Birch, McMullin win 2024 Age Book of the Year awards
The winners of the Age Book of the Year awards have been announced.
Tony Birch won the fiction award for his novel Women & Children (UQP) and Ross McMullin won the nonfiction prize for Life So Full of Promise: Further biographies of Australia’s Lost Generations (Scribe).
Chosen from shortlists announced last month and announced last night by the Age editor Patrick Elligett at the opening of the Melbourne Writers Festival, the winners each receive $10,000, courtesy of the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
The 2024 judges were writer Simon Caterson, historian Joy Damousi, bookseller Mark Rubbo and former publisher Louise Swinn.
Set in 19665, Birch’s novel focuses on 11-year-old Joe Cluny’s and his family—his sister Ruby, single mother Marion, and adored grandfather, Charlie. The judges said Birch had imbued his characters ‘with great humanity and a dignity that belies the difficulties of their lives’, adding that Women & Children is ‘a book that will live with you’. While the book addresses domestic violence, Birch said its writing had not been driven by the issues. ‘But I did want to write a book which conveyed the depth of love in a family, and clearly that was the motivation for writing about the relationship between Joe and Charlie,’ said Birch.
The judges said McMullin’s Life So Full of Promise showed ‘how the full human cost of war goes far beyond those lives lost in violent conflict and the people immediately affected who are closest to them’, The book follows on from McMullin’s collective biography, Farewell Dear People, and examines the lives of three men whose deaths in World War I meant their potential went unfulfilled—including Murdoch Mackay, who McMullin said ‘could have been prime minister’. In choosing subjects McMullin said ‘there had to be a way of showing in the narratives that the loss was obviously shattering for the families, but at a national level, a loss as well because they had such rich potential’.
McMullin’s book is the third Age Book of the Year winner in a row published by Scribe. Last year’s winners were Robbie Arnott for Limberlost (Text) and Kim Mahood for Wandering with Intent (Scribe).
Category: Awards Local news
