‘Signs and Wonders’ wins 2022 Nib Literary Award

Delia Falconer has won the Waverley Council’s 2022 Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award, worth $20,000, for her book Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss (Scribner).

Chosen from a shortlist of six books, Signs and Wonders builds on Falconer’s two acclaimed essays ‘Signs and Wonders’ and ‘The Opposite of Glamour’ to explore how it feels to live as a reader, a writer, a lover of nature and a mother of small children in an era of profound ecological change.

Falconer is an author, critic and senior lecturer living in Sydney. Her first book The Service of Clouds (Picador) was shortlisted for five national awards, including the Miles Franklin and Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Falconer is the second author in the Nib’s 21-year history to win the award twice. She first won the award in 2011 for her book Sydney (NewSouth).

Rachel E Menzies and Ross G Menzies’ co-authored work Mortals (A&U) won the $2500 Nib People’s Choice Prize. Mortals explores the theory that the fear of death has shaped human society and is the hidden driver behind most of humankind’s endeavours. Each author shortlisted also receives $1000.

Presented by Sydney’s Waverley Council, the Nib recognises the role research plays in fiction and nonfiction. The winner of last year’s prize was Luke Stegemann’s Amnesia Road: Landscape, violence and memory (NewSouth).

For more information about the award, visit the Waverley Council website.

Category: Awards Local news