful, Xiao Xin! (ill. Sher Rill Ng), and the Millie Mak series, also illustrated by Sher Rill Ng. Alice was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for services to literature in 2022.

Sher Rill Ng is a Woi Wurrung/Melbourne-based illustrator. She designed and illustrated for SaaS companies before releasing her first author-illustrated picture book Our Little Inventor in 2019. In 2022, Our Little Inventor was adapted into a children’s opera, composed by Emma Jayakumar and presented by the West Australian Opera. Her work includes middle grade book covers for The Twelve by Cindy Lin, The Rogues by Lian Tanner and Winnie Zeng Unleashes a Legend by Katie Zhao. Most recently, Sher Rill has illustrated Be Careful, Xiao Xin! written by Alice Pung.

Judges’ comments

Millie Mak is indeed a girl for our times. A relatable character, she’s introduced through two connected stories in Millie Mak the Maker.

This layered approach, including instructions for making the crafty projects that Millie completes with her family and friends, and charming illustrations throughout, ensure a delightful payoff for our younger readers as they make their way through a longer read.

Authentic and refreshingly honest, exploring culture and class, the stories move at a lively pace and reflect the experience of a young Australian girl of Chinese and Scottish heritage, as she comes to understand her family and her friends, where she fits, and what’s important. Millie learns that things are not always as simple as they seem.

The language used offers appropriate complexity, and the themes of resourcefulness, resilience, kindness, and patience, both at home and within the school environment, would resonate strongly with many Australian children today.

It would be remiss to not also draw attention to the book’s design and production. Produced in a textured hardcover embossed with gold highlights, and featuring patterned endpapers, Millie Mak is a very special bibliographic package both inside and out.

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Non-fiction

WINNER: 'Close to the Subject', Selected Works Daniel Browning

Close to the Subject: Selected Works

Daniel Browning

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Non-fiction

Published by: Magabala Books

This book is a collected works of one of Australia’s most accomplished media personalities. Chronicling his career since 2007, Close to the Subject presents a selection of pieces from Daniel Browning’s stellar career as a journalist, radio broadcaster, and interviewer.

Alongside conversations with the likes of the late Archie Roach, Doris Pilkington, and Vernon Ah Kee, the book a series of critical essays displaying Browning’s talent as an Australian cultural critic and public intellectual. A range of previously unpublished poetry, memoir, art writing and play script is also presented, highlighting his vulnerable and passionate creative side in its own right.

Daniel Browning

Daniel Browning (he/him) is a Bundjalung and Kullilli journalist, radio broadcaster, documentary maker, sound artist and writer. Currently, he is Editor: Indigenous Radio with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and produces and presents The Art Show for ABC RN, the ABC’s specialist arts and journalism network. He also presented Awaye! for many years, an RN staple which surveys contemporary Indigenous cultural practice across the arts spectrum.

A leading Aboriginal journalist with a long career at the ABC, Daniel Browning has been quietly achieving in the arts and media world for almost three decades. He is celebrated as a pioneer for his fiercely perceptive commentary and values-driven practice, and across the breadth of his career, has sought to elevate public commentary and criticism on Aboriginal arts and culture for the last three decades. Central to his work has been his talent as a conversationalist.

Judges’ comments

With thoughtfully chosen essays and interviews braided together with poetry and memoir, Browning demonstrates clear talent as an observer of cultural and political life, as well as within the hybrid literary form. The effect of the book is cumulative, threading the personal with the political through the lens of art.

Browning, a veteran journalist and Bundjalung and Kullilli art critic, is at his best dismantling the shibboleths of journalistic objectivity. Much of our media pretends to an ideal of impartiality that is only ‘possible’ because the starting position is European white and increasingly middle class. Browning shatters this understanding by being honest: we are each a hive of biases. These tell us important things and Browning explores them through his searching, honest work.

Close to the Subject tells stories we often fail to hear despite their reverberations and reiterations. Browning offers a gracious invitation to participate in a wider cultural context of important narratives of this country, one requiring a suspension of ‘ego and the cult of personality, fortified by whiteness and normativity.’

Close to the Subject is simply and effectively a collection of courageous and superbly crafted scratchings at this country’s ear, demanding a hearing of further truth telling.

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'Eventually Everything Connects', Sarah Firth

Eventually Everything Connects

Sarah Firth

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Non-fiction

Published by: Allen & Unwin

Eventually Everything Connects is Sarah Firth’s debut graphic novel, a collection of interconnected visual essays created over eight years. Sarah invites you into her wild mind as she explores ways to see with fresh eyes, to face the inevitability of change, and to find freedom in sensuality.

With raw honesty and vulnerability, Firth reminds us that the profane and the sacred, the tender and the cruel, the rigorous and the silly, all coexist in dynamic tension. This book is a delicious mix of daily life, science, philosophy and irreverent humour that is comforting, confronting and mind-expanding in equal measure.

Sarah Firth

Sarah Firth is a comic artist, writer and graphic recorder.Eventually Everything Connects is her debut graphic novel.

Judges’ comments

Sarah Firth offers a wildly inventive opus in Eventually Everything Connects. This memoir-cross-graphic-novel-cross-encyclopedia-of-modern-life is thrilling in its execution. Firth’s visual essays range from discussion of sexuality and desire to Olympic weightlifting to death and decomposition.

Firth skilfully demonstrates the possibilities offered by the graphic non-fiction form. Her illustration style is modern and entirely her own, characterised by clever recurring motifs and hidden details that reward close reading. The book’s art complements Firth’s literary voice, which balances sincerity with silliness.

Firth’s writing is candid and self-aware, employing the memoir form to ask questions that extend beyond herself. It is an empathetic work that is critical of power and conscious of systems but discusses this subject matter accessibly and invitingly. Firth achieves this balance by asking questions without proclaiming answers; instead, the reader is invited to join Firth herself as she searches.

The result is a literary quest, which brings together art, science, memoir, and deft deployment of intertextuality to generate and maintain its momentum. Firth has real verve that comes across on every page and leaves the reader in the state created by all great literature: of having seen and been seen.

