SPN Book of the Year shortlist announced

The shortlist for the 2022 Small Press Network (SPN) Book of the Year (BOTY) Award has been announced.

The shortlisted books are:

• Friends and Dark Shapes (Kavita Bedford, Text)
• No Document (Anwen Crawford, Giramondo)
• Gravidity and Parity (Eleanor Jackson, Vagabond)
• Sexy Tales of Paleontology (Patrick Lenton, Subbed In)
• Theory of Colours (Bella Li, Vagabond)
• Permafrost (S J Norman, UQP)
• Hometown Haunts (ed by Poppy Nwosu, Wakefield).

Judges Penni Russon, Bec Kavanagh and Andrew Finegan said the shortlist ‘speaks to the diversity of forms and the exciting experimentation in the small, people-powered publishing houses in Australia, but this shortlist is a mere peak on a mountain of novels, academic texts, poetry, nonfiction, children’s picture books and YA, all of which are doing interesting and wonderful things to expand our ideas about what the Australian publishing scene is up to’.

Formerly the Most Underrated Book Award, the prize was first presented under its new name in 2020 and aims to recognise ‘significant and groundbreaking’ books being produced in Australia. The joint recipients of the 2021 award, both essay collections, were Echoes (Shu-Ling Chua, first published by Somekind Press) and We Are Speaking in Code (Tanya Vavilova, Brio).

The BOTY 2022 winner will be presented in partnership with the Wheeler Centre as part of its Next Big Thing series on 25 November, after the second day of this year’s SPN Independent Publishing Conference.

Tickets for the award ceremony are available through the Wheeler Centre on a pay-what-you-can basis. For more information about the shortlist, see the SPN website.

Category: Awards Local news