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After winning the unpublished manuscript award at the 2021 VPLAs, André Dao’s Anam (Hamish Hamilton) won the fiction prize at the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards (PMLAs) and the Glenda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), BookPeople awards and 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.’ (more…)

Originally published by Books and Publishing (Read More)