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'Graft: Motherhood, Family and a Year on the Land', Maggie MacKellar

Graft: Motherhood, Family and a Year on the Land

Maggie MacKellar

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Non-fiction

Published by:Penguin Random House

A gorgeously written reflection, set in Tasmania, on motherhood, farming, nature and home.

‘In my mind I walk over the land. I run my hands through the grass as if it were the hair on my head. I dig my fingers into the dirt as if the soil were the crust of my skin.’

In Graft, Maggie MacKellar describes a year on a Merino wool farm on the east coast of Tasmania, and all of life – and death – that surrounds her through the cycle of lambing seasons. She gives us the land she knows and loves, the lambs she cares for, the ewes she tries to save, the birds around her, and the dogs and horses she adores.

This book is a stunning thanksgiving for a place and a moment in motherhood; and a timely reminder of the inescapable elemental laws of nature.

Maggie MacKellar

Maggie MacKellar is a writer and historian living on the east coast of Tasmania/lutruwita. She writes the much-loved newsletter The Sit Spot and is the author of five books, including When It Rains and Graft.

Judges’ comments

In Graft, Maggie MacKellar wields language with a borderline supernatural presence. There is a seasonal rhythm woven through the prose that reflects the natural cycles of the subject matter: the land, motherhood, longing. Her storytelling does not shy from the rough, grim and hard reality of all that it means to be entangled in her eastern Tasmanian place.

Graft is a fine piece of writing that reminds us of our responsibility to our kin, to our landscape, to live well and in relation. To read MacKellar’s work is to submit to its lyricism, to its moving from human to the non-human and being warmed through its ever hopeful, ever resilient prose. It is a celebration of what it is to live through your hands and heart, and of not merely watching but also contributing to the slow and steady rhythms in the everyday.

This telling deeply involves our senses: we can feel the wool of the sheep, see the swelling walnuts, hear the birds and their feathered movement above and around us. We cannot help but be nurtured and elevated through such storytelling.

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'A Kind of Confession', Alex Miller

A Kind of Confession

Alex Miller

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Non-fiction

Published by: Allen & Unwin

A Kind of Confession is a secret look into Alex Miller’s writing life, spanning sixty years of creativity and inspiration.

This selection from his notebooks and letters makes it exhilaratingly evident that Miller has been devoted to finding and telling stories that are profound, substantial and entertaining, stories that capture both intellect and emotion.

Miller’s fascinating life is told in a personal, behind-the-scenes exploration of his struggle to become a published writer, his determination, his methods of creative thought and the sources of his inspiration. His writing, sometimes in anger and despair, sometimes with humour and joy, whether created for publication or for private meditation, is alive with ideas, moral choices, commentary, encouragement, criticism and love.

Alex Miller

Alex Miller is the award-winning author of thirteen novels and a collection of essays and stories. He is published internationally and widely in translation. Miller is twice winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, for The Ancestor Game and for Journey to the Stone Country. He is an overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1993 for The Ancestor Game. Conditions of Faith and are both winners of the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the NSW Premier’s Awards.

Landscape of Farewell was awarded the Chinese 21st Century Weishanhi Best Foreign Novel of the Year and the Manning Clark Medal for Miller’s outstanding contribution to Australian cultural life.Autumn Laing received the Melbourne Prize for Literature, and Coal Creek, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. Miller’s work of non-fiction, Max, was shortlisted for the National Biography Award in 2021. His most recent novel, A Brief Affair, was published in 2022.

Judges’ comments

Reading A Kind of Confession, one is immediately struck by the strong sense of voice, evident from the earliest entries. Miller is at once self-possessed and riddled with doubt. Writing requires a forensic kind of truth that confronts reality, even when it is unforgiving, and that is what Miller does here.

A Kind of Confession grapples with the universal disappointments of a young author desperate to write but unable to get published. It is also funny and acidic in ways that feel precise. The book operates as a lonely writer’s guide to the agonies and ecstasies of doing the work, and bubbles with uncertainty and personal terrors.

Miller loves his children dearly, adores his second wife Stephanie – they met in 1975 and he credits her enthusiastically and at length as the co-pilot of his long and prolific writing life – and engages with a rich history of Australian letters, ideas and personalities.

He relishes the melodramatic role of being a funny old grump. He is vain and, when not wielding detachment as a shield, easily wounded. If we are being honest, these are, if not essential, overwhelmingly common qualities in a writer. What elevates Confession is the sheer charm of it.

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'A Clear Flowing Yarra', Harry Saddler

A Clear Flowing Yarra

Harry Saddler

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Non-fiction

Published by: Affirm Press

They say you can’t step in the same river twice, and it’s true that the Yarra has been hugely changed – but this book is a glorious and timely reminder that things can also be changed for the better.

Nature writer Harry Saddler hops, skips and jumps his way along, beside, on and even in the Yarra River from source to mouth, revelling in its hidden beauty, getting close to platypuses, kingfishers, Krefft’s gliders and the occasional seal, and meeting many of the swimmers, bushwalkers, ecologists and traditional owners who are quietly and tenaciously restoring the river, patch by patch.

Optimistic, inspiring and heartfelt, A Clear Flowing Yarra is a passionate love letter to the river that shapes Melbourne, and an evocative vision of what it is now and what it can be.

Harry Saddler

Harry Saddler is a Melbourne-based writer. His writing about the interactions between people, animals and the environment has been published in The Lifted Brow, Meanjin and The Guardian, among others.

His book The Eastern Curlew was shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards in 2019.

Judges’ comments

The authorial voice is a feature of so many of our shortlisted books, and perhaps it is strongest in A Clear Flowing Yarra. Nature writer Harry Saddler’s utter joy in the Birrarung’s meanderings pours out onto the page and it is impossible to not be swept up. This is not a scientific study of the environmental wellbeing of the river, nor the kind of ponderous elegy one often finds in nature writing: it is a romp.

