The Shortlist for the Australian 2025 Indie Book Awards

Showing all posts tagged: literary awards

The Shortlist for the Australian 2025 Indie Book Awards

20 January 2025

The Australian Indie Book Awards span six categories: fiction, non-fiction, debut fiction, illustrated non-fiction, children’s, and young adult, and last week the shortlist for the 2025 awards was published. My main interest is fiction, where Dusk by Robbie Arnott, and The Ledge by Christian White, are among contenders in that category.

I’m yet to read Dusk, but finished The Ledge in four days flat. Record time, for me, in recent years. White’s thriller/crime stories, with twists that leave you breathless, are verifiable page turners. That is was holidays contributed to the fast read. On that basis, The Ledge is my favourite in fiction. The winners will be announced on Monday 24 March 2025.

That might give me time to read Dusk, plus Cherrywood by Jock Serong, and Juice by Tim Winton, the other titles shortlisted in the fiction category, beforehand.

The ten best novels of the twenty-first century to date

31 December 2024

Literary writers at The Sydney Morning Herald canvassed critics, editors, and writers, including Jane Sullivan, David Free, Gyan Yankovich, and Beejay Silcox, to determine the best ten books of this century, or the last twenty-five years.

Producing such a small list from a relatively long time frame, will doubtless generate discussion.

Anyway, Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright (winner of both the Stellar, and Miles Franklin, literary awards in 2024), along with Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney, My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, are among notable — to me, that is — inclusions.

RELATED CONTENT

books, literary awards, literature

Melissa Lucashenko wins 2024 Mark and Evette Moran Nib award

28 November 2024

Goorie/South East Australian author Melissa Lucashenko has won the 2024 Mark and Evette Moran Nib literary award, with her 2023 novel Edenglassie. A work of historical fiction, Edenglassie, which links the past with the present, also won this year’s ARA Historical Novel Prize, Indie Book Awards, and the fiction category of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.

When Mulanyin meets the beautiful Nita in Edenglassie, their saltwater people still outnumber the British. As colonial unrest peaks, Mulanyin dreams of taking his bride home to Yugambeh Country, but his plans for independence collide with white justice. Two centuries later, fiery activist Winona meets Dr Johnny. Together they care for obstinate centenarian Granny Eddie, and sparks fly, but not always in the right direction. What nobody knows is how far the legacies of the past will reach into their modern lives.

Speaking after being presented the Nib, at a ceremony at Sydney’s Bondi Pavilion last night, Lucashenko said she intended to give away much of the forty-thousand dollar prize money.

Gail Jones wins Creative Australia Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature

27 November 2024

Sydney based Western Australian author Gail Jones was last week presented with the Creative Australia Lifetime Achievement in Literature award.

Jones’ books have won the ARA Historical Novel Prize, Barbara Ramsden Award, and Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. They have also been included on the long and short lists of numerous literary awards, including the Miles Franklin, Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, and the International Dublin Literary Award.

Charlotte Wood did not win the Booker Prize, still gets Booker bump

22 November 2024

Sales of Australian author Charlotte Wood’s latest novel Stone Yard Devotional have enjoyed a boost, as a result of being both long and short listed for this year’s Booker Prize. The phenomena is sometimes called the Booker bump:

Her publisher says that since winning the Stella Prize in 2016 for The Natural Way of Things, her blistering feminist critique of the patriarchy, “Charlotte’s books have been bestsellers — and Stone Yard Devotional is no exception. Since being longlisted for the Booker Prize, sales have increased by over 30 per cent. We have to date sold over 40,000 copies of this beautiful book.”

Anyone who makes it to even the longlist of any literary award, but goes no further, is a winner if you ask me.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey wins 2024 Booker Prize

14 November 2024

British author Samantha Harvey has been named winner of the 2024 Booker Prize, with her novel, Orbital, published by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Penguin Books. I don’t know how many novels are set on the International Space Station, I’m sure there’s a few, but Orbital is one of them:

A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day. Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.

I’d been gunning for Stone Yard Devotional, which I read earlier this year, by Australian author Charlotte Wood, who was on the Booker shortlist with Harvey. But I’ll be adding Orbital to my TBR list.

Harry Hartog Book Of The Year 2024 shortlist

5 November 2024

Australian indie bookseller Harry Hartog has entered the literary prize fray with their inaugural Book Of The Year award. A shortlist featuring three titles, in three categories respectively, fiction, non-fiction, and children’s and young adults, was published a few days ago.

No surprise to see Intermezzo by Sally Rooney nominated in fiction. Nor All I Ever Wanted Was to Be Hot, by Australian writer and comedian Lucinda Froomes Price, in non-fiction. No word yet on when the winners will be announced (how so indie) but I’m gunning for Intermezzo in the fiction category.

South Korean author Han Kang wins 2024 literature Nobel Prize

16 October 2024

The Seoul based author is the first South Korean to be named a Nobel Prize literature laurate. Han Kang has written over a dozen novels since 1995, so if you’re a book reader, chances are you’ve seen at least one. The Vegetarian, published in 2016, won the International Booker Prize in the same year.

In her oeuvre, Han Kang confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose.

RELATED CONTENT

Han Kang, literary awards, literature

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood on 2024 Booker Prize shortlist

18 September 2024

Sydney based Australian author Charlotte Wood has gone through to the shortlist of the 2024 Booker Prize, with her novel Stone Yard Devotional, which was announced on Monday 16 September 2024. If Wood were to win the Booker Prize this year, she would become the first Australian author to do so since Richard Flanagan in 2014, with his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

The 2024 winner will be named on Tuesday 12 November 2024.

2024 Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Awards winners

17 September 2024

Anam, by Melbourne based Australian author André Dao, has been named winner in the Fiction category of the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. Anam was also shortlisted for the Miles Franklin this year, and the Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award in 2023.

Winners in other categories were Close to the Subject: Selected Works by Daniel Browning, in Non-Fiction, and We Could Be Something by Will Kostakis, in Young Adult.

Tamarra: A Story of Termites on Gurindji Country, co-authored by Violet Wadrill, Topsy Dodd Ngarnjal, Leah Leaman, Cecelia Edwards, Cassandra Algy, Felicity Meakins, Briony Barr, and Gregory Crocetti, took out Children’s Literature. The Cyprian by Amy Crutchfield, and Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country by Ryan Cropp, won in Poetry and Australian History respectively.

The 2024 winners were announced in the Australian capital, Canberra, last week, on Thursday 12 September, with recipients each being awarded eighty-thousand dollars (Australian).

« older posts