Prime Minister’s Literary Awards

Cold Enough For Snow

Jessica Au

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: Giramondo

A young woman has arranged a holiday with her mother in Japan. They travel by train, visit galleries and churches chosen for their art and architecture, eat together in small cafés and restaurants and walk along the canals at night, on guard against the autumn rain and the prospect of snow. All the while, they talk, or seem to talk: about the weather, horoscopes, clothes and objects; about the mother’s family in Hong Kong, and the daughter’s own formative experiences. But uncertainties abound. How much is spoken between them, how much is thought but unspoken? Cold Enough for Snow is a reckoning and an elegy: with extraordinary skill, Au creates an enveloping atmosphere that expresses both the tenderness between mother and daughter, and the distance between them.

Jessica Au

Jessica Au is a writer based in Melbourne. She has worked as deputy editor at the quarterly journal Meanjin and as a fact-checker for Aeon magazine. Her novel, Cold Enough for Snow (2022), is the inaugural winner of The Novel Prize and was published by Giramondo, New Directions and Fitzcarraldo Editions, with translation in eighteen languages.

Judges’ comments

Cold Enough For Snow relates a short holiday spent together in Japan by a mother and daughter. They live in different countries and the daughter has made a meticulous itinerary, revealing Japan through its natural beauty and through the cultural galleries, houses, rooms, fabrics, places.

Japan itself, with an elaborate and exquisite surface and an elusive interior, is an intricate and sustained metaphor for the relationship between the mother and daughter. As they move through this unfamiliar, cultivated world their own internal lives unfurl. Surfaces are the touchstones in life as well as the place to begin.

The novel is a crystalline technical feat: a series of small portraits and wider scenes, with stillness achieved by capturing arrested motion. The novel is an enquiry into the human heart and how lives are led. Here is the daily embedded in the eternal: here we are in lives past, but also entirely present. Au, by some personal alchemy, uses image the way poets use compression of language. The same poetic is applied to her choice of words. The clarity of language suggests contemporary Korean novels and has an unusual gravity.

Au’s writing has a quietness, a sophistication of expression emerging from a hum of silence and thought. It signals a new direction in Australian literature, intricately structured and with a flow and reach that, like all remarkable writing, is without boundaries.

The Sun Walks Down

Fiona McFarlane

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: Allen & Unwin

In September 1883, the South Australian town of Fairly huddles under strange, vivid sunsets. Six-year-old Denny Wallace has gone missing during a dust storm, and the whole town is intent on finding him. As they search the desert and mountains for the lost child, the residents of Fairly – newlyweds, landowners, farmers, mothers, artists, Indigenous trackers, cameleers, children, schoolteachers, widows, maids, policemen – explore their own relationships with the complex landscape unsettling history of the Flinders Ranges. 

The colonial Australia of The Sun Walks Down is unfamiliar, multicultural, and noisy with opinions, arguments, longings and terrors. It’s haunted by many gods – the sun among them, rising and falling on each day that Denny could be found, or lost forever. 

Fiona McFarlane

Fiona McFarlane is the author of the novel The Night Guest, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and a collection of short stories, The High Places, which won the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Her short fiction has been published in the New Yorker, Best Australian Stories and Zoetrope: All-Story. Born in Sydney, Fiona teaches creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley.

Judges’ comments

When little Denny goes missing in a dust storm in rural South Australia, a community is galvanised to look for him. This incident forms the spine of Fiona McFarlane’s third book, The Sun Walks Down, a luminous re-telling of the old story of the lost child in the Australian landscape.

Set in a farming community where the stakes are high, the First Nations people of the community continuously rise above their masters, intellectually and emotionally, remaining clear-eyed, despite heartbreakingly overt and masked attempts at subjugation.

The story is multivocal in its construction of multicultural nineteenth century life, shifting between the perspectives of the colonisers and the colonised, brown cameleers and white artists, logical servants and entitled mistresses. The characters in the book are not equal in power, and those with financial and social power wield it as expected.

However, it is McFarlane’s fine attunement to those who possess the only power that ultimately matters, the capacity to care and to love, that distinguishes this work admirably.

This striking work of fiction considers the ethical position of the recorders of history and demonstrates the storyteller’s capacity to imagine the past with clarity, beauty, and courage. It is a powerful and engrossing novel that speaks to our contemporary concerns.

Losing Face

George Haddad

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: UQP

A stunning, thought-provoking novel about facing up to your family and your future, ‘Losing Face’ deals with timely issues around consent and inherited trauma.

Joey is young, indifferent. He’s drifting around Western Sydney unaware that his passivity is leading him astray. And then one day he is involved in a violent crime, one that threatens to upend his life entirely.

Elaine, his grandmother, is a proud Lebanese woman with problems of her own. When Joey is arrested, she is desperate to save face and hold herself together. In her family, history repeats itself, vices come and go, and uncovering long-buried secrets isn’t always cathartic.

This gripping and hard-hitting novel reveals the richness and complexity of contemporary Australian life and tests the idea that facing consequences will make us better people.

George Haddad

Dr George Haddad is an award-winning writer, artist and academic practising on Gadigal land. His novella, Populate and Perish, was the winner of the 2016 Viva La Novella competition and his short story Kátharsis was awarded the 2018 Neilma Sidney Prize. George’s novel, Losing Face, was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and shortlisted for The Readings Prize. In 2023 he was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist. He is a lecturer and researcher at the Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University. George’s text, sound, performance and installation based art has been exhibited at Firstdraft, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, ReadingRoom and Metro Arts.

Judges’ comments

Set in Sydney’s west, Losing Face is a portrait of a Lebanese-Australian family told from the perspective of 19-year-old Joey. Joey is passive, self-loathing, rudderless; the inertia of his days only punctured by workouts at the gym, minor spats with his mother Amal, mind-numbing shifts at a supermarket, and casual drug use.

In alternating chapters, a second narrative voice emerges in the form of Elaine, Joey’s grandmother. Having laboured in factories since arriving in Australia from Lebanon, she now lives on a disability pension and keep her pokies addiction from her family.
Joey’s apathy eventually contributes to his being arrested, along with four friends, for a violent crime. He was a bystander, not a participant—but does it matter, when his silence made him complicit?

Racial profiling; class consciousness; casual misogyny; queerness; love and family loyalty. These are big topics and Haddad affords them appropriate gravity—but Losing Face is also sharply funny. The dialogue sings and spits. The relationship between Joey and his grandmother is tender and thorny. The ‘bad men’ of the story are not cartoonish but ordinary, and more believable for it.

Haddad offers no easy redemption or slick endings. Joey is neither hero nor anti-hero: he is utterly real in all his complexity and foibles.

Other Houses

Paddy O’Reilly

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: Affirm Press

Other Houses is a masterful and tender story about people who live from payday to payday. Acutely observed and lyrical, Paddy O’Reilly’s novel paints a haunting picture of class, aspiration and the boundaries we will cross for love.

Lily works as a cleaner. She moves through houses in inner-city Melbourne, unseen, scrubbing away the daily residue of other people’s privilege. Her partner Janks works the line in a local food factory. With every pay check they inch further away from their former world of poverty and addiction.

Lily and Janks are determined that their daughter Jewelee will have a different life. She’ll have a career, not a dead-end job. She’ll have savings, not debt. But precarious lives are easily upended. One wrong move throws the family into a situation in which the lines between right and wrong, hope and disappointment, are blurred.

Paddy O’Reilly

Paddy O Reilly is the author of three novels, two collections of award-winning short stories, and a novella. Her novels have been shortlisted for major awards, and her stories have been widely published, anthologised and broadcast in Australia and overseas.

Judges’ comments

Other Houses is about cleaning the homes of strangers, about driving to Eden in a hurry, about trust and mistrust. Lily and Janks live on the fringes of Melbourne, trying to provide Lily’s daughter with the kind of middle-class power that neither of them has had, private school, life in a suburb with in-ground swimming pools and nature strips. Then Janks disappears, and Lily tries to find him.

As the story unfolds, and new knowledge is revealed through the alternating perspectives of Lily and Janks, the reader is trusted with information that is withheld from the characters. The use of dramatic irony in the hands of a skilful storyteller like O’Reilly works as a hook for the reader and as meta-commentary about the withholding of information and power, enforced by poverty.

Lily cleans other people’s houses. This labour forms the book in theme and plot. We see the underside of Australia’s class system as Lily does the dirty work of ensuring that the rich maintain appearances. While the story is an indictment of the violence of class oppression, it never dehumanises its characters by putting them on a pedestal.