‘Timely’ is overused, but as we try to understand the damage colonisation has inflicted, and what kind of future this place has, A Clear Flowing Yarra offers a gentle way into grappling with the consequences of our actions. Saddler honours the many layers of what it is to be an urban river. The Yarra is an ecological place, but it is also a social place, and in a settler colony a river bears a great deal of history along its banks.

Saddler gives space for others put their words on the page – the litter collector, the cold-water swimmer, the Friends of the Forest at the river’s headwater. But the book is at its strongest every time Saddler takes us out with him on the river’s shores, searching for its animal inhabitants and sharing his sheer delight in their myriad lives.

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Young adult literature

WINNER: 'We Could Be Something', Will Kostakis

We Could Be Something

Will Kostakis

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Young adult literature

Published by: Allen & Unwin

Part coming-out story.

Part falling-in-love story.

Part falling-apart story.

Harvey’s dads are splitting up. It’s been on the cards for a while, but it’s still sudden. Woken-by-his-father-to-catch-a-red-eye sudden. Now he’s restarting his life in a new city, living above a cafe with the extended Greek family he barely knows.

Sotiris is a rising star. At seventeen, he’s already achieved his dream of publishing a novel. When his career falters, a cute, wise-cracking bookseller named Jem upends his world.

Harvey and Sotiris’s stories converge on the same street in Darlinghurst, in this beautifully heartfelt novel about how our dreams shape us, and what they cost us.

Will Kostakis

Will Kostakis is an award-winning author for young adults. His first novel, Loathing Lola, was published when he was just nineteen. It sold a whopping ten copies including the seven he bought himself. After a brief break to dabble in celebrity journalism and reconstruct his shattered dream, he returned with The First Third, which sold more than ten copies (possibly fifteen). It won the 2014 Gold Inky Award and was shortlisted for the CBCA and the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, among others. The Sidekicks was his third novel for young adults, and his US debut. It won the IBBY Australia Ena Noel Award.

Will has also contributed to numerous anthologies, including the ABIA Award-winning Begin, End, Begin: A #LoveOzYA Anthology. He was awarded the 2020 Maurice Saxby Award by the School Library Association of New South Wales for service to children’s and young adult literature and is an ambassador for the NSW Premier’s Reading Challenge.

Judges’ comments

17-year-olds Harvey and Sotiris both live in Sydney’s Darlinghurst and are trying to find their paths in life under difficult circumstances. Subtly and skilfully, Kostakis shows the reader differences and resemblances between the inner and outer worlds of the two young men.

Kostakis has achieved a new level of excellence with this novel, capturing both characters with crisp, clear prose, layered with meaning and pathos. Brimming with raw emotion and truth, We Could Be Something contains vivid descriptions of the Darlinghurst and Kings Cross area of Sydney, and of Greek-Australian culture, intergenerational living, and Australia’s LGBTQI evolving communities.

Kostakis writes with authenticity and insight about a teen novelist having his ego and creative spirit crushed when his first novel falters. The novel’s bittersweet conclusion avoids cliche and leaves the reader with something far more complex, realistic and lingering than a tidy ending. Kostakis balances the reader’s desire for satisfaction with this story’s demand for authenticity with enviable skill.

This is a powerful novel with universal appeal, imbued with heart and wit, told with control and maturity.

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'Grace Notes', Karen Comer

Grace Notes

Karen Comer

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Young adult literature

Published by: Hachette Australia

A debut YA verse novel about what happens when the paths of a young busking violinist and an aspiring street artist collide during a pandemic. Set in one of the most locked-down cities in the world – Melbourne, 2020.

This song has a grace note,
a tiny note that’s there for embellishment
but can easily be ignored,
not played.
Tonight, I add it in –
just because.
We can all do with an extra note
of grace.

Grace Dalfinch is a talented violinist who longs to play contemporary music in bars, but her mum forbids her.

James Crux is an aspiring street artist who promised his dad he wouldn’t paint in public until he’s finished school.

When Crux witnesses Grace’s impromptu performance on a deserted tram, he’s inspired to paint her and her violin; and when Grace stumbles across her portrait in a Melbourne alley by an anonymous street artist, she sets out to find its creator.

Karen Comer

Karen Comer is a freelance editor and presents writing workshops to children and adults. Earlier in her career, she worked in educational publishing and was the editor for children’s art magazine BIG. She lives in Melbourne. Grace Notes is her debut novel.

Judges’ comments

Karen Comer’s assured debut verse novel captures the fear, anxiety and boredom of Melbourne’s Covid lockdowns with pinpoint accuracy. Comer’s clever and engaging verse brings a fresh voice which enlivens the characters of musician Grace and emerging street artist Crux.

Through their eyes, and subtly beautiful imagery, Comer examines an extraordinary period of history that young people lived through with resilience and humour. Grace and Crux are authentically drawn and tenderly written, depicting the missteps and elation of young love amid family ups and downs, and the larger concerns surrounding the threat of Covid and the world’s response to the crisis.

Comer’s deep understanding of these times is drawn from personal experience, and combines powerfully with well-researched themes of music and art—things that kept many of us going during the pandemic. There is a temptation to read Grace Notes as though it is entirely a work of fiction, such is the ease with which she writes; the truth is never far away, though, drawn back to our attention with an apt observation or turn or phrase: that the pandemic happened to all of us, and that these are our stories.

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'We Didn’t Think It Through', Gary Lonesborough

We Didn’t Think It Through

Gary Lonesborough

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Young adult literature

Published by: Allen & Unwin

The justice system characterises Jamie Langton as a ‘danger to society’, but he’s just an Aboriginal kid, trying to find his way through adolescence.

Jamie lives in Dalton’s Bay with Aunty Dawn and Uncle Bobby. He spends his downtime hanging out with his mates, Dally and Lenny. Mark Cassidy and his white mates – the Footy Heads – take every opportunity they can to bully Jamie and his friends. On Lenny’s last night in town before moving to Sydney, after another episode of racist harassment, Jamie, Dally and Lenny decide to retaliate by vandalising Mark Cassidy’s car. And when they discover the keys are in the ignition… Dally changes the plan. Soon they are all in Mark Cassidy’s stolen car cruising through town, aiming to take it for a quick spin, then dump it.

