Limberlost, Wandering With Intent, win 2023 Age Book of Year

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Limberlost, Wandering With Intent, win 2023 Age Book of Year

4 May 2023

The Age Book of the Year Awards 2023 winners were announced this evening, at the opening of the 2023 Melbourne Writers Festival. The awards, presented annually, are made in two categories for Australian writing: fiction and non-fiction.

Limberlost, by Tasmanian author Robbie Arnott was named winner in the fiction category, while Wandering With Intent, by Wamboin, New South Wales based author and artist, Kim Mahood triumphed in the non-fiction category.

Arnott’s win today is his second in the awards. He also won in 2021, the year the prize returned after a nine year absence, with his 2020 novel The Rain Herron.

Jarad Bruinstroop wins unpublished poetry 2023 Val Vallis Award

3 May 2023

Some late news to hand, Jarad Bruinstroop has been named winner of the 2023 Val Vallis Award for unpublished Australian poetry, with a poem titled Fragments on the Myth of Cy Twombly.

Bruinstroop’s debut collection of poetry, Reliefs, is due to be published by the University of Queensland Press later this year.

The Jaguar by Sarah Holland-Batt wins 2023 Stella Prize

27 April 2023

The Jaguar by Sarah Holland-Batt, book cover

It’s been a good couple of years for poetry at the Stella Prize. And for the University of Queensland Press (UQP). This evening Queensland born Australian author Sarah Holland-Batt was named winner of the 2023 award, with her collection of poetry, The Jaguar, published by UQP, in May 2022. Holland-Batt follows Evelyn Araluen, winner of the 2022 Stella with her collection of poetry, Dropbear, also published by UQP.

The Jaguar is Holland-Batt’s third book, and was written in the wake of her father being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and his later death in 2020:

With electrifying boldness, Sarah Holland-Batt confronts what it means to be mortal in an astonishing and deeply humane portrait of a father’s Parkinson’s Disease, and a daughter forged by grief. Opening and closing with startling elegies set in the charged moments before and after a death, and fearlessly probing the body’s animal endurance, appetites and metamorphoses, The Jaguar is marked by Holland-Batt’s lyric intensity and linguistic mastery, along with a stark new clarity of voice.

Alice Pung, chair of this year’s judging panel, describes Holland-Batt’s prose as “unexpected and unforgettable“:

In The Jaguar, Sarah Holland-Batt writes about death as tenderly as we’ve ever read about birth. She focuses on the pedestrian details of hospitals and aged care facilities, enabling us to see these institutions as distinct universes teeming with life and love. Her imagery is unexpected and unforgettable, and often blended with humour. This is a book that cuts through to the core of what it means to descend into frailty, old age, and death. It unflinchingly observes the complex emotions of caring for loved ones, contending with our own mortality and above all – continuing to live.

The Stella Prize is not the only accolade The Jaguar has garnered. It was named The Australian’s, 2022 Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the 2023 Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize, which is part of the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.

Update: see Holland-Batt’s Stella Prize acceptance speech here.

The 2023 BookPeople Book of Year shortlist

21 April 2023

It’s been a busy several days for literary awards. Since last Friday, shortlists for The Age Book of the Year, the International Booker Prize, the Australian Book Industry Awards, and the Australian Book Design Awards, for book cover design, have been published.

And to cap off the week, the 2023 BookPeople Book of Year shortlist was announced earlier today. Six books have been selected in three categories: kids, adult non-fiction, and adult fiction. The following six titles are on the adult fiction shortlist:

Limberlost by Robbie Arnott
Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au
Horse by Geraldine Brooks
All That’s Left Unsaid by Tracey Lien
Willowman by Inga Simpson
Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson

The BookPeople Book of Year awards honour new Australian book releases, which have been selected by Australian Booksellers Association members as their favourite hand-sells of the last year. The winners in each category will be named on Sunday 19 June 2023.

Nice to see Willowman on the fiction list, I think everyone else has had at least one listing previously. Oh, and another accolade for Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow. Incredible, hey?