Instead, it is a bold tribute to the pragmatism of those who must take the unprincipled stand and do what is needed to survive. Written in prose that sings on the page with joy and lament, O’Reilly’s book is a moving story that will stay with the reader for a very long time.

The Lovers

Yumna Kassab

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Fiction

Published by: Ultimo Press

What happens when we become used to each other, when we become bored, when we anticipate each other’s moods like the seasons cycled in a day? What happens when you are tired of me and I tire of you?

Every couple has a story. How they met, how they fell in love – their ups, their downs. What made them want to be in each other’s arms day and night. The struggle of family expectations. The need to please each other, the desire to go their separate ways. It is about the private universe between two people as they try to hold to each other despite the barriers of geography, culture and class.

Every couple has a beginning, a middle, and maybe an end.

Yumna Kassab

Yumna Kassab is a writer from Western Sydney. She studied medical science and neuroscience at university. Her fiction has been listed for prizes including the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, Queensland Literary Awards, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, The Stella Prize and The Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Judges comments

Yumna Kassab’s third novel is a formally experimental work that gestures to, then warps, the conventions of tragedy, romance and folklore.

Through a series of short, impressionistic vignettes, we meet Jamila and Amir and witness the passage of their relationship.

Jamila and Amir are romantic archetypes: she is wealthy and worldly; he is a village man whose weekly earnings could not buy his lover’s preferred shampoo. She is listless, hungering for an amorphous something more; he is clawing his way back to normalcy after the breakdown of his marriage. She is a visitor to the city whose means allow her to travel freely; his day-to-day is circumscribed by his class position.

Their meetings take place in the cloister of Jamila’s bedroom, lending these sections a powerful sense of intimacy. In the gaps—the silences and miscommunications between characters; the uncertainty of the real versus the imagined; the literal white space on the page—Kassab conjures the ambiguity, loneliness and hesitation of a love affair. Her prose is poetic and controlled, investing the novel with the feel of a contemporary fable.

There’s an eddying quality to the narrative, mimicking the push-pull nature of Amir and Jamila’s relationship. They know it has no future and yet, buoyed by hope, they return to one another. With the structural inventiveness of a deft hand, The Lovers enlivens and explodes the time-honoured story of doomed romance.

Open Your Heart to Country

Jasmine Seymour

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Children’s Literature

Published by: Magabala Books

From the award-winning creator of Baby Business (2019) and Cooee Mittigar (2019) comes a stunning bilingual story of healing and belonging. 

Told in English and Dharug, Open Your Heart to Country is a moving account of re-connection to Country from a First Nations perspective. Sharing the nourishing power of returning home and being immersed in the language of Country, this picture book invites readers to reflect on the importance of place, not only for First Nations’ peoples but for everyone. 

With exquisite illustrations and soft, lilting text, Open Your Heart to Country appeals to the very young, while sharing a deeper message for older readers. A book the whole family can enjoy. 

Jasmine Seymour

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

It is Jasmine’s wish that through her books, everyone will know that the Dharug mob are still here, still strong. Jasmine is a primary school teacher in the Hawkesbury area of NSW.

Judges’ comments

Open Your Heart to Country is a lyrical ode to the ancient strength and beauty of Country, told in English and Dharug. The bilingual narrative powerfully engages the reader with First Nations worldviews and language pathways. As the author note explains: “By reading the Dharug words told with their own English translations, you will ‘hear’ this story with Dharug ears.”

Jasmine Seymour subverts the usual linear story telling structure with elegant, poetic prose and sprawling, double-page illustrations that allow the reader to engross themselves in every part of the story. The text travels through Country with slow, measured rhythm, shifting through rivers, stars, and ceremonies. The mixed media collage illustrations reinforce this non-linearity, depicting dawn or dusk depending on how the viewer interprets the image.

Seymour flattens earth and time by placing birds and butterflies hovering right above a swimming child in one scene. In another she sends stars, turtles, and snakes floating above a boat. This gives a sense of motion to the story where the reader feels like they are flying with the cockatoos and butterflies, or weaving through the flowers, plants and waterways.

The ghostlike depictions of the animals, trees and humans add to the timelessness of living beings. Open Your Heart to Country is an invitation to learn from the oldest living culture on earth and a profound meditation on the power of Country that speaks to the healing power of connection and homecoming.

The Dunggiirr Brothers and the Caring Song of the Whale

Aunty Shaa Smith

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Children’s Literature

Published by: Allen & Unwin

Welcome to Ngambaa Country on the mid-north coast of New South Wales. I am Aunty Shaa and this is the story of the Koala Brothers, the Dunggiirr Brothers. This is the story of our Country. We live the story of being saved by Dunggiirr and we do a ceremony to keep it alive. It is this story and memory we share with you in this book.

This stunning picture book from the Yandaarra Caring for Country community group, a project led by Gumbaynggirr Elder Aunty Shaa Smith, in association with the University of Newcastle, helps us learn the stories of the mid-north NSW coast. The Dunggiirr Brothers and the Caring Song of the Whale also spreads a welcome and beautiful message of care and understanding to the wider community.

Aunty Shaa Smith

In Gumbaynggirr language, Yandaarra means ‘to shift camp together’. Yandaarra is a collaboration led by Aunty Shaa Smith under the guidance of the Old Fellas and Gumbaynggirr Country, with Uncle Bud Marshall and Aunty Shaa’s daughter Neeyan Smith. Yandaarra includes non-Gumbaynggirr academics Sarah Wright, Lara Daley and Paul Hodge from the University of Newcastle, sitting on Awabakal and Worimi Countries. As Yandaarra, they walk together, shift camp together, and live and work in, with and as Country. Yandaarra, the research project, is a re-creation story.

It’s about remembering what was (what is) as part of this re-creating. This work is about honouring Elders and custodians past, present and future. Yandaarra have held workshops, yarned together, planted trees, gathered food, laughed and shared. When they look to how to shift camp – or shift their practices, relationships and ways of thinking about the land – using Gumbaynggirr Dreaming and Protocols is key. www.gumbaynggirrjagun.org

Judges’ comments

The Dunggirr Brothers and the Caring Song of the Whale is a beautifully written and illustrated Dreaming narrative that invites readers not only into an ancient story but into the presence of the land and peoples who give the story life and meaning, and who are given life and meaning in turn. The text makes clever use of photographs to show the story custodian moving through Country as the tale is told, demonstrating how culture and knowledge is grounded in place, and how the story shapes land and people.

As the narrative moves through place it also weaves through time, taking the reader on a journey into the cycles of Country as it shifts between what would be thought of in a linear sense as past, present and future. The vibrancy of culture, the strength of community, and the power of Country are woven together in an experiential narrative that shows the connections that bind all life together, ending with an invitation for all people to “look after the earth and each other.”

This is a rich, generous text that brings together words, illustrations and photographs in a perfect harmony of lived and living story.

Zadie Ma and the Dog Who Chased the Moon

Gabrielle Wang

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Children’s Literature

Published by: Penguin Random

Meet Zadie Ma, a girl who writes magical stories that sometimes come true. Can Zadie bring to life her most important story of all . . . the one where she finds Jupiter, the dog of her dreams? From the Australian Children’s Laureate for 2022-23 and shortlisted for the Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature, 2023.

Gabrielle Wang

Gabrielle Wang is an author and illustrator, and the Australian Children’s Laureate for 2022 to 2023. Born in Melbourne of Chinese heritage, her maternal great-grandfather came to Victoria during the Gold Rush and her father was from Shanghai. Her stories are a blend of Chinese and Western culture with a touch of fantasy.

Gabrielle’s first children’s novel, The Garden of Empress Cassia, won the 2002 Aurealis Award, was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and was a CBCA Notable Book. The Pearl of Tiger Bay was shortlisted for the 2004 Aurealis Award and The Lion Drummer was a Notable Book in the 2009 CBCA Book of the Year Awards. A Ghost in My Suitcase won the 2009 Aurealis Award, was a CBC Notable Book, was shortlisted for the 2011 Sakura Medal and received a Highly Commended in the 2010 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.

Her first young adult novel, Little Paradise also received a Highly Commended in the 2011 Prime Minister’s Awards. Gabrielle’s picture book The Race for the Chinese Zodiac (2010) illustrated by Sally Rippin and Regine Abos was a Notable Book in the CBCA Awards for 2011 and shortlisted for the 2011 YABBA and WAYBRA awards. Gabrielle has created two popular characters Poppy and Pearlie for the highly successful 2011 Our Australian Girl series.