But it’s a bad plan. And as a consequence, Jamie ends up in the youth justice system where he must find a way to mend his relationships with himself, his friends, his family and his future.

Gary Lonesborough

Gary Lonesborough is a Yuin man, who grew up on the Far South Coast of NSW as part of a large and proud Aboriginal family. Gary was always writing as a child, and continued his creative journey when he moved to Sydney to study at film school. Gary has experience working in youth work, Aboriginal health, child protection, the disability sector (including experience working in the youth justice system) and the film industry, including working on the feature film adaptation of Jasper Jones. His debut YA novel, THE BOY FROM THE MISH, was published by Allen & Unwin in 2021. It was published in the US in 2022 under the title Ready When You Are

Judges’ comments

Gary Lonesborough’s powerful second novel is a tense contemporary story focusing on the life of a Koori teenager who spends time in youth detention for stealing a car. A mix of prose, stream of consciousness verse poetry, and childhood flashbacks, this novel tackles themes relevant to this nation since colonisation began: systemic racism in the justice system, the separation of First Nations families, and the healing power of poetry, music, forgiveness and love.

Lonesborough’s experience working in the youth justice system brings lived expertise of the disempowerment of many young Indigenous people and how it makes them think, feel and act. Jamie is vivid and memorable as he recovers from poor choices and finds his way to a brighter path. The ending, infused with love and the power of family connection, rebukes deficit positioning of young First Nations people and invites an optimistic future.

We Didn’t Think It Through puts marginalised young men under the spotlight as they struggle to find their places in the world. It reveals the critical roles of family members and Elders, particularly senior women, in continuing Culture and dealing with intergenerational trauma, incarceration and loss. It is an honest reflection on vulnerable masculinity in all its frailty, fear, and doubt – reminding us of the promise of our lost boys, before they can become lost men.

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'A Hunger of Thorns', Lili Wilkinson

A Hunger of Thorns

Lili Wilkinson

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Young adult literature

Published by: Allen & Unwin

Maude is the daughter of witches. She spent her childhood running wild with her best friend, Odette, weaving stories of girls who slayed dragons and saved princes. Then Maude grew up and lost her magic – and her best friend. Storytelling is her only gift that remains.

Odette always hungered for forbidden, dangerous magic, and two weeks ago she went searching for it. Now she’s missing, and everyone believes she’s dead. Everyone except Maude.

Maude is sure she can find Odette inside the ruins of Sicklehurst, an abandoned power plant built over an ancient magical forest –a place nobody else seems to remember is there. The danger is, nobody knows what remains inside Sicklehurst, either. And every good story is sure to have a monster…

Lili Wilkinson

Lili Wilkinson is the award-winning author of eighteen books for children and teenagers, including After the Lights Go Out, The Erasure Initiative and How To Make A Pet Monster. Lili established the Inky Awards at the Centre for Youth Literature, State Library of Victoria. She has a PhD in Creative Writing, and lives in Melbourne with her partner, child, dog and three chickens.

Judges’ comments

In her impressive first fantasy, Lili Wilkinson has created a unique specimen of the genre filled with bursts of unrestrained creativity and vividly descriptive writing. On a foundation of confident world-building that mixes the unreal with notes of historical realism, Wilkinson explores the premise of a broken world in which magic is regulated and commercialised and, as a result, wild girls like Maude and Odette are suppressed by conformity.

A tapestry of contemporary themes—female rage, sapphic relationships, governmental overreach, industrialisation, toxic friendships, and loyalty —weaves long arcs across a large novel that concludes in a galloping and wholly satisfying third act that deftly and simultaneously ties up loose ends and paves the way for other stories set in this world.

The novel examines ways in which young women, in particular, are manipulated and controlled even by those who love them, and the myriad ways they subvert and resist. Instead of feminine power and wildness that masks tired prejudices about gender, Wilkinson’s clever novel aims to illuminate profound truths about our times through a mirror that seems familiar, but is not.

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'Welcome to Sex', Yumi Stynes & Melissa Kang

Welcome to Sex

Yumi Stynes & Melissa Kang

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Young adult literature

Published by: Hardie Grant Publishing

Welcome to Sex is a frank, age-appropriate introductory guide to sex and sexuality for teens of all genders.There’s no denying it – sex can be pretty tricky… and talking about sex can feel weird and so uncomfortable. But it doesn’t have to be that way!

This little book is packed with honest advice on everything you need to know about sex: how to know when ready and reasons not to have sex, exploring pleasure on your own to becoming sexually intimate with others, contraception and staying safe, how to communicate about sex, wobbly starts and awkward moments.

Yumi Stynes & Melissa Kang

Most people know Dr Melissa Kang as the longest-serving expert behind the iconic Dolly Doctor column, but she’s also a practising medical doctor for marginalised young people and has academic roles at the University of Technology, Sydney and the University of Sydney. She is fifth-generation Malaysian-Chinese Anglo-Australian, which makes specialising in adolescent sexuality and sexual health all the more interesting. She continues to  speak about these topics in the mainstream media.

Yumi Stynes is a second-gen Japanese-Australian  TV and radio presenter. She’s currently the host of Ladies, We Need to Talk, an award-winning podcast that explores all the trickiest topics and taboos about women’s health, including periods, discharge, difficult motherhood, and whether or not your vagina is weird.

Judges’ comments

A fearless, frank and important resource for young people, Welcome to Sex is meticulously researched and comprehensive in its representation of sex and sexual experience. The text is very inclusive in its language and the content can be read by all young adults regardless of sexual orientation, identity, gender or culture.

Kang and Stynes’s combined voice is warm, friendly and approachable—brooking no awkward silences in what can be a difficult conversation between young people and adults. Young people are themselves represented in the text, through letters and other contributions, alongside adults and sexual educators, adding extra layers and thoroughness to the book.

