Award winners to look out for

Fiction

Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy (Giramondo) won the $60,000 Miles Franklin Literary Award, the $60,000 Stella Prize, the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, the 2023 Queensland Literary Awards (QLAs) fiction book award ($15,000) and the UK’s James Tait Black Prize. Said the Stella judges: ‘Fierce and gloriously funny, Praiseworthy is a genre-defiant epic of climate catastrophe proportions.’

Meanwhile, Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie (UQP) won the Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance ($30,000), the fiction award ($25,000) at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards (VPLAs), the adult fiction award at the BookPeople Book of the Year Awards, and the fiction award in the Indie Book Awards. QLA judges described Edenglassie as a ‘historical tapestry that tears down barriers between past and present’.

After winning the unpublished manuscript award at the 2021 VPLAs, André Dao’s Anam (Hamish Hamilton) won the fiction prize at the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards (PMLAs) and the Glenda Adams Award for New Writing at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. (Dao also won the Pascall Prize for Cultural Criticism and was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Writer.)

Recently shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood (A&U) has also been shortlisted in the PMLAs, the Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIAs), and the BookPeople Book of the Year Awards, as well as for the Age Book of the Year. The Booker judging panel said of Stone Yard Devotional: ‘The past, in the form of the returning bones of an old acquaintance, comes knocking at [the protagonist’s] door; the present, in the forms of a global pandemic and a local plague of mice and rats, demands her attention. The novel thrilled and chilled the judges.’

Other highly awarded fiction titles include Trent Dalton’s Lola in the Mirror (Fourth Estate), which won literary fiction book of the year at the ABIAs, and was shortlisted for the Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award, as well as Kate Grenville’s Restless Dolly Maunder (Text), which was also shortlisted in the latter and in the PMLAs, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the ARA Historical Novel Prize.

Nonfiction

Anna Funder’s Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life (Hamish Hamilton) won the biography of the year award at the ABIAs and the adult nonfiction award at the BookPeople Book of the Year Awards, and was also longlisted for the inaugural Women’s Prize for Nonfiction and for the Nib Literary Award.

David Marr’s Killing for Country: A Family Story (Black Inc.) won the book of the year and the nonfiction book of the year in the Indie Book Awards, and was shortlisted in the history category of the PMLAs, as well as the true crime category of the Ned Kelly Awards. Said Indie Book Awards judge Lindy Jones: ‘This is a grim and brutal subject handled in a measured and thoroughly researched way … Marr’s meticulous research and careful prose tell the brutal colonial history of Indigenous dispossession through the greed and avarice of the squatters, the murderous barbarity of the lawless Native Police, and the criminal hypocrisy and wilful blindness of the governing class, both in Australia and Britain.’

The Voice to Parliament Handbook (Thomas Mayo & Kerry O’Brien, HG Explore) won the overall book of the year award and social impact book of the year at the ABIAs, and was shortlisted at the BookPeople Book of the Year Awards. The authors donated royalties from the book to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, after the book had reached the top of the bestsellers chart ahead of the Voice referendum.

Other award-winning nonfiction books include Alecia Simmonds’s Courting: An Intimate History of Love and the Law (La Trobe University Press), which won the Australian history prize ($15,000) at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and was shortlisted for the PMLAs and the NSW Premier’s History Awards; as well as Reaching Through Time: Finding My Family’s Stories (Shauna Bostock, A&U), which won the NSW regional and community history prize ($15,000) at the NSW Premier’s History Awards, and was longlisted for the Nib Literary Award.

Children’s nonfiction

Welcome to Sex (Melissa Kang & Yumi Stynes, HGCP) won the YA book of the year at the Indie Book Awards and book of the year for older children (ages 13+) at the ABIAs, and was shortlisted in the YA category of the PMLAs and the children’s category at the BookPeople Book of the Year Awards. After retailer Big W stopped selling the book in physical stores, following ‘multiple incidents of abuse’ aimed at staff, the book climbed to number five on the bestseller chart. A spokesperson said Hardie Grant ‘would love to thank booksellers for their support of the book’, the fourth in the authors’ ‘Welcome to’ series.

YA

Will Kostakis’s We Could Be Something (A&U Children’s) won in the YA category ($80,000) of the PMLAs, was announced as a Notable Book for older readers by the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA), and was also shortlisted in the QLAs, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and VPLAs.

Rebecca Lim’s Two Sparrowhawks in a Lonely Sky (A&U) won the young people’s history prize ($15,000) at the NSW Premier’s History Awards, was shortlisted in the PMLAs and the Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award, and was longlisted in the children and young adult category of the ARA Historical Novel Prize. Upon acquisition, the publisher described Lim’s novel as ‘another unforgettable story of family, resilience and the complex Asian-Australian experience’.

Karen Comer’s Grace Notes (Lothian) won book of the year: older readers at the CBCA Book of the Year Awards, and was shortlisted in the YA category of the PMLAs.

A Hunger of Thorns (Lili Wilkinson, A&U Children’s) won the award for writing for young adults ($25,000) at the VPLAs, was announced as an honour book in the older readers category at the CBCA Book of the Year Awards, and was shortlisted in the YA category of the PMLAs.

The Spider and Her Demons (sydney khoo, Penguin) won the young adult book award ($15,000) at the QLAs, and was also shortlisted in the Readings Young Adult Prize and for best YA novel at the Aurealis Awards.

Younger readers

Tamarra: A Story of Termites on Gurindji Country (Violet Wadrill, Topsy Dodd Ngarnjal, Leah Leaman, Cecelia Edwards, Cassandra Algy, Felicity Meakins, Briony Barr & Gregory Crocetti, HG Explore) won in the children’s category ($80,000) of the PMLAs, was announced as a CBCA Notable Book and was shortlisted for the Karajia Award for Children’s Literature and the CBCA Eve Pownall Award.

Remy Lai’s Ghost Book (A&U) won the children’s literature prize ($25,000) at the VPLAs, and was shortlisted in the best children’s fiction category at the Aurealis Awards and the children’s category of the PMLAs.

Other awarded children’s books this year include The Impossible Secret of Lillian Velvet (Jaclyn Moriarty, A&U Children’s), which won children’s book of the year at the Indie Book Awards, and was shortlisted for the children’s book award at the QLAs, as well as If I Was a Horse (Sophie Blackall, Lothian), which won the children’s award at the 2024 BookPeople Book of the Year Awards.

Category: Think Australian awards