The Wishbird was a CBCA 2014 Notable Book and was shortlisted for the 2014 Australian Book Design Awards, Yabba Awards, Kroc Awards, Koala Awards, Cool Awards and Crystal Kite Award.

Gabi’s books also include the suspenseful The Beast of Hushing Wood for middle readers, and a sequel to the award-winning A Ghost in My Suitcase, called Ting Ting the Ghosthunter. Zadie Ma and the Dog Who Chased the Moon is her most recent novel.

Judges’ comments

Zadie Ma and the Dog who Chased the Moon is an extraordinary novel that speaks to the power of imagination to empower people and change lives. The narrative is told from the perspective of Zadie Ma, a girl who longs for a dog of her own and who creates stories which sometimes come true. Whilst the book is set in post World War 2 Melbourne, this is a text that in many ways transcends time and location as it travels through the tales of Zadie and her family.

An outstanding addition to the text is the inclusion of graphic novel elements, which provide a different way of interacting with the story whilst never losing the clarity and strength of the narrative voice. While multiple threads are deftly woven as the reader follows Zadie through adventures and relationships, the story never loses its immediacy and emotional resonance. Ultimately, what shines through most strongly is the profound, intergenerational power of story itself and the way in which it can change how we see ourselves and others.  

11 Words for Love

Randa Abdel-Fattah, Maxine Beneba Clarke

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Children’s Literature

Published by: Hachette Australia

A moving and joyful book for children from all backgrounds about the many ways we love, from award-winning author Randa Abdel-Fattah and acclaimed illustrator Maxine Beneba Clarke.

There are eleven words for love, and my family knows them all.

A family flees their homeland to find safety in another country, carrying little more than a suitcase full of love.

As their journey unfolds, the oldest child narrates 11 meanings for love in Arabic as her family show, and are shown, all different kinds of love in their new home, and they also remember the love they have for their homeland and for those left behind or lost along the way.

In the Arabic language, there are over 50 words describing the degrees of love. That’s 50 stories, 50 life-worlds. This lyrical and heartwarming book takes you on a journey through 11 of these Arabic expressions for love.

Randa Abdel-Fattah

Randa Abdel-Fattah is a Palestinian Egyptian Muslim writer, academic, former lawyer and the multi-award-winning author of 11 books published in over 20 countries, including multiple translations, stage productions in the US and Australia, and a graphic novel series. Randa has been nominated for Sweden’s 2019 and 2018 Astrid Lindgren Award, the world’s biggest children’s and young adult literature award. Randa is also a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Sociology at Macquarie University and her recent book is Coming of Age in the War on Terror.

Maxine Beneba Clarke

Maxine Beneba Clarke is an Australian poet and writer of Afro-Caribbean descent. She is the ABIA and Indie award-winning author of Carrying the World (2016), Foreign Soil (2017) and The Hate Race (2018). She is the author of five books for children, including the CBCA and Boston Globe/Horn Prize award-winning picture book The Patchwork Bike (2016, illustrated by Van T Rudd), and the critically acclaimed Wide Big World (2018, illustrated by Isobel Knowles).

Maxine is the author-illustrator of two picture books, Fashionista (2019) and When We Say Black Lives Matter (2020). She also illustrated the picture book 11 Words for Love (2022), written by Randa Abdel-Fattah. We Know A Place is the third picture book she has both written and illustrated.

Judges’ comments

11 Words for Love is a gentle, profound story in English and Arabic that explores eleven different forms of love, from al-wud “sunshine-warm friendship” to al-Hanaan “marshmallow-heart-tender.” Each word of this poetic narrative is carefully placed and perfectly considered to form a flowing text that is accompanied by bright, bold illustrations that combine colour, movement and texture.

The joyful vibrancy of the illustrations joins seamlessly with the text to inscribe layers of complexity onto every page as the reader is drawn onwards through the tale of a family who fled their homeland. The story, told from the perspective of a child, speaks of the love the family carries with them, the love found in a new place, and the memories of what has been loved and lost.

Words and images both are crafted by expert storytellers who convey great depths of meaning through picture book form in an evocative, emotionally-charged tale. This is a powerful narrative that speaks to culture, family and connection across oceans and worlds.

My Strange, Shrinking Parents

Zeno Sworder

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Children’s Literature

Published by: Thames & Hudson

My Strange Shrinking Parents is about an immigrant family and the sacrifices that they make to raise their son in a new country. The story is presented as a fairytale but is woven together with personal memory. It is grounded in ideas of belonging, time, transience and imperfection. Traditional materials were used so that the overall aesthetic could describe these notions as much as the written narrative. I valued the characteristics of the materials and processes including stains, smears and off register colour placement. There is a tradition in Eastern art that believes flaws can heighten beauty by lending the piece individuality, humanity and warmth. This was a guiding philosophy for the artwork. My hope for the book is that it will provide readers with an example of family and love that is a bit more than hugs and sunshine. This book is about a quieter type of love, which I came to recognise and admire in my own parents. I have done my best to share it through this story. 

Zeno Sworder

Zero Sworder is a writer and artist who was born in regional Victoria and now lives in Melbourne with his young family. After studying Chinese literature and migration law at university, he worked as a journalist, an English language teacher, a consular officer, a tribunal advocate for refugees and immigrants and a jewellery designer. But he has always felt most himself sitting at a table drawing pictures and making up stories.

Judges’ comments

Zeno Sworder brings to life the experience of a migrant child who is awed and frustrated by his parents’ sacrifices. In this unique and uncanny telling of a familiar story, the narrator’s parents are required to give up a part of themselves, literally. At first, it’s five centimetres for a birthday cake. Then more for school fees and a uniform, and on it goes through childhood and adolescence, until the boy is fully grown, and his parents are the size of a teacup.

The book celebrates the reciprocal nature of parent-child love, coming full circle by the end of the book where the child character is looking after his now tiny parents in a doll’s house he has built. The words of his mother’s lullaby, which return at the close of the book, ring strongly: “Can I tell you a secret / That every heart knows / Love is a circle / Round and Round it goes.”

The illustrations evoke an epic and magical world where exchanging one’s height for another’s growth seems natural. Sworder lingers on key moments like the mum singing a lullaby with her child on her chest, or the family dancing in their humble house under the moonlight. Sworder depicts with wonder objects of significance like teacups and hand carved wooden figurines, in the early and final pages of the book, creating an altered mirror that shows the ways relationships shift while also noting the transfer of memories from one generation to the next.

My Father and Other Animals: How I Took on the Family Farm

Sam Vincent

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Non-fiction

Published by: Black Inc Books

Sam Vincent is a 20-something writer in the inner suburbs, scrabbling to make ends meet, when he gets a call from his mother: his father has stuck his hand in a woodchipper, but ‘not to worry – it wasn’t like that scene in Fargo or anything’. When Sam returns to the family farm to help out, his life takes a new and unexpected direction.

Whether castrating a calf or buying a bull – or knocking in a hundred fence posts by hand when his dad hides the post-driver – Sam’s farming apprenticeship is an education in grit and shit. But there are victories, too: nurturing a fig orchard to bloom; learning to read the land; joining forces with Indigenous elders to protect a special site.

By turns affecting, hilarious and utterly surprising, this memoir melds humour and fierce honesty in an unsentimental love letter. It’s about belonging, humility and regeneration – of land, family and culture. What passes from father to son on this unruly patch of earth is more than a livelihood; it is a legacy. 

Sam Vincent

Sam Vincent’s writing has appeared in The Monthly, The Saturday Paper, Griffith Review and The Best Australian Essays. His first book, Blood and Guts, was longlisted for the Walkley Book Award and in 2019 he won the Walkley Award for longform feature writing. He runs a cattle and fig farm in the Yass Valley, NSW, and supplies fruit to some of the best restaurants in the Canberra region.

Judges’ comments

This book at first seems to be a light-hearted and highly readable account of returning to the family farm to help an aging father, but through tackling the demands of running a farm in Australia, Sam Vincent probes deeply into some of the biggest issues of our time.

Vincent explores regenerative farming practices and how they might help address some of the effects of climate change, the city-country divide, the role of women in farming, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous connection to country. This book is a celebration of the love of land and builds bridges of understanding that will appeal to a broad cross section of readers.