High production values from publisher Hardie Grant and wonderful illustrations from Jenny Latham complete an informative, entertaining, and potentially life-saving book that should find a place in every home (even ones that don’t contain a teenager).

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Australian history

WINNER: 'Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country', Ryan Cropp

Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country

Ryan Cropp

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Australian history

Publisher: La Trobe University Press

The fascinating biography of a brilliant man who captured the nation’s imagination and boldly showed Australians who we were and how we could change.

In the 1960s, Donald Horne offered Australians a compelling reinterpretation of the Menzies years as a period of social and political inertia and mediocrity. His book The Lucky Country was profoundly influential and, without doubt, one of the most significant shots ever fired in Australia’s endless culture war.

Ryan Cropp’s landmark biography positions Horne as an antipodean Orwell, a lively, independent and distinct literary voice ‘searching for the temper of the people, accepting it, and moving on from there’. Through the eyes – and unforgettable words – of this preternaturally observant and articulate man, we see a recognisable modern Australia emerge.

Ryan Cropp

Ryan is a writer and historian based in Sydney. His writing has appeared in Australian Book Review, Overland and Inside Story. He has studied and taught in the Department of History at the University of Sydney. His latest book is Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country.

Judges’ comments

In Ryan Cropp’s hands, Donald Horne’s life speaks to the complexities at play in Australia’s post-World War II history. Both a social history and an intellectual journey, this book delivers a sense of possibility in the idea that ‘Australia’ could develop as a concept, a community and a culture. It is an excellent, well-rounded biography that pays due credit – and critique – to its complicated and, at times, diffident subject.

The literary quality of this biography emerges from the superbly crafted prose. It is a delight to read from the first page to the last, consistently clear yet never simplistic. Cropp has synthesised a vast array of research, and his expansive reading references the immense oeuvre of Horne’s own work. Despite this breadth, Horne’s ideas are succinctly but effectively presented, often through his own idiom.

A well-balanced biography that neither idolises nor impugns its subject, Donald Horne instead evokes his foibles, failings and unflagging intellect, as well as his profound political voyage. This is a rich biography—of a prominent Australian identity, but also a testament to the craft and method of biographical writing.

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'Bee Miles', Rose Ellis

Bee Miles

Rose Ellis

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Australian history

Publisher: Allen & Unwin

Bee Miles was a truly larger-than-life character. Famous for being outrageous in public, or, as she said, living recklessly, she shocked and intrigued cities and towns across Australia. But she was no ordinary wanderer.

Born into a wealthy family, Bee moved in Sydney’s literary and artistic circles in the 1920s and 1930s before she took up residence on the streets. A consummate performer and a perceptive critic, she caught the public’s imagination with her spectacular acts of defiance, emerging majestically from the surf with a knife strapped to each thigh, hitchhiking across remote Australia and drawing large city crowds with her Shakespeare recitations. She was also repeatedly incarcerated in prisons, confined to mental hospitals and treated brutally by a succession of authority figures, starting with her father.

Until now, no-one has uncovered the real story behind the colourful legend. This first full biography offers a fascinating glimpse into a dark side of Australia’s history.

Rose Ellis

Rose Ellis is a writer, editor and researcher based in Sydney.

Judges’ comments

Who was Bee Miles: an eccentric, bohemian serial arrestee, ‘vagrant’ or social rebel? In this moving, tender and humble biography of the outrageous Sydney identity, Bee Miles, we discover a much wider story—about mental illness and family life, as well as the social transformations of Sydney and Australia through the mid-twentieth century.

This is a finely crafted biography of a subject whose life and legacy have been divisive for over a century. Rose Ellis draws on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, subtly deploying them to create a narrative that moves ahead with intellect but without pretension. This approach seeks an empathetic but not uncritical analysis of its subject, who is well placed within her milieu but – equally importantly – located outside of it. Bee Miles’ character, values, ethics, and principles are revealed through her determined refusal of social norms and mores.

By resisting the determinations of her time and culture in spectacular acts of defiance, Miles’ story functions as an embodied critique—causing embarrassment and consternation, forcing society to stumble and account for its pettiness. Beautifully written, Ellis’s account of Bee Miles shows how those often depicted as ‘outsiders’ have complex interior lives and identities.

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'Bennelong and Phillip: A History Unravelled', Kate Fullagar

Bennelong and Phillip: A History Unravelled

Kate Fullagar

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Australian history

Publisher: Scribner Australia

The first joint biography of Bennelong and Governor Arthur Phillip, two pivotal figures in Australian history – the colonised and coloniser – and a bold and innovative new portrait of both.

Kate Fullagar

Kate Fullagar is professor of history at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, in the Australian Catholic University, and co-editor of the journal History Australia. Her book The Warrior, The Voyager and the Artist won the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction at the 2021 NSW Premier’s Awards.

Judges’ comments

To unravel the complexities of Sydney’s early colonial past, Kate Fullagar’s Bennelong and Phillip unspools the relationship between Governor Arthur Phillip and Aboriginal diplomat and leader, Bennelong. She demonstrates that this history was characterised by an intricate network of entanglements and was far from a straightforward linear narrative.

Bennelong and Phillip brings a creative and original lens to a foundational relationship in Australia’s past, prompting readers to wrestle with their own historical assumptions. In Fullagar’s hands, the story is carefully balanced across the protagonists and their times, with a deft narrative arc that acknowledges the importance of the early Sydney invasion story without unduly privileging it. While in no doubt that the 1788 arrival of the First Fleet dramatically and irrevocably changed the lives of the Eora peoples, this book demonstrates that even when options were severely curtailed, Aboriginal agency and the capacity to affect change was visible whenever the opportunity emerged.

This unique account is presented via an intriguing structure and approach that unravel both the protagonists’ intertwined biographies and the many narratives they have accumulated. It will doubtless encourage other historians and authors to reconsider both their methods and their tellings of the past.

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'Killing for Country: A Family Story', David Marr

Killing for Country: A Family Story

David Marr

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Australian history

Publisher: Black Inc.

A gripping reckoning with the bloody history of Australia’s frontier wars.

