The shortlist for the 2021 Stella Prize, worth $50,000, has been announced. The six shortlisted books are: Fathoms: The world in the whale (Rebecca Giggs, Scribe) Revenge: Murder in Three Parts (S L Lim, Transit Lounge) The Animals in That Country (Laura Jean McKay, Scribe) Witness (Louise Milligan, Hachette) Stone Sky Gold Mountain (Mirandi Riwoe, UQP) The Bass Rock (Evie…

Experiences in nature fill many of the picture books on offer from Australian publishers at Bologna this year. Thank you rain! (Sally Morgan & Johnny Warrkatja Malibirr, Magabala Books) is full of the plants and animals that welcome rain: raindrops in the treetops; birds singing in the rain; raindrops wetting the dry earth and filling…

US production company New Regency has acquired the film and television rights to Meg Mason’s 2020 novel Sorrow and Bliss in a deal brokered by Casarotto Ramsay and HarperCollins Australia. According to HarperCollins, New Regency, whose production credits include the Oscar-winning films The Revenant, 12 Years a Slave and Birdman, acquired screen rights in a ‘competitive auction’. The…

Melbourne-based author and illustrator Jess Racklyeft has been awarded a Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) International Bologna Scholarship to attend this year’s Bologna book fair. Here she shares her journey to illustration and writing, upcoming projects, the illustrators she admires and why she cried at Bologna the last time she visited. How…

MidnightSun Publishing has acquired debut novel Tank Water by Michael Burge, a story of homophobic hate crimes and the dangers of growing up feeling different in rural Australia. Burge met MidnightSun publisher Anna Solding at a pitch session hosted by New England Writers Centre in 2018. ‘From the first time I met Michael, when he…

In nonfiction the ‘long-awaited’ picture book Your Brain is a Lump of Goo from Idan Ben-Barak (A&U), the award-winning author of Do Not Lick This Book, and Christopher Nielsen. It explores ‘the biggest and most mysterious organ in the human body’ with expertise and humour, says A&U, while All About the Heart (Berbay) will give curious…

The first issue for 2021 of Books+Publishing’s sister publication Think Australian is shining a spotlight on debut and early-career authors. In this preview, Think Australian asked Australian publishers and literary agents to nominate their most promising new authors, whose debut or second books would appeal to an international readership. To sign up for Think Australian,…

Unlimited Futures is a YA anthology of sci-fi and speculative fiction edited by Rafeif Ismail and Ellen van Neerven. What makes it so different from other collections like it is the anthology’s centring of Blak and Black lives in an Australian context. Unlimited Futures contains a mix of genres including poetry, which is rare in…