The detail deployed by Vincent, from how to build a paddock fence, slaughter an animal or grow a fig orchard, is riveting and sustains the narrative. The wisdom, sarcasm and dry humour of Vincent’s father also ripple entertainingly through the pages. Most powerful of all is the section that deals with the dispossession of the First Peoples from the Gundaroo region and the Vincent family’s decision to engage with Traditional Owners and investigate the ancient heritage of the farm. The honesty brought to this sensitive moment is laudable. And so is the result of this decision.

This book demonstrates a meaningful way forward for non-Indigenous Australians to recognise the traditional custodianship of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and go about achieving practical reconciliation.

Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life

Brigitta Olubas

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Non-fiction

Published by: Virago

At last – the authorised biography of Shirley Hazzard, one of the greatest writers in the English language, author of The Great Fire, The Transit of Venus and Greene on Capri, winner of the National Book Award, the Miles Franklin Award and shortlisted for The Women’s Prize for Fiction. 

Brigitta Olubas tells the story of a girl from the suburbs of Sydney, Australia who fell early under the spell of words and sought out books as her companions. In the process she transformed and indeed created her life. She became a woman of the world who felt injustice keenly and a deep and original thinker, who wrote some of the most beautiful novels – Transit of Venus and The Great Fire among them – and always with an eye to the ways we reveal ourselves to another. 

Brigitta Olubas 

Brigitta Olubas is professor of English in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She published the first scholarly monograph on Hazzard’s writing and edited Shirley Hazzard’s essays, We Need Silence To Find Out What We Think and Shirley Hazzard’s Collected Stories.

Judges’ comments

The depth and complexity with which Olubas captures the life of Shirley Hazzard is immediately evident in the scope of the text. But despite its weightiness, this compelling literary biography is light in touch and easy to read. Enriched by thorough and detailed research, and drawing extensively from Hazzard’s beautiful letters, the work offers an intimate sense of Hazzard across the scope of her life.

From the intensity of youthful emotion to the deeply considered and yet passionate mature writer, to the distressing frailty of her later life, this biography asks questions of what a life in writing means, and how it makes meaning for others. From the prologue, it understands writing as an act of love, and balances both as imperatives for Hazzard, as well as the quintessential stuff of being.

Significantly, the biography also draws attention to a writer who has not always been acknowledged as she deserves, and manages the sleight of hand which is the pinnacle in literary biography, of addressing Hazzard’s novels without overwriting them, and leaving the reader enthused to return to or discover them. In this instance, reading Olubas’ work in advance will see the reader engage with Hazzard’s writing with an unprecedented depth and able to appreciate her work on a new level.

We Come With This Place

Debra Dank

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Non-fiction

Published by: Echo Publishing

We Come With This Place is deeply personal, a profound tribute to family and the Gudanji Country to which Debra Dank belongs. Debra Dank has created an extraordinary mosaic of vivid episodes that move about in time and place to tell an unforgettable story of country and people. 

There is great pain in these pages, and anger at injustice, but also great love, in marriage and in family, and for the land. Dank faces head on the ingrained racism that lies always under the skin of Australia, the racism that calls a little Aboriginal girl names and beats and rapes and disenfranchises the generations before hers. She describes sudden terrible violence, between races and sometimes at home. But overwhelmingly this is a book about strong, beloved parents and grandparents, guiding and teaching their children and grandchildren what country means, about joyful gatherings and the pleasures of eating food provided by the place that nourishes them, both spiritually and physically. 

Debra Dank

Debra Dank is a Gudanji/Wakaja woman, married to Rick, with three adult children and two grandchildren. An educator, she has worked in teaching and learning for many years – a gift given through the hard work of her parents. She continues to experience the privilege of living with country and with family. Debra completed her PhD in Narrative Theory and Semiotics at Deakin University in 2021.

Judges’ comments

This shatteringly beautiful memoir works through fragmented and non-linear storytelling to insist on a powerful sovereignty of voice. It is demanding reading, but rewarding, bringing the reader to negotiate their relationship to Gudanji Country and all that is entailed with that place across the injustice of the past and our colonial present.

Through glimpses into family life, Dank narrates the strength and resilience of both people and culture, refusing to shrink from that which is traumatic, but celebrating likewise that which sustains and heals. It documents atrocity and demonstrates inherited family trauma, for instance, but carries hope into the contemporary moment through the inclusion of the voices of the next generation. Moments of the work remain indelibly beyond reading – from Water-women, to station life, to fishing in an arid landscape, to looking for turkeys.

This is stunning writing which integrates different modes of cultural and historical storytelling from a variety of perspectives to challenge the colonial denigration of Indigenous epistemologies. Its resistance of linearity serves not only to interweave perspectives from different generations, and capture the scope of history across different moments, but simultaneously insists on the appreciation of an ontological world view that inherently steps outside the logic of Western imperialism. It asks its reader to learn to see Country with new eyes, and speaks to the power of stories in being, becoming and continuing.

Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong

Louisa Lim

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Non-fiction

Published by: Text Publishing

The story of Hong Kong has long been obscured by competing myths: to Britain, a ‘barren rock’ with no appreciable history; to China, a part of Chinese soil from time immemorial that had at last returned to the ancestral fold. To its inhabitants, the city was a place of refuge and rebellion, whose own history was so little taught that they began mythmaking their own past. 

Lim’s deeply researched and personal account is startling, casting new light on key moments: the British takeover in 1842, the negotiations over the 1997 return to China, and the future Beijing seeks to impose. Indelible City features guerrilla calligraphers, amateur historians and archaeologists who, like Lim, aim to put Hong Kongers at the centre of their own story. 

Wending through it all is the King of Kowloon, whose iconic street art both embodied and inspired the identity of Hong Kong—a site of disappearance and reappearance, power and powerlessness, loss and reclamation. 

Louisa Lim

Louisa Lim is a Senior Lecturer in Journalism at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advancing Journalism, where she teaches audio journalism and podcasting. Her previous book The People’s Republic of Amnesia; Tiananmen Revisited was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. Previously she was a correspondent for the BBC and NPR, and spent a decade reporting from China. She is the co-host of an award-winning podcast, The Little Red Podcast, about China.

Judges’ comments

Indelible City is the story of Hong Kong as it seesaws between world powers, struggling to be heard beneath the grand incongruous narratives of its overseers. For centuries, Hong Kong’s history has been expunged, subsumed, if not outright buried by the British Secrets Act or more recently, via China’s National Security laws, and yet as journalist Louisa Lim, a Hong Konger herself, reveals in this compelling work, despite these erasures – or perhaps because of them – there is something irrepressibly distinctive about Hong Kong and its people.

In a deep historical trawl matched with dogged reportage, Lim paints an evocative and multi-layered picture of Hong Kong spanning indigenous seafaring people and earth god shrines to drug-running British traders, Margaret Thatcher ominously falling down the steps of Beijing’s Great Hall of the People through to the surging shoals of pro-democracy activists armed with Post-it notes, sharpies and umbrellas in 2019.

With lyricism, Lim evokes the modern Hong Kong she grew up in, a collective identity perhaps embodied by the most unlikely hero of all, a rubbish collector who graffitied government property with sloping towers of crooked calligraphy, agitating for decades against his perceived dispossession. Intimate and meticulously researched, Indelible City is an exquisite literary act of truth-telling, and is in marked contrast to the doors of the Hong Kong Museum of History, which as Lim notes, seem to be constantly opening and closing for refits.

A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions

Thom van Dooren

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Non-fiction

Published by: MIT Press

In this time of extinctions, the humble snail rarely gets a mention, and yet snails are disappearing faster than any other species. In A World in a Shell, Thom van Dooren offers a collection of snail stories from Hawai’i—once home to more than 750 species of land snails, almost two-thirds of which are now gone. Following snail trails through forests, laboratories, museums, and even a military training facility, and meeting with scientists and Native Hawaiians, van Dooren explores ongoing processes of ecological and cultural loss as they are woven through with possibilities for hope, care, mourning, and resilience. 

Thom van Dooren

Thom van Dooren is a field philosopher and writer based at the University of Sydney where he is Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute. He is the author of numerous books and essays on extinction, biodiversity, and people’s relationships with threatened species and places.

Judges’ comments

Coming at a moment when we are beginning to comprehend the realities of mass extinction that we face with climate crisis, van Dooren’s sensitive work calls to attention the importance of recognising the specificity of each loss, and particularly of species little acknowledged in the world view.

