Penguin Literary Prize 2023 shortlist announced

Penguin Random House Australia (PRH) has announced the shortlist for the 2023 Penguin Literary Prize.

The shortlisted titles are:

• ‘The Elementals’ by Liz Allan, the story of The Bastards, a band featuring three teenage girls who are obsessed with Nirvana.
• ‘The Boy Who Wept Rabbits’ by Benjamin Forbes, a story that co-opts magical realism to deal
  with issues of masculinity, shame, abuse and identity, following a timid boy, afflicted with rabbits for tears, as he moves across a continent and, internally, traverses a landscape of self-loathing and confusion.
• ‘Falling and Burning’ by Michael Krockenberger, the story of a tragedy resulting from a joyride gone wrong told from ten different perspectives.
• ‘Jade and Emerald’ by Michelle See-Tho, in which a lonely 10-year-old girl forms an unlikely bond with a socialite, a friendship that strains her already-fraught relationship with her strict mother.
• ‘Nothing Like The Sun’ by J N Read, a morally complex speculative novel of voluntary euthanasia gone wrong and one Officer’s quest to save their father from termination in the name of population control, revolving around issues of ageing populations, genetic modifications and artificial intelligence.
• ‘The Guggenheim’ by Heather Taylor-Johnson, in which honeymooners in New York, Julia and Dex, survive a massacre that veils their marriage in tragedy and death; four years on from the shooting, The Guggenheim sees them back in Adelaide, ‘where Julia finds the chaos of her coping unsustainable’.

The Penguin Literary Prize was launched in 2017 established to ‘find, nurture and develop new Australian authors of literary fiction’. Previous winners include Kathryn Hind with Hitch, Imbi Neeme with The Spill, Sophie Overett with The Rabbits, James McKenzie Watson with Denizen and Annette Higgs with On A Bright Hillside in Paradise, to be published in July 2023.

PRH publisher Meredith Curnow said: ‘Each year staff across Penguin Random House and United Book Distributors enthusiastically throw themselves into the preliminary reading for the Penguin Literary Prize. It is an exhilarating process, reading work from writers across the country. This year the shortlist features six quite different texts and I can’t wait to see which one the judges select to be published by PRH.’

The winner will be announced on 15 June 2023.

Category: Awards Local news