David Marr was shocked to discover forebears who served with the brutal Native Police in the bloodiest years on the frontier. Killing for Country is the result – a soul-searching Australian history.

This is a richly detailed saga of politics and power in the colonial world – of land seized, fortunes made and lost, and the violence let loose as squatters and their allies fought for possession of the country – a war still unresolved in today’s Australia.

David Marr

David Marr’s books include Patrick White: A Life, The High Price of Heaven, Dark Victory (with Marian Wilkinson), Panic, My Country and six best-selling Quarterly Essays. He has written for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age,The Saturday Paper, The Guardian and The Monthly, and served as editor of The National Times, reporter for Four Corners and presenter of ABC TV’s Media Watch.

Judges’ comments

In documenting his own family history on the frontier, David Marr points to Australia’s unavoidable origin story—of colonisation, violence and empire, as well as the complicity of government and family alike in the colonial project. This book blows out of the water any doubt about the violence of Australia’s frontier of contact between Aboriginal peoples and those who took their lands. The horror Marr documents is irrefutable. The detail of the violence is overwhelming and undeniable. This is an important work of truth-telling.

Its prose is compelling and readable, with few flourishes. The clipped and no-nonsense tone is highly suited to the sombre subject matter, while avoiding polemic or acrimony. Killing For Country captures the sometimes banal and often horrifying detail of the organised violence used to murder Indigenous peoples. Its research is built primarily on published period sources, especially newspaper accounts, which provide historical flavour and veracity. The message is powerful and the sweep of the work is laudable.

This highly accessible book will advance the much-needed national conversation about invasion and its consequences, and the degree to which people chose to look the other way. This work serves as a potent reminder that frontier violence existed, and its consequences continue to shape race relations today.

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'Courting: An Intimate History of Love and the Law', Alecia Simmonds

Courting: An Intimate History of Love and the Law

Alecia Simmonds

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Australian history

Publisher: La Trobe University Press

Until well into the twentieth century, heartbroken men and women in Australia had a legal redress for their suffering: jilted lovers could claim compensation for ‘breach of promise to marry’. Hundreds of people, mostly from the working classes, came before the courts, and their stories give us a tantalising insight into the romantic landscape of the past – where couples met, how they courted, and what happened when flirtations turned sour. In packed courtrooms and breathless newspaper reports, love letters were read as contracts and private gifts and gossip scrutinised as evidence.

Alecia Simmonds brings these stories vividly to life, revealing the entangled histories of love and the law. Challenging our preconceptions about how previous generations loved and lost, and prompting fascinating questions about the ethics of love today, Courting is a transcontinental journey into the most intimate corners of the past.

Alecia Simmonds

Dr Alecia Simmonds is a senior lecturer in law at the University of Technology, Sydney. Her first book, Wild Man, won the 2016 Davitt Prize for best nonfiction crime writing. She has been the recipient of prestigious academic grants and her writing has appeared in publications including The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Arena and Inside Story.

Judges’ comments

Through eleven life stories, Alecia Simmonds’ Courting gives us an important synopsis of Australian legal history as we explore the stories of jilted lovers who made claims for ‘breach of promise to marry’. This now-archaic cause of action takes us into the world of some wonderful (and odious) characters—entertainers, cads, entrepreneurs and fortune tellers. Courting is a lively, rich and entertaining synthesis of deep scholarship that explores the history of love and the law in Australia.

Through the study of a particular action in Australian law, Simmonds opens up a fascinating picture of courtship in Australia during the long nineteenth century. We learn the intimate details of peoples’ affairs of the heart, read through their love-letters, intimate gifts and promises made and broken. In the process, Simmonds outlines the commoditisation and indeed monetisation of romance, even as older, communal precepts of honour and trust dwindled. In doing so, Courting brings the pages of legal history to life, revealing fundamental contests that beset intimate relations in Australia.

Courting is a transcontinental road trip into the most private corners of our history, challenging our assumptions about how past generations loved and lost, while raising intriguing issues about the ethics of love today. The language is expressive, inventive, playful, evocative, critical, empathetic and a delight to read.

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Poetry

WINNER: 'The Cyprian', Amy Crutchfield

The Cyprian

Amy Crutchfield

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Poetry

Publisher: Giramondo Publishing

From poems of desire and sexual longing to poems of love in the face of death, The Cyprian explores the joy and heartbreak love weaves into our lives. The collection confronts some of our primary questions about love: how is it possible to accept the death of the beloved? What role does deception play in love? When does love become a force of exploitation? The collection is composed of five parts, reflecting different aspects of Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty – a complexity which is also implicit in the ambiguity of the book’s title.

Crutchfield trained as a classicist, and her poetry combines conversational idioms with mythic visions of human relationship, ‘longing and its/ fierce metamorphosis’. Elegies, love poems and imagistic snapshots mix with wide open epistolary verse. Her poetry reclaims the linguistic power and range of allusion found in late romantic poets like Christopher Brennan and Francis Webb, bringing them to bear on contemporary female experience.

Amy Crutchfield

Amy Crutchfield studied Classics and Law at the University of Melbourne. Her poetry has been published in Australia, the UK and Ireland. She has worked as a teacher and a lawyer. The Cyprian is her first book.

Judges’ comments

Amy Crutchfield’s The Cyprian reappraises the figure of Aphrodite—Greek goddess of beauty, lust, love, procreation and passion—from a contemporary vantage point, finding in Aphrodite a capacious and complex avatar for love and its violent destruction across time.

In incisive lyric poems, Crutchfield brings the mythic into contact with the quotidian, using Aphrodite to explore women’s loves, needs and losses. Counterpointing poems concerned with the female perspective are explorations of male desire, misogyny, power and control. Crutchfield is alert to the idealisation, eroticisation and demonisation of women in visual art and history and considers these questions in relation to the deifying gaze in Bonnard and Picasso’s cruelty to his lovers, among others, demanding we reckon with old shibboleths: ‘There are not enough museums / for all we once believed in,’ the poet tells us.