Focusing on the wondrous array of Hawai’i’s land snails – and recognising the extinctions already in progress amongst the gastropods there and elsewhere – van Dooren’s work brings into focus the complexity of snail life, and makes clear all that would be implicated in their loss. There is beautiful detail in this work, such as the contemplation of snail communication via slime trails, and joy offered in moments of encounter, as in his documentation of the Kānaka Maoli knowledge of snails singing.

Engaging in a thorough study of snail life via the histories which complicate their island being, including colonial incursions and collecting, and moving all the way through to contemporary ecological efforts to preserve them, complicated by the presence of the US Defence Force, van Dooren makes clear the entanglements between the snails’ world and our own.

He also shows how, more than simply being a canary in the coalmine for the coming losses we face, the snails demonstrate that climate justice is indelibly entangled with justice for First Nations people. His work speaks poignantly to the need for both, navigating grief, hope and resilience in crisis.

The Greatest Thing

Sarah Winifred Searle

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Young adult literature

Published by: Allen & Unwin

It’s the first day of Grade Ten, and Winifred is going to reinvent herself. Now that her two best (and only) friends have transferred to a private school, Win must navigate high school on her own. Luckily, she isn’t alone for long. In art class, she meets Oscar and April. They don’t look or act like the typical teenagers in her town: they’re creative, a little rebellious and seem comfortable in their own skin in a way that Win can only dream of. 

But even though Winifred is breaking out of her shell, there’s one secret she can’t bear to admit to April and Oscar, or even to herself – and this lie threatens everything. Win needs to face her own truths, but she doesn’t need to do it alone. Through the healing power of clandestine sleepovers, op-shopping and zine publishing, Win finds and accepts what it means to be herself. 

Sarah Winifred Searle

Sarah Winifred Searle originally hails from spooky New England in the United States, but currently lives in sunny Perth, Australia with their beloved spouse and cat. Best known for vulnerable memoir and compassionate fiction, they write and draw comics and still like to make zines with their friends when they have time. www.swinsea.com

Judges’ comments

The Greatest Thing is an Own Voices graphic novel in the tradition of Safdar Ahmed’s Still Alive and Alison Bechdel’s tragicomic Fun Home, with complex characters, a striking central story, and a clear arc. This tender coming-of-age novel employs precise, well-considered dialogue in thought and speech balloons, and deceptively simple, panelled, sequential artwork to tell the story of grade ten student Win, who is a creator suffering depression.

The concept of graphination argues that the entire personality of the artist is visible through their representation of a character. Given the main character of The Greatest Thing is based on the author, it is unsurprising the evolution and growth of Win’s voice within and by means of her art, is particularly fine.

The novel is a masterpiece of understatement and emotional authenticity, exploring themes of fatphobia, biphobia, self-harm, and mental health issues, as well as starting at a new school, navigating shifting friendships, and loneliness, by means of a nested Zine inside a graphic novel device. The Greatest Thing is a profound exploration of the value of art in helping us negotiate the world and our relations with others.

Essentially a story about courage, the work is richly layered and deftly handled, representative of diverse relationships (such as those between mothers and daughters and with new loves). A stunning exemplar of the “perzine” (personal narrative) format, The Greatest Thing evokes deep empathy for all who struggle and deserve to flourish.

Sugar

Carly Nugent

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Young adult literature

Published by: Text Publishing

Persephone is angry. Angry that her life revolves around finger-prick tests, carbohydrate counts and insulin injections. Angry at Alexander Manson. Angry with her mum for lots of things, for nothing and for everything.

But most of all, she’s angry with herself. For deserving it all. Because one year ago she did something and her dad died.

But then Persephone finds a body on a bush path, a young woman she doesn’t know but feels a strong connection to. And as she tries to find out what happened to Sylvia, Persephone begins to understand her own place in the complex interconnectedness of the universe. 

Sugar is the story of a sixteen-year-old girl trying to make sense of the life-changing events that have sent her world into a spin, her search for a reason behind it all, and ultimately her acceptance of life’s randomness. 

Carly Nugent

Carly Nugent lives in Bright in Victoria. Her short fiction has featured in numerous publications, including the Bellevue Literary Review and Award Winning Australian Writing. Her first novel, The Peacock Detectives, won the Readings Children’s Book Prize, was a CBCA Honour Book, and was shortlisted for the Text Prize, the Australian Book Design Awards and the Sisters in Crime Davitt Awards. Sugar, inspired by her own experience of having diabetes, is her first book for young adults.

Judges’ comments

Sugar is an exquisitely written first-person debut novel by Bright-based author Carly Nugent and draws on the author’s lived experience of living with chronic illness. The protagonist and narrator is furious 16-year-old Persephone, diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes soon after the death of her father in a car accident. Her voice is both lyrical and refreshingly raw, conveyed in prose as beautifully composed and sharp, as it is original. The calamities that befall Persephone are layered narratively, but also structurally, in the form of chapters punctuated by blood sugar level readings and bushfire warnings.

Persephone is complex and flawed, and we feel the emotional authenticity of her reactions as the story unfolds with a momentum that carries the reader inexorably forward. Sugar is characterised by many other marvellously imperfect but perfectly real characters, seen through Persephone’s eyes, as she navigates her rage and the bushfire season, including her mother, Demi, her mother’s best friend, battered wife and nurse, Iris, and Iris’ son, hypochondriac, abused Steven. Themes of living with disability and chronic illness, grief, poverty, domestic violence, mental illness, and suicide, are threaded through a work of dazzling clarity and finesse that demonstrates the literary virtuosity that critics often claim is missing from books for this age group.

Ask No Questions

Eva Collins

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Young adult literature

Published by: Puncher & Wattmann

With a third of Australians born and around half with one parent born overseas, migration stories are a crucial part of our national experience. In her verse novel, Ask No Questions, Eva Collins writes spare affecting lines about her own experience as a teenager when her parents decided to emigrate from Poland to Australia. She captures the loss and gain, grief and celebration with great poignancy. Simply written but deeply moving, Ask No Questions is accessible poetry that is particularly suited for young adult readers. 

Eva Collins

Eva Collins was born in Poland and came to Australia with her family in 1958. She holds Bachelor degrees in Philosophy (University of Melbourne) and Fine Art Photography (RMIT), as well as a Master’s degree in Contemporary Art (Victorian College of the Arts). Eva was a finalist in the Olive Cotton and Moran Portrait Awards, and won the Inaugural Nikon Prize (2005). Her photographs are held at the National Portrait Gallery and the State Library of Victoria among other places, and have been widely exhibited. Her poems have appeared in Best Australian Poems, Quadrant, Southerly and Westerly. An extract from this collection was first published in the Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology (2008).

Judges’ comments

Ask No Questions is an affecting debut free verse memoir written by Eva Collins, charting her family’s journey from Poland to Australia during the Cold War, and told largely from her 12-year-old perspective. The title springs from something Collins’ parents would tell her whenever she interrogated their decisions, embodying the anxiety and endangerment immigrants feel, particularly those fleeing oppressive regimes. With almost one third of Australians coming here from elsewhere, and almost half the population having one parent who was born overseas, the memoir documents an important, insufficiently acknowledged period of history for this audience. The spare, restrained language Ask No Questions employs is both direct and accessible as Eva’s journey takes us from the loss of the things that shaped her identity in Poland to the challenges to identity that came with moving to Australia in the 1950s.

This beautifully signposted memoir moves backwards and forwards between the present and the past, in ways that starkly and strikingly interrogate the differences between the two countries and cultures, in memorable detail. This memoir is a wonderful introduction to a period of postwar Australian history that could bear further scrutiny, and to the verse form.

The Upwelling

Lystra Rose

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Young adult literature

Published by: Hachette Australia

Three misfits.
Two warring spirits.
One chance to save the world. 

Kirra is the great-granddaughter of a truth dreamer, and, like Great Nanna Clara, no-one believes her night-visions are coming true. When an end-of-the-world nightmare forces her to surf where her brother was killed, she time-slips into a place that could ruin her life, here, and in the Dreaming. 

Narn is the son of a well-respected Elder and holds an enviable role in his saltwater clan. Though he bears the marks of a man, many treat him like an uninitiated boy, including the woman he wants to impress. 

Tarni is the daughter of a fierce hunter and the custodian of a clever gift. Somehow, she understands Kirra when no-one else can. But who sent this unexpected visitor: a powerful ancient healer or an evil shadow-spirit? 

When death threatens all life, can a short-sighted surfer, a laidback dolphin caller and a feisty language unweaver work together to salvage our future? 