The rise and rise of Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au

19 April 2023

Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au, book cover

Cold Enough for Snow (Giramondo Publishing), by Melbourne based Australian author Jessica Au, is a heart-warming story of a young woman and her mother, who holiday in Japan together.

A young woman has arranged a holiday with her mother in Japan. They travel by train, visit galleries and churches chosen for their art and architecture, eat together in small cafes and restaurants and walk along the canals at night, on guard against the autumn rain and the prospect of snow. All the while, they talk, or seem to talk: about the weather, horoscopes, clothes and objects; about the mother’s family in Hong Kong, and the daughter’s own formative experiences. But uncertainties abound. How much is spoken between them, how much is thought but unspoken?

But Au’s debut novel has had run of success that authors — both new and established — could only dream of. Since being published in February 2022, Cold Enough for Snow has won a slew of awards. Gongs so far include the 2020 Novel Prize, of which it was the inaugural recipient, and the 2022 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction.

Au’s book also cleaned up at the 2023 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, collecting both the Fiction award, and the Victorian Prize for Literature, valued together at A$125,000. The novel has also been shortlisted in the fiction categories of the 2022 Queensland Literary Awards, and the 2023 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Cold Enough for Snow was also shortlisted for the fiction award in the 2022 Age Book of the Year.

Literary award longlist listings meanwhile include the 2022 Indie Book Awards, 2023 Dublin Literary Award, and the 2023 BookPeople Nielsen award. These are incredible achievements, and are all the more remarkable given the page count barely exceeds one hundred. Compelling stories do not need to be of epic proportions.

But Cold Enough for Snow’s winning streak may not be over just yet. Today, the title was included in the shortlist of the Small Publishers’ Adult Book of the Year category in the 2023 Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIAs). The winners of the ABIAs will be announced in late May. We can only be left wondering: what’s next for Au’s debut work of fiction?

2023 Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIAs) shortlists

19 April 2023

Another day, another literary award shortlist announcement, this time it’s the 2023 Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIAs) shortlists. All up, seventy-one books have been shortlisted across fourteen categories, including Audiobook of the Year, Biography Book of the Year, several Children’s and The Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year, with five titles selected in two fiction categories:

Literary Fiction Book of the Year

All That’s Left Unsaid by Tracey Lien
The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane
Horse by Geraldine Brooks
Seeing Other People by Diana Reid
Limberlost by Robbie Arnott

General Fiction Book of the Year

Dirt Town by Hayley Scrivenor
The Tilt by Chris Hammer
Exiles by Jane Harper
Day’s End by Garry Disher
Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson

The ABIAs are pretty close to Australia’s equivalent of the Oscars (or Logies), but for books rather than movies. Accordingly, winners will be named at a ceremony on the evening of Thursday 25 May 2023, in Sydney.

The Age Book of the Year awards 2023 shortlists

14 April 2023

The Age Book of the Year awards 2023 shortlists were announced this afternoon. The awards are split into two sections, one for fiction, and the other for non-fiction.

The shortlisted titles for the fiction award are:

Limberlost by Robbie Arnott
Every Version of You by Grace Chan
A Country of Eternal Light by Paul Dalgarno
Funny Ethnics by Shirley Le
The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane
Faithless by Alice Nelson

The shortlisted titles for the non-fiction award are:

The All of It by Cadance Bell
Childhood by Shannon Burns
Suburban Noir by Peter Doyle
Raised by Wolves by Jess Ho
Wandering with Intent by Kim Mahood
Those Dashing McDonagh Sisters by Mandy Sayer

The winners of each category — who will be announced on Thursday 4 May 2023, at the opening of the Melbourne Writers Festival — will receive a prize of ten thousand dollars.

Is the Australian publishing industry is based on a hunch?