While Crutchfield brings a classicist’s range of reference to bear in The Cyprian, the poems are frank, lively and acerbic, as befits one ‘who says what she means and / means what she says.’ Crutchfield’s lines are almost aphoristic in their concision yet see through to worlds magnitudes larger, and her voice arrives fully-fledged, and entirely in command.

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'In the Photograph', Luke Beesley

In the Photograph

Luke Beesley

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Poetry

Publisher: Giramondo Publishing

The poems in In the Photograph unfold in domestic and suburban settings. They capture the exact moment of writing: how, from it, possibilities branch out into observation, memory, word play, analogy, fantasy, other artworks and other art forms. Cinema, photography, theatre, painting and music all move freely in and out of the poem’s frame.

The writing revels in humour and narrative surprise: twists in syntax, jump cuts in time, jump cuts from one category of experience into another. In the Photograph is intimate, familial, often moving; it is also sparklingly clever and alert to the imaginative possibilities that can open out from the minutiae of days.

Luke Beesley

Luke Beesley is a writer, artist and singer-songwriter. In addition to his highly regarded books, which include Aqua Spinach (2018), Jam Sticky Vision (2015) and New Works on Paper (2013), his poetry has been published widely in Australia and internationally and has been translated into several languages. His latest collection, In the Photograph, was published in 2023. He lives and works on Wurundjeri Wurrung land (Naarm/Melbourne).

Judges’ comments

Luke Beesley’s In the Photograph offers a series of vignettes that capture the poetic imagination in flight. In these prose poems, capacious and playful, the subtle ‘twists in emotional grammar’ inconspicuously ‘concertinaed’ in the seconds of our diurnal existences billow out into surreal and hypervivid epiphanies.

Shuttling between the suburban and the sublime, Beesley finds provocations in everything, from the way light falls across cut lettuce to a Melbourne water tower to the music of Belle and Sebastian. These perceptions and reveries are seasoned with prosodic precision: the prospect of facing rush-hour traffic incites ‘a very small fear of the day’s adult inevitability’; a daydream about the painter Cy Twombly recalls ‘yesterday’s listlessness in the unusual spring heat, and this late sequence of strange clarity’.

This is a savvy collection that moves comfortably within the world of the visual arts, cinema, and music; yet it is also at home in the rounds of domestic routine and familial intimacy. This intimacy transfuses the poet’s relationship to words and his artmaking so that the quirks of fatherhood transmogrify into a home-grown practice of Dada. In pulling off such unlikely juxtapositions, this book provides conclusive proof of the compatibility between formal experimentation and democratic appeal.

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'She is the Earth', Ali Cobby Eckermann

She is the Earth

Ali Cobby Eckermann

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Poetry

Publisher: Magabala Books

She is the Earth is the luminous new verse novel from celebrated poet Ali Cobby Eckermann. It charts a journey through grief and celebrates the healing power of Country. We follow Eckermann’s soft footfalls in the open (but far from empty) spaces between earth and sky; from sandstone to wetlands, from plains to mountain ranges.

Eckermann’s writing soars in this meditative and transformative piece. Soaked in lightness and dark, history and dreaming, her words will move you, shake you, devastate you and uplift you. This book is full of unexpected beauty in slow, contemplative moments. Read it to see the ‘She’ in and around all of us.

Ali Cobby Eckermann

Ali Cobby Eckermann is a Yankunytjatjara poet and artist from South Australia whose work has been published and celebrated around the world.

Her poetry collections include little bit long time and the award-winning collection Inside My Mother. Her verse novels are  His Father’s Eyes and Ruby Moonlight, which won the inaugural black&write! Indigenous fellowship, the Kenneth Slessor Prize, a Deadly Award and was named the NSW Premier’s Literary Award Book of the Year.

In 2013 Ali toured Ireland as Australia’s Poetry Ambassador, and in 2017 she received the Windham-Campbell Prize from Yale University.

She describes herself as a dreamer, a gardener, with deep respect for her journey thus far.

Judges’ comments

Ali Cobby Eckermann’s verse novel She is the Earth is the hypnotic journey of an evolving soul guided by the spirit Blessing, by ancestral wisdom and signs, and by a host of totemic presences that reconnect her to the path of song, to her mother, to her family and ultimately to a profound sense of healing: ‘in every breath/ the replica is love’.

There is a striking dynamism in this poem’s taut lines, which expresses a strong sense of movement and becoming. Mobilising the spaciousness and paradoxes of wisdom texts, this work approaches prayer. In travelling towards the mother, there is a generative reciprocity between the expansion of an embodied consciousness with the land and all living things: ‘every time I blink/ a wildflower appears’. Rebuilding in this ‘ritual made of self’, the soul is also rebuilding a powerful and binding sense of the collective in a call to observe carefully, to witness, and to care.

This book signals that the vital and pressing vision of the Uluru Statement from the Heart is ever present, ever ongoing. Liberatory, emotionally and formally sure-footed, generous in its scope and intentions, She is the Earth is essential reading: ‘listen strong/ you are strong’.

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'Golden Bridge: New Poems', Jennifer Maiden

Golden Bridge: New Poems

Jennifer Maiden

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Poetry

Publisher: Quemar Press

Looks at concept & reality of the golden bridge, representing victory, mercy, problem-solving & memory’s complexity. Here a bridge links present to future, oneself to how one could be: perhaps that is why the golden bridge image recurs in history – linking self to surrounding time/space, a way of commenting on & possibly changing history itself. General Kutuzov called his exit strategy for French invaders a ‘golden bridge’. In Vietnam, Cau Vang (golden bridge) is held by vast stone hands, just as a gold bridge links islands in Bali. Perhaps a bridge is gold to mean wealth, or wealth of mercy. The image ripples & mirrors through these poems. A bridge in gold in a Chinese garden, Kutuzov’s strategy, lunar eclipse, the artist’s pen outlining new moral compass, Bali’s bridge watched by Albanese and Uren who fears for Assange, a cat’s arc asleep, an entity’s shape carrying another, truck-bombed dawn Kerch Bridge, a twisting Chinese dragon, or ultimately ‘a golden bridge from Time to Time’.