Lystra Rose

Lystra Rose, a descendant of the Guugu Yimithirr, Birri Gubba, Erub and Scottish nations, is an award-winning writer and editor who lives in a land where the rainforest meets the sea: Yugambeh-speaking country (Gold Coast), Australia. When she’s not catching waves with her husband and their two groms, Lystra is editing Surfing Life magazine and is the executive producer of Surfing Life TV (globally broadcasted on Fuel TV). She is the first female editor-in-chief of a mainstream surf magazine in the world. THE UPWELLING is Lystra’s debut novel.

Judges’ comments

The Upwelling is an exciting debut fantasy written by a descendent of the Guugu Yimithirr, Birri Gubba, Erub and Scottish nations. This near-apocalypse story moves between two timelines and features three striking main narrators. Teen surfer Kirra lives in the contemporary world with her Nan and her FIFO worker dad. Narn, son of an Elder, and Tarni, language unweaver, dwell in a parallel timeline where colonisers have not come to Australia, a world rooted in cultural and traditional practices, language, and lore.

When Kirra unwittingly surfs into Narn and Tarni’s world, she finds herself in a different Australia to the one she knows. In this world, Kirra’s own powers of truth dreaming or future seeing, and her abilities as a time breaker, are recognised for what they are, enabling all three teens to help defeat a fearsome enemy in Narn and Tarni’s world before Kirra is returned to her own.

The novel is a compelling breath of fresh air in Australian Literature and genre writing as it unapologetically and proudly employs Yugambeh language in its narration and dialogue, and associated traditional culture, myth and lore (with the permission of Elders and Traditional Custodians), refusing to pander to a non-Indigenous readership. Its immersive and propulsive storyline allows readers to naturalistically absorb these unique elements, causing them to think on what an alternative “Australia” might have been like if colonisation had not occurred.

What We All Saw

Mike Lucas

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Young adult literature

Published by: Penguin Books Australia

Witches only exist in stories. Everyone knows that. But what if the stories are real? 

FOUR FRIENDS. FOUR TRUTHS. ONE NIGHTMARE. 

If you wander into the wood …
If you hear scratching sounds from the Old Quarry …
If you go too close to the edge … 

WATCH. OUT. 

Mike Lucas

Mike Lucas is the author of several picture books including CBCA Notable Book Olivia’s Voice. He has also written and published several books of humorous children’s poetry, has had work highly commended in magazines and contributed to poetry anthologies. In 2017 Mike was one of the main organisers of the Adelaide Festival of Children’s Books. He presents writing and poetry workshops at schools, owns a bookshop in Blackwood, South Australia, and works as a full-time engineer. He doesn’t sleep much. What We All Saw is Mike’s first YA novel.

Judges’ comments

What We All Saw is a debut novel for this readership from a humorous poet for young people, Mike Lucas. Set in 1976 in and around a cursed and derelict manor house in England, and a quarry with a murderous cliff known as Hag’s Drop, this horror story is reminiscent of, and influenced by, Stephen King’s “The Body” (later filmed as Stand by Me).

Its characters — narrator Sammy, Shell, who is vision impaired, Charlie, a talented story-teller, and Gray, a fearless, truculent teen with a dreadful and abusive homelife — form the beating heart of the novel, and are beautifully drawn. Every character in the story, whether primary or incidental, has a distinct voice, and the complex potency of the dynamic between each of the foursome is compelling as they navigate a story that moves fluidly through many genres, from paranormal and horror to mimetic realism including themes of domestic abuse  and violence.

What We All Saw is a dark, exciting, complex tale that neatly and swiftly concludes many years in the future—a bold ending to a novel of remarkable ambition.

Unmaking Angas Downs: Myth and History on a Central Australian Pastoral Station

Shannyn Palmer

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Australian history

Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

Some stories dominate how we see and interpret a place, while others are obscured from view. Angas Downs is a pastoral station in Central Australia, but pastoralism is only a fraction of what has happened there. Like all places it has accrued people and stories, in multiple layers, over time. Unmaking Angas Downs traces a history of colonisation in Central Australia by tracking the rise and demise of a rural enterprise across half a century, as well as the complex and creative practices that transformed a cattle station into Country. It grapples with the question of how people experience profound dislocation and come to make a place for themselves in the wake of rupture. Angas Downs emerges as a place of dynamic interaction and social life – not only lived in, but also made by Anangu. 

Shannyn Palmer

Shannyn Palmer is a community-engaged practitioner, researcher and writer living and working on the Ancestral lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples. She was born and raised on Dja Dja Wurrung Country in the state now known as Victoria and has also lived and worked on Wurundjeri Country and Central Arrernte Country. While living in Mparntwe and working with Aṉangu, recording the stories that form the foundation of this book, Shannyn worked for the Aṟa Iritija Project, travelling between seven communities in the southwest of Central Australia working with Aṉangu to develop and maintain the community-based archive. She has a PhD in History from the ANU and works to develop community-engaged practice and enable meaningful intercultural conversations and collaborations.

Judges’ comments

Shannyn Palmer sets herself an ambitious task: to ‘explore the implications of different ways of knowing the world for historical research and writing in a colonised settler nation’. In an age that calls for truth-telling, she models an exemplary act of truth-listening. Unmaking Angas Downs relates the history of a place layered with stories and varied human experience. Colonising stories of pastoralism, policy-making and tourism sit alongside Anangu life stories and journeys, and the complex practices that transformed a cattle station into Country. Palmer employs an innovative style and structure that gives equal place to variant and even contradictory histories of everyday things, concepts and words. She is ever-present in the text, weaving her methodological and ethical processes into the narrative without a hint of ego or self-aggrandisement. Recounting her own coming into awareness, from halting conversations in English to complex acts of listening through an interpreter to stories in Pitjantjatjara, she shows how Angas Downs was made and unmade by Anangu through journeys and rupture, belonging and dislocation, relatedness and exchange. The result is a narrative carefully grounded in time and place, even as it problematises the cultural constructs of time and place that have marginalised Indigenous storytelling voices and techniques.

Palmer pulls off a book with the highest degree of difficulty: a nimble high-wire act of cross-cultural research, interpretation and communication. Her book not only rewrites the history of colonisation in Central Australia; it offers a model of engaged listening and interwoven truth-telling that pushes the boundaries of the discipline of history in Australia. A book for our times, it invites new ways of reading, as well as writing, the history of a colonised nation. An exceptional work of historical scholarship by an exciting new voice in history-making (and unmaking).

Elizabeth and John: The Macarthurs of Elizabeth Farm

Alan Atkinson

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Australian history

Publisher: UNSW Press

Elizabeth and John Macarthur were the first married couple to travel voluntarily from Europe to Australia, arriving in 1790, both aged 23, within three years of the initial invasion. John Macarthur soon became famous in New South Wales and beyond as a wool pioneer, a politician, and a builder of farms at Parramatta and Camden. For a long time, Elizabeth’s life was regarded as contingent on John’s and, more recently, John’s on Elizabeth’s. 

In Elizabeth and John, Alan Atkinson, the prizewinning author of The Europeans in Australia, draws on his work on the Macarthur family over 50 years to explore the dynamics of their strong and sinewy marriage, and family life across two generations. With the truth of Elizabeth and John Macarthur’s relationship much more complex and deeply human than other writers have suggested, Atkinson provides a finely drawn portrait of a powerful partnership. 

Alan Atkinson

Elizabeth and John Macarthur were the first married couple to travel voluntarily from Europe to Australia, arriving in 1790, both aged 23, within three years of the initial invasion. John Macarthur soon became famous in New South Wales and beyond as a wool pioneer, a politician, and a builder of farms at Parramatta and Camden.

Alan Atkinson has dedicated much of his scholarly life to deep archival research on the Macarthurs and their world, and this book is his crowning achievement. His expansive, deliberative, leisurely and absorbing dual biography gives us John and Elizabeth Macarthur as they saw themselves, in a narrative that effortlessly combines intimacy with breadth.

Exploring the relationships, education, reading and conversation that helped to form their thinking, he joyously uncovers the ‘life of the mind’ of his two protagonists. Wherever possible, Atkinson uses the Macarthurs’ own words to write a history from their point of view, a history that turns what we know inside out. At the same time, he draws upon his deep knowledge of the Enlightenment era and early colonial history to show them to be in every way products of their historical moment, both local and global.

Sensitive and assured, Atkinson writes with lyrical affection for his subject matter but never loses sight of the scholar’s duty to rigour and accuracy. His book invites an immersive reading, a slow relaxation into layered, complex stories that together shape the contours of a lost world.

