Australian fiction and poetry at Frankfurt

Australian publishers are excited to pitch a wide range of fiction titles this year, including major award winners, debuts and follow-ups, in genres ranging from complex literary works to page-turning thrillers. Below are some titles Australian publishers look forward to highlighting at the fair.

Literary and contemporary fiction

After taking out the Australian awards that really count (in sales as well as prestige)—the Miles Franklin and Stella Prize—as well as the Queensland Literary Award for fiction and the ALS Gold Medal, Alex Wright’s Praiseworthy (Giramondo) has surely gained a reputation outside of Australia. (It also took home this year’s James Tait Black fiction prize in the UK.)

Giramondo will be pitching this modern masterpiece alongside Chinese Postman (October 2024), a new novel about the experience of old age by ‘one of Australia’s most important novelists’, Brian Castro. In this book, Abraham Quin is a migrant, thrice-divorced, a one-time postie and professor, a writer now living alone in the Adelaide Hills. ‘He reflects on his life with what he calls “the mannered and meditative inaction of age”, offering up memories and anxieties, obsessions and opinions, his thoughts on solitude, writing, friendship and time.’

Giramondo is also excited to pitch Raaza Jamshed’s debut novel, What Kept You?, which focuses on a young Muslim woman, Jahan, who leaves Lahore for the outskirts of Sydney at the age of 18, to escape the fear of violence that haunts her life in Pakistan; Jahan’s story is addressed to her grandmother, with an episodic structure that ‘mirrors the fragmented nature of her memories’.

From Pantera, An Onslaught of Light (Natasha Rai, March 2025), longlisted for several unpublished manuscript awards, is ‘a luminous literary migrant fiction debut’. Archana and her family arrive in Australia from India searching for a better life, but the move is not easy on anyone. ‘Years later, Arch lives her ideal solitary, isolated life. But with her father’s illness, she is pulled back into the world and a potential new start’, says the publisher. ‘This is a stunning debut with literary cross-over appeal from a committed writer with a promising future,’ says Pantera editorial director Kate Cuthbert, adding that it has already garnered praise from Miles Franklin winner Shankari Chandran, who says: ‘Haunting and heartbreaking, Rai’s debut novel deftly weaves a tale of guilt and atonement … a powerful journey from alienation to connection, from loneliness to love, from darkness to light.’ (more…)

Originally published by Books and Publishing (Read More)