13 April 2023

Katherine Day writing for The Conversation:

“The entire industry is based on hunches,” says literary agent Martin Shaw, who was head book buyer at Readings for 20 years before he became an agent. “More than half the books you publish either lose money or don’t make money. And that’s true — week in, week out, year in year out — whether you’re a small, medium or big publisher,” claims Henry Rosenbloom, founder of Scribe Publications, which has been acquiring books since 1976. This can be a heartbreaking reality for the in-house staff. “I’ve personally spent months editing books, and you publish the book and no one’s interested,” Henry adds.

I wonder how the publishing industry could not be based on hunches. Unless you’re publishing a big-name, well established (and even then nothing’s ever guaranteed) author, how does anyone know how a new book might be received?

RELATED CONTENT

Australian literature, publishing

Recently published Australian fiction, April 2023

11 April 2023

It’s been a while since I wrote about recent fiction releases by Australian authors, so here’s a quick round up of a few titles that have arrived on bookshop shelves in the last little while.

The Last Love Note, by Emma Grey, book cover

The Last Love Note, by Emma Grey, an author living near Canberra, is the story of a woman, Kate Whittaker, looking for love following her husband’s death. Based in part on Grey’s own experiences after her husband died, her protagonist struggles to get on with life.

Kate has a son to raise, while holding down a demanding job, and contending with a domineering mother, along with her best friend who is trying to find her a match. Then Kate learns that her boss knows a secret about her past…

The Bell of the World by Gregory Day, book cover

The Bell of the World is the sixth novel from Victorian author, poet, and musician Gregory Day, and is set during early to mid-twentieth century in a rural coastal town called Ngangahook. Sarah Hutchinson, a troubled young woman, returns to Australia after a stint at an English boarding school, to live with her uncle Ferny.

Sarah and Ferny bond over music, poetry, and reading. But their way of life is threatened when local town’s people propose building a bell tower, the chimes of which would surely disrupt the harmonies created by nature.

Resistance, by Jacinta Halloran, book cover

Resistance is the latest novel by Melbourne based author Jacinta Halloran, a former doctor and board member of Australian literary award, the Stella Prize. Nina is a family therapist with a reputation for listening to everything her clients tell her.

But her latest case may be her most challenging. A couple who stole a car and drove into the outback have been ordered to be counselled by her. But something’s not quite right about this couple who are reluctant to see her, and before long Nina begins to fear for the safety of their two children.

We Only Want What's Best, by Carolyn Swindell, book cover

We Only Want What’s Best, is the debut novel of Sydney based writer and stand-up comedian Carolyn Swindell, and is set on a flight between Australia and Los Angeles. Bridget is taking her daughter Becky to Disneyland to perform in a dance recital. Accompanying them is Simone and her daughter, Zahra.

Bridget, who isn’t completely comfortable making the long flight, becomes further unsettled when she finds potentially exploitative photos of Zahra, and other dance troupe girls, on Simone’s phone. The two women struggle to contain the rising tension between them, lest it overwhelms them before the flight lands.

Things She Would Have Said Herself, by Catherine Therese, book cover

Things She Would Have Said Herself, is new fiction from Australian author Catherine Therese, and tells the story of Leslie Bird, the quick tempered matriarch of her family. And while Leslie loves being a wife and mother, there’s a problem: she can’t stand her husband or children.

Despite the difficulty of her role, Leslie does her best to conceal the pain she feels, and the losses she has suffered. But the pressure of organising and hosting Christmas lunch for her extended family, may cause everything to unravel in spectacular fashion.

The 2023 David Harold Tribe Poetry Award

4 April 2023

Entries are open until Monday 29 May 2023 for the 2023 David Harold Tribe Poetry Award. With a prize of twenty-thousand dollars, it is Australia’s richest award for original, unpublished, poetry of up to one-hundred lines in length. David Tribe was an Australian humanist and writer who died in 2017.

The prize was created in 2005 as part of the David Harold Tribe Awards, to recognise excellence in Australian fiction, poetry, philosophy, sculpture, and symphony, with a prize for each segment being awarded every five years. In 2018, the last time the poetry award was presented, Grace Heyer and Ella O’Keefe were named joint winners.

More information about the prize, and how to enter, can be found here.

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