Justice in Kelly Country: The Story of the Cop Who Hunted Australia’s Most Notorious Bushrangers

Lachlan Strahan

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Australian history

Publisher: Monash University Publishing

Partway through the Jerilderie Letter, Ned Kelly accused Senior Constable Anthony Strahan of threatening to shoot him ‘like a dog’. Those few fateful words have ricocheted through Australian history.

Anthony’s great-great-grandson grew up believing Ned Kelly was a heroic outlaw and Anthony the ruthless cop who pursued him. Yet through his painstaking research Lachlan pieced together a different story about the life of his ancestor.

This is a tale about justice and retribution, morality and character. It is also a story of inheritance and the tales we choose to preserve and retell. 

Lachlan Strahan

Lachlan Strahan is a historian and a former diplomat. His first book, Australia’s China, has become one of the standard works on Australia–China relations. His second, Day of Reckoning, traced a series of crimes in Papua New Guinea after World War II and was shortlisted for the 2006 NSW Premier’s Australian History Prize. His most recent book is Justice in Kelly Country. 

Judges’ comments

The legend of Ned Kelly and his gang exerts a powerful and polarising cultural force in Australia, driving historians and enthusiasts alike to take sides in an ideological contest: was Kelly man or myth, hunter or hunted, victim or villain? Lachlan Strahan chooses not to look directly into the glare of the Kelly legend but to glance sideways, making the focus of his history a member of the police force who also happens to be his own great-great-grandfather.

He peels aside layers of family bitterness and national myth-making to find a complex historical figure and a deeply human story. Set against the life of Anthony Strahan – another Irish emigrant who battled for existence in the rough and impoverished society of rural Victoria – the Kelly story takes its historical place as one more element of deprivation and disorder.

As he grapples with the untidy legacies of family bitterness, Strahan’s deft, assured and often moving account offers a nuanced elaboration of time, place and multiple protagonists, giving insight into the complex motivations and ambitions, constraints and opportunities of a broad cast of colonial characters. This rich amalgam of national, local, global and family history is not simply an addition to Kelly literature and historiography; it is a welcome intervention.

Saving the Reef: The human story behind one of Australia’s greatest environmental treasures

Rohan Lloyd

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Australian history

Publisher: UQP

While in the past Australians wrestled with what the Reef is, today they are struggling to reconcile what it will be. To do this, we need to understand the Reef’s intertwining human story. 

The Great Barrier Reef has come to dominate Australian imaginations and global environmental politics. ‘Saving the Reef’ charts the social history of Australia’s most prized yet vulnerable environment, from the relationship between First Nations peoples and colonial settlers, to the Reef’s most portentous moment – the Save the Reef campaign launched in the 1960s. 

Through this gripping narrative and interwoven contemporary essays, historian Rohan Lloyd reveals how the Reef’s continued decline is forcing us to reconsider what ‘saving’ the Reef really means. 

Rohan Lloyd

Rohan Lloyd is a historian who specialises in North Queensland and Australian environmental history. He has published histories on the Great Barrier Reef, North Queensland and Australian environmentalism. Rohan works as an English teacher at Ignatius Park College in Townsville and is an adjunct lecturer at James Cook University. Saving the Reef is his first book. 

Judges’ comments

History doesn’t just happen. In this important environmental history of the Great Barrier Reef, Rohan Lloyd demonstrates that people make history by the actions they take and the decisions they make. His account of campaigns, commissions, institutional responses and political interventions to protect the Reef does not downplay the difficulties of action in the face of vested interests or competing needs and aspirations. But ultimately it offers hope and guidance for future collective actions for both conservation and change.

As a place at once full of promise and under threat, the Reef itself has become a contested entity. Lloyd’s book is threaded with reflective essays on such themes as knowledge, seeing and science, which range broadly across history, geography and culture. How people and organisations experience and know the Reef informs the way they campaign for its protection or use. Whether to present the Reef to public imagination as enduring or endangered is a question with no easy answer: Lloyd is only too conscious that awareness of vulnerability can also lead to despair. His book is a powerful argument for working together across the barriers of competing interests and learned mistrust – not with naivete but with understanding, respect and willed optimism.

Black Lives, White Law: Locked Up & Locked Out in Australia

Russell Marks

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Australian history

Publisher: La Trobe University Press in conjunction with Black Inc Books

Indigenous Australians are the most incarcerated people on the planet. Indigenous men are fifteen times more likely to be locked up than their non-Indigenous counterparts; Indigenous women are twenty-one times more likely. 

Featuring vivid case studies and drawing on a deep sense of history, Black Lives, White Law explores Australia’s deplorable record of locking up First Nations people. It examines Australia’s system of criminal justice – the web of laws and courts and police and prisons – and how that system interacts with First Nations peoples and communities. How is it that so many are locked up? Why have imprisonment rates increased in recent years? Is this situation fair? Almost everyone agrees that it’s not. And yet it keeps getting worse. 

In this groundbreaking book, Russell Marks investigates Australia’s incarceration epidemic. What do we see if the institutions of Australian justice receive the same scrutiny they routinely apply to Indigenous Australians? 

Russell Marks

Russell Marks is a criminal defence lawyer and an adjunct research fellow at La Trobe University, where he completed a PhD in Australian political and cultural history. His most recent book is Black Lives, White Law: Locked Up and Locked Out in Australia. He lives on Kaurna land.

Judges’ comments

This passionate, timely book shines a critical light on First Nations’ incarceration rates in Australia, bringing history into the present with a sense of urgency and purpose. Black Lives, White Law shows the current incarceration crisis to be the contemporary manifestation of a long and brutal history of internment regimes and custodial institutions, instruments for state management of a problem created by the conditions of the colony’s conception.

Russell Marks draws on his experience of working for Aboriginal legal services and as a criminal defence lawyer to tell devastating stories from the front line with immediacy and compassion. He combines these telling personal accounts with a broad, authoritative and readable synthesis of the rich scholarship on dispossession, sovereignty, law and justice in Australia, building a tightly woven argument about legal disadvantage and the failures of a justice system that sees First Nations people – and sometimes whole families – spend time behind bars again and again. Marks insists that there must be another way. Powerfully interventionist while avoiding polemic, this book reminds us that frontier violence has a present as well as a past.

At the Altar of Touch

Gavin Yuan Gao

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Poetry

Publisher: UQP

From the 2020 winner of the Thomas Shapcott Award comes a sophisticated, impressive and rich collection of poetry that unpacks the complexity of family, grief, and cross-cultural and queer identity. 

These richly allusive poems weigh violence and tenderness, wound and cure, history and future. Boldly and tenderly, they balance loss and gain, adventure and quiet, as they hum to one another of love and loss. This is a scintillating and exhilarating collection from an accomplished and distinctive new voice. 

Gavin Yuan Gao

Born in Beijing, Gavin Yuan Gao is a genderqueer, bilingual immigrant poet and translator who grew up in Beijing and Brisbane. They hold a BA (magna cum laude) in English Literature and Creative Writing from The University of Michigan. Their debut poetry collection, At the Altar of Touch, won the 2020 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and was published by UQP in 2022. They live and write in Brisbane.

Judges’ comments

At the Altar of Touch is an intensely lyrical, intimate and expansive collection of poems. Here, in their debut collection, Gavin Yuan Gao deploys striking imagery and layered metaphor to find a path through suffering towards connection and belonging.

The poems range from heartbreaking elegies to the poet’s mother, tenderly erotic queer love poems, unsettling accounts of bullying and endurance, and ecstatic odes to desire and the natural world. Throughout, the language is associative, yet controlled and immersive, sweeping the reader up in the sensations and meanings held in the body.

The book incorporates, adapts and reimagines cultural touchstones as diverse as blind Chinese folk musician Abing, Telemachus from Greek mythology, Wordsworth, Rachmaninoff, and My Fair Lady. It is invigorating and enlightening, gently subverting our sense of the division of Eastern and Western aesthetics. But the poems also directly tackle, with nuance and courage, acutely contemporary experiences of racism in public places.

Gao’s poems are sinuous and sensual, drawing on archetypal motifs to deepen the resonance of the personal and familial. At the Altar of Touch is an achingly beautiful, rewarding ode to persistence and passion and is a startling poetic debut.

