Down wins Miles Franklin for ‘Bodies of Light’

Melbourne writer Jennifer Down took out Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, the $60,000 Miles Franklin Literary Award, for her second novel Bodies of Light (Text). The winner was chosen from a shortlist announced in June, in a headline-grabbing year for the Miles Franklin that featured a plagiarism scandal as well as the shortlisting of a self-published book for the first time in the prize’s history.

The winner of the Barbara Jefferis Award was recently announced as S L Lim for Revenge: Murder in three parts (Transit Lounge); the $50,000 award is presented every two years for the best Australian novel that ‘depicts women and girls in a positive way or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in society’.

The respected, long-running ALS Gold Medal went to poetry collection Human Looking by Andy Jackson (Giramondo). Administered by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, the medal was presented alongside the Mary Gilmore Award for the best first book of poetry (Jelena Dinić, In the Room with the She Wolf, Wakefield) and the Magarey Medal for biography (Bernadette Brennan, Leaping into Waterfalls, A&U). Brennan’s biography of the late Australian writer Gillian Mears also won the National Biography Award as well as the nonfiction category of the Age Book of the Year. The fiction category was awarded to Miles Allinson for his second novel In Moonland (Scribe).

In May the Sydney Morning Herald named three debut authors as the Best Young Australian Novelists for 2022: Ella Baxter for New Animal (A&U), Michael Burrows for Where the Line Breaks (Fremantle Press) and Diana Reid for Love & Virtue (Ultimo). Reid also swept this year’s trade awards, taking out overall book of the year and literary fiction book of the year at the Australian Book Industry Awards, as well as the adult fiction category at the Australian Booksellers Association’s awards night.

Wounded Country (Quentin Beresford, NewSouth) took out the top prize in the Queensland Literary Awards, where other winners included The Other Half of You (Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Hachette) for fiction, Lies, Damned Lies (Claire G Coleman, Ultimo) for nonfiction, Kunyi (Kunyi June Anne McInerney, Magabala) for children’s book, Girls in Boys’ Cars (Felicity Castagna, Pan) for YA, Stasis Shuffle (Pam Brown, Hunter Publishers) for poetry, Another Day in the Colony (Chelsea Watego, UQP) for people’s choice, and Dark as Last Night (Tony Birch, UQP) for short story collection. Birch’s book also took out the fiction prize at the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards earlier this year.

Alongside Birch, Safdar Ahmed’s graphic novel Still Alive: Notes from Australia’s immigration detention system (Twelve Panels Press) swept the NSW awards, winning overall book of the year as well as the Multicultural NSW Award. Among the 12 award categories, YA novel The Gaps by Leanne Hall (Text) won the prize for young people’s literature and The Winter Road by Kate Holden (Black Inc.) took out the nonfiction prize. The Winter Road also took out the nonfiction category in the NSW Premier’s History Awards, while both Holden and Hall’s books went on to win in the Davitt Awards for crime books by Australian women.

Other Davitt winners included Once There Were Wolves (Charlotte McConaghy, Hamish Hamilton), middle-grade novel The Detective’s Guide to Ocean Travel (Nicki Greenberg, Affirm) and debut Before You Knew My Name (Jacqueline Bublitz, A&U)—Bublitz also swept Aotearoa New Zealand’s Ngaio Marsh Awards, becoming the first author to win both best novel and best first novel at the awards. Back in Australia, the winners of the Ned Kelly Awards for crime were revealed in August: Banjawarn (Josh Kemp, UWA Publishing) won best debut, while Banquet: The untold story of Adelaide’s family murders (Debi Marshall, Vintage) won best true crime. Also in crime, Margaret Hickey won the Danger Prize for her debut novel Cutters End (Penguin).

In other state awards, Canberra writer Subhash Jaireth won the Australian Capital Territory Book of the Year for his essay collection Spinoza’s Overcoat (Transit Lounge); Return to Dust (Dani Powell, UWAP) took out the fiction category of the Chief Minister’s Northern Territory Book Awards; and winners of the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards included poetry collection Homecoming (Elfie Shiosaki, Magabala) and middle-grade novel A Glasshouse of Stars (Shirley Marr, Puffin).

In children’s awards, A Glasshouse of Stars also took out the younger readers category at the prestigious Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Awards. Other winners included YA novel Tiger Daughter (Rebecca Lim, A&U), picture book Iceberg (Claire Saxby, illus by Jess Racklyeft, A&U), and information book Still Alive, Notes from Australia’s Immigration Detention System (Safdar Ahmed, Twelve Panels Press).

In other children’s awards, debut author Gary Lonesborough won the biennial Ena Noël Award, presented by the Australian branch of the International Board on Books for Young People, for his YA novel The Boy from the Mish (A&U). The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators awarded Heroes of the Secret Underground by Susan Gervay (HarperCollins) in the Australian and New Zealand division of this year’s Crystal Kite Member Choice Awards. A joint winner of the picture fiction category of the Wilderness Society’s Environment Award for Children’s Literature, Sharing (Aunty Fay Muir & Sue Lawson, illus by Leanne Mulgo Watson, Magabala) was also jointly awarded the inaugural Karajia Award for First Nations children’s storytelling along with Somebody’s Land: Welcome to our Country (Adam Goodes & Ellie Laing, illus by David Hardy, A&U).

Announced in June, winners of the 70th Australian Book Design Awards included Catch Us the Foxes (Nicola West, S&S) for commercial fiction cover, How Wild Things Are (Analiese Gregory, Hardie Grant) for best designed cookbook, and You Two, You Two (Brooke Hill, illus by Elin Matilda, Wonderthink) for best designed children’s illustrated book.

In September the Educational Publishing Awards Australia were revealed, naming winners in categories including scholarly nonfiction book of the year (Vandemonians: The repressed history of colonial Victoria, Janet McCalman, MUP) and primary educational picture book (Somebody’s Land, Adam Goodes & Ellie Laing, illus by David Hardy, A&U). Vandemonians also jointly won the 2022 Ernest Scott Prize for History along with Shifting Grounds: Deep histories of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland (Lucy Mackintosh, Bridget Williams Books).

In unpublished manuscript prizes, mystery novel A Place Near Eden (A&U) by Melbourne writer Nell Pierce won the 2022 Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award, while Western Australian Brendan Ritchie took out the Dorothy Hewett Award for his road novel Eta Draconis (UWAP, 2023).

A range of publishers awarded contracts to the winners of unpublished manuscript prizes. True crime writer Vikki Petraitis won the inaugural A&U Crime Fiction Prize for The Unbelieved; Sydney writer Annette Higgs won the Penguin Literary Prize for On a Bright Hillside in Paradise (2023); Zeynab Gamieldien won the first ever WestWords/Ultimo Prize for Scope of Permissibility; and Steph Vizard won HarperCollins’s Banjo Prize for commercial fiction for her rom-com The Love Contract (2023).

Finally, Australian Poetry announced Audrey Molloy’s The Important Things (Gallery Press) as the winner of the 2021 Anne Elder Award for a first book of poetry, while Australian SFF writer Shelley Parker-Chan won a spate of overseas awards for her debut novel She Who Became the Sun (Tor), including best new writer at the Hugo Awards and two categories at the British Fantasy Awards.

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