Jennifer Maiden

Jennifer Maiden has published 29 poetry collections, 6 novels, 3 nonfiction works. Awards include 3 Kenneth Slessors, 2 CJ Dennis Prizes, Victorian Prize for Literature, Christopher Brennan Award, 2 Age Poetry Book of Year, Age Book of Year, ALS Gold Medal. Griffin International Prize shortlisted her Liquid Nitrogen. Her latest books from Quemar Press: poetry collections Selected Poems 1967-2018, Appalachian Fall, brookings:the noun, The Espionage Act, Biological Necessity, Ox in Metal, Golden Bridge; The China Shelf, workbook Workbook Questions: Writing of Torture, Trauma; 5 Play With Knives novels; booklength essays The Cuckold and the Vampires, The Laps of the Gods.

Judges’ comments

The golden bridge in Tolstoy’s War and Peace is representative of an infrastructure that enables power to act, on occasion, humanely, and Jennifer Maiden’s oracular Golden Bridge: New Poems works to similar ethical ends, manifesting recurrent patterns of political intrigue alongside the related banalities of moral corruption.

Maiden’s volume combines geopolitical spheres while collapsing temporalities, placing contemporary leaders into strangely timeless, yet timely conversations. Tracing the “weakness, greeds, guilts, power” (31) that conjure bloodlessly horrifying scenes, Maiden’s exemplary scorn targets systems that seek as if by default to mute the voices of their constituents; the poems on Assange are especially prescient, and this writing reminds its readers that the work of empire remains a nefarious, arcane, unholy magic.

Through her work, Maiden makes visible both the tortured and their torturers, at large and unchanging, an ever-present dimension in systems of global governmentality. These acerbically political excursions remain importantly liberating.

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'The Drama Student', Autumn Royal

The Drama Student

Autumn Royal

Shortlist year: 2024

Shortlist category: Poetry

Publisher: Giramondo Publishing

As its title suggests, the poems in Autumn Royal’s The Drama Student explore theatrical responses to life. And in particular, the staging of the emotional life. The subject, a student of experience, and a writer with an uncertain future, feels her vulnerability and dependency. Grief is paramount among her emotional responses, provoked by hauntings of violence, the death of loved ones, the failure of relationships, the disappointment of her aspirations. The great fear: ‘I am threatened / with an exceptional ability and no means / of expression.’ The theatre provides those means, the expressive gestures, the subversion of typecast roles, the transformation of domestic objects into props for the performance of self, and the richness of language. Royal’s use of the elegiac form offers no answers, only the hope of tearing open conventional understandings of loss and insecurity, as it invokes a tradition of women poets and thinkers.

Autumn Royal

Autumn Royal creates drama, poetry and criticism. She is the interviews editor at Cordite Poetry Review, an arts and disability support worker and a sessional academic teaching creative writing in Naarm/Melbourne. Her poetry collections include She Woke and Rose, Liquidation and The Drama Student, which was shortlisted for the 2023 Judith Wright Calanthe Award.

Judges’ comments

A suite of eerily suggestive performances, Autumn Royal’s The Drama Student rehearses the modes and moods of an array of poetic genres – from the elegiac to the anacreontic – to lay bare the inseparability of candour and artifice.

These are poems that manifest an impressive discipline of attention: to the body in its libidinal contortions; to the furtive expressivity of fabrics; and to the brittle self-possession of the artist, whether of the stage or page. Royal’s voices evince a poise collected and confected from the debris of self-exposure, and from the pressure of what remains unsaid: ‘I want these words to thicken – to form a cloth case for the bolster / stuffed with denial.’

In its mastery of atmosphere and implication, The Drama Student belongs to a lineage that includes poets such as Robert Browning, Sylvia Plath, and Emma Lew. It is a learned book, deeply embedded in a literary history of lamentation that culminates in the citational bravura of its concluding prose poem, ‘Soliloquy’.

The density of allusions in Royal’s work is emblematic of a generosity it extends not just to other writers, but also to the reader in recognising the excess and violence that often characterise the life of our emotions.

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2024 PMLA winners, shortlist and judges

Judges 2024

Fiction

Children's literature

Young adult literature

Non-fiction

Australian history

Poetry

Fiction

Anam

André Dao

Restless Dolly Maunder

Kate Grenville

Edenglassie

Melissa Lucashenko

The Carnal Fugues

Catherine McNamara

Stone Yard Devotional

Charlotte Wood

Children's literature

Tamarra: A Story of Termites on Gurindji Country

Biographies

Etta and the Shadow Taboo

JM Field and Jeremy Worrall

Ghost Book

Remy Lai

Two Sparrowhawks in a Lonely Sky

Rebecca Lim

Millie Mak the Maker

Alice Pung & Sher Rill Ng

Non-fiction

Close to the Subject: Selected Works

Daniel Browning

Eventually Everything Connects

Sarah Firth

Graft: Motherhood, Family and a Year on the Land

Maggie MacKellar

A Kind of Confession

Alex Miller

A Clear Flowing Yarra

Harry Saddler

Young adult literature

We Could Be Something

Will Kostakis

Grace Notes

Karen Comer

We Didn’t Think It Through

Gary Lonesborough

A Hunger of Thorns

Lili Wilkinson

Welcome to Sex

Yumi Stynes & Melissa Kang

Australian history

Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country

Bee Miles

Rose Ellis

Bennelong and Phillip: A History Unravelled

Kate Fullagar

Killing for Country: A Family Story

David Marr

Courting: An Intimate History of Love and the Law

Alecia Simmonds

Poetry

The Cyprian

Amy Crutchfield

Amy Crutchfield

In the Photograph

She is the Earth

Ali Cobby Eckermann

Golden Bridge: New Poems

Jennifer Maiden

The Drama Student

Autumn Royal

We acknowledge the many Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and honour their Elders past and present.

We acknowledge the many Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and honour their Elders past and present.