Harvest Lingo

Lionel Fogarty

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Poetry

Publisher: Giramondo Publishing

At the centre of Lionel Fogarty’s fourteenth collection is a series of poems written in India which are remarkable for the connections they draw between the social problems the poet encounters in this country – poverty, class division, corruption – and those he sees in contemporary Australia, besetting his own people. Other poems tell of encounters between people and between cultures, address historical and cultural issues and political events, and pay tribute to important Indigenous figures.

There are intensely felt lyrics of personal experience, and poems which contemplate Fogarty’s own position as a poet and an activist, speaking with and for his community. Fogarty’s poems are bold and fierce, at times challenging and confronting, moved by strong rhythms and a remarkable freedom with language. They are an expression of the ‘harvest lingo’ which gives the collection its title. 

Lionel Fogarty

Lionel Fogarty was born on Wakka Wakka land, at Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve in south-east Queensland in 1957. Throughout the 1970s he worked as an activist for Aboriginal Land Rights, and in the 1990s, after the death of his brother Daniel Yock, protesting against Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. His poetry collections date from the early 1980s; his most recent collections are Connection Requital, Mogwie-Idan: Stories of the Land, Eelahroo (Long Ago) Nyah (Looking) Mobo-Mobo (Future), all with Vagabond Press; Lionel Fogarty: Selected Poems 1980-2017, published by re.press; and Harvest Lingo, published by Giramondo and shortlisted for the 2023 NSW and Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.

Judges’ comments

In this powerful new collection, Lionel Fogarty demonstrates that his many decades of writing and publishing poetry have not diminished his political bite or poetic power. Across themes of love and Country, domestic and international politics, the personal and interpersonal, Fogarty does not shy away from interrogating all facets of life as observed and experienced by an Indigenous Elder and a life-long activist.

Often, with the sense of an outsider or ‘intruder’, Fogarty has created a collection that is dense and multilayered, veering into abstraction that intensely evokes the absurd realities that Indigenous people are asked to face living in colonial Australia.

Fogarty writes with a radical inversion of the English language that turns the coloniser’s tongue in upon itself to create poetry that challenges the reader in pursuit of political liberation. His work is singular and uncompromising, it is often difficult, but it has a lyrical form and a syntactical uniqueness that flows with rhythm and purpose. Harvest Lingo is a book of intense commitment and power.

Exactly As I Am

Rae White

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Poetry

Publisher: UQP

let me tell you
how to lean gently on
one another without
rocking sideways. 

Rae White’s compelling second poetry collection ‘Exactly As I Am’ rises from their lived experience as a non-binary transgender person. Their gloriously defiant, unruly poems dissect and scrutinise the spaces transgender people are both assigned and denied in society, through unflinching explorations of gender identity, gender discrimination and gender euphoria. These bracing poems lean towards you, hold out their hand and offer you: a connection, a community, an emboldened call to action. 

Rae White

Rae White is a non-binary transgender poet, writer and zinester. Their poetry collection Milk Teeth won 2017 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, was shortlisted for 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and commended in the 2018 Anne Elder Award. Rae’s short story ‘The Body Remembers’ placed second in 2019 Rachel Funari Prize for Fiction. Their poem ‘what even r u?’ placed second in 2017 Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Rae’s poetry has been published in Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, Meanjin Quarterly, Overland, Rabbit and others. Rae is the editor of enbylife.net, a journal for non-binary and gender diverse creatives.

Judges’ comments

This linguistically energetic and versatile book explores non-binary, transgender identity in compelling and insightful ways. The poems are deft and witty, and they do not flinch or hold back in their depictions of both overt and covert discrimination directed towards transgender people.

Exactly As I Am breaks apart traditional uses of form and structure and plays with layout, punctuation and with unique and unexpected methods of inquiry. The book demonstrates how poetry can articulate the ways in which non-binary bodies occupy their contested spaces, while inextricably linked to the everyday realities of paying rent, buying groceries, having jobs and negotiating structures which are universally disempowering.

The poems are welcoming and inviting, giving the reader a strong sense that there are many ways of experiencing and accepting identity. The overall tone of the book is one of joy and celebration, of pride, hope and enthusiasm for embracing non-normative ways of being. This book is an impressive and necessary work, one which will help to break down barriers and prejudices faced by transgender people. Essentially, it is a book of love and empowerment.

The Jaguar

Sarah Holland-Batt

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Poetry

Publisher: UQP

With electrifying boldness, Sarah Holland-Batt confronts what it means to be mortal in an astonishing and deeply humane portrait of a father’s Parkinson’s Disease, and a daughter forged by grief. 

Opening and closing with startling elegies set in the charged moments before and after a death, and fearlessly probing the body’s animal endurance, appetites and metamorphoses, The Jaguar is marked by Holland-Batt’s lyric intensity and linguistic mastery, along with a stark new clarity of voice. 

Here, Holland-Batt is at her most exacting and uncompromising: these ferociously intelligent, insistent poems refuse to look away, and challenge us to view ruthless witness as a form of love. ‘The Jaguar’ is an indelible collection by a poet at the height of her powers. 

Sarah Holland-Batt

Sarah Holland-Batt is an award-winning poet, editor and critic. Her latest book, The Jaguar, won the 2023 Stella Prize and The Australian Book of the Year 2022, was shortlisted for the 2023 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and longlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship, the W.G. Walker Memorial Fulbright Scholarship, residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell colonies in the United States, the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, an Asialink Literature residency in Japan, and an Australia Council Literature Residency at the B.R. Whiting Studio in Rome, among other honours.

Judges’ comments

This is a book of intensely moving poems which explore grief, loss, change and memory in transformative ways. The poet’s metaphorical imagination and control of language ensure that her poems are shapely, richly evocative and affecting.

Through concentration of thought, image and emotion, The Jaguar brings the reader into an animated connection with the poet’s experience of her father’s protracted illness and eventual death. Other poems deftly give voice to the complexities, disappointments and ironies of love and desire, and to encounters with place across continents and states of being.

A poet of meticulous craft, Holland-Batt amalgamates narrative and lyrical strategies to enterprising ends. All the poems in this book are attended by a deep sense of how poetry is a perfect tool for revelation and insight.

Clean

Scott-Patrick Mitchell

Shortlist year: 2023

Shortlist category: Poetry

Publisher: Upswell Publishing

Our lucent teeth spark the rainbow dark.
Here, we do not use words like love.
Instead, we speak with hands that hold
as shoulders tussle
the roughhouse rougher.
In the absence of daylight,
we are just two young men,
silent save for giggle and shoe scuff:
we do not rouse suspicion when touching.
from ‘Night Orchids’
—
In this volume, Scott-Patrick Mitchell propels us into the seething mess of the methamphetamine crisis in Australia today. These poems roil and scratch, exploring the precarious life of addiction and its sleep deprivation. From an unsteady and unsavoury life, we are released into the joy of a recovery made through sheer hard work.

Even in the disintegration, the poet points us towards love and carries tenderness every day in memory. Scott-Patrick Mitchell’s decades of spoken-word practice has enabled a fine tuning on the page when, for so many readers, we enter into an alien zone of unknowing.

Scott-Patrick Mitchell

In this volume, Scott-Patrick Mitchell propels us into the seething mess of the methamphetamine crisis in Australia today. These poems roil and scratch, exploring the precarious life of addiction and its sleep deprivation. From an unsteady and unsavoury life, we are released into the joy of a recovery made through sheer hard work.

Even in the disintegration, the poet points us towards love and carries tenderness every day in memory. Scott-Patrick Mitchell’s decades of spoken-word practice has enabled a fine tuning on the page when, for so many readers, we enter into an alien zone of unknowing.

Judges’ comments

The poems in Clean eschew the sterility and decorum suggested by one meaning of its title. Instead, they map the treacherous and trauma-haunted terrain of addiction and recovery with fearless experimentation and striking compassion.

The voice of these poems has none of the feel of a detached observer or social worker; they dwell instead within desperation, hunger, precarity and marginalisation, giving the reader a visceral sense of the humanity behind the headlines of the methamphetamine crisis.

In its form and use of language, the collection is adventurous and forensic. There are lyrics, prose poems, palindromic and textual play, elegies and fragments. But the poems are always aurally captivating, using sound and associative techniques to foreground the bodily and emotional experience of encounter.

In its three sections – “Dirty”, “The Sleep Deprivation Diaries” and “Clean” – Scott-Patrick Mitchell explores not only this unpredictable arc of recovery, but wider themes of homophobic violence, queer joy and sensuality, the climate crisis, masculinity, family and grief.

In this accomplished debut collection, Mitchell has composed a complex, fierce and tender ode to recovery, love and presence.