Children’s Booker Prize hopes to encourage younger people to read more books

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Children’s Booker Prize hopes to encourage younger people to read more books

17 November 2025

The Booker Prize, which recognises English language novels published in the United Kingdom and Ireland, has unveiled a new award: the Children’s Booker Prize, which will be awarded for the first time in 2027.

The Children’s Booker Prize, which will launch in 2026 and be awarded annually from 2027, will celebrate the best contemporary fiction for children aged eight to 12 years old, written in or translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland. The aim of the prize is to engage and grow a new generation of readers by recognising and championing the best children’s fiction from writers around the world.

This is good news all around. Not only will the Children’s Booker encourage more younger people to read, it will also support authors with an enticement to write more stories for children. The more literary awards there are, the better it is for literature, writing, and reading, as a whole.

Tasma Walton, Robbie Arnott, jointly win ARA Historical Novel Prize

17 October 2025

Authors Tasma Walton (Instagram link), based in Western Australia, and Robbie Arnott (Instagram link), based in Tasmania, have been named joint winners of the 2025 ARA Historical Novel Prize, with their novels I am Nannertgarrook, and Dusk, respectively.

I’m yet to pick up I am Nannertgarrook, but read Dusk earlier this year. It seems to me members of literary award judging panels must have their work cut out for them when novels of the calibre of Dusk are among shortlisted titles.

Suzanne Leal won in the Children and Young Adults category with her novel The Year We Escaped. Awarded annually, the ARA Historical Novel Prize celebrates the work of Australian and New Zealand historical novel writers, with prizes valued at a total of one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollars.

Michelle de Kretser, Rick Morton, among 2025 Prime Minister’s Literary Award winners

7 October 2025

de Kretser, who’s novel Theory & Practice (which I’m currently reading), and Morton’s book, Mean Streak, about the previous Australian government’s controversial Robobot debt recovery scheme, are respective winners of the fiction and non-fiction categories.

Others recipients, who were announced last Monday, 29 September 2025, include The Other Side of Daylight: New and Selected Poems, by David Brooks in poetry, and The Invocations, by Krystal Sutherland in young adult. See the full list of winners here.

Entries for final Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship open October 2025

15 September 2025

The fellowship was created in 2011 to honour the memory of late Australian writer and biographer Hazel Rowley, who died in the same year. Past recipients of the fellowship, which supports the work of Australian biography writers, include Mary Hoban, the inaugural winner, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Matthew Lamb, and Mandy Sayer, for her book Those Dashing McDonagh Sisters.

When Rowley’s sister Della, together with Lynn Buchanan and Irene Tomaszewski, established the fellowship, they envisaged it would run for ten years, but after fifteen have decided to call time on the award. The organisers however are reportedly open to other parties taking on the fellowship, and would be prepared to assist anyone willing to do so.

It is to be hoped this will happen. Literary awards and fellowships are vital in supporting the work of Australian writers, many of whose annual earnings are well below the average salary.

The 2025 Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Awards shortlists

19 August 2025

Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser, winner of this year’s Stellar Prize, Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane, and Juice by Tim Winton — which I’m presently reading — are among titles shortlisted in the fiction category of the 2025 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.

Award categories also include non-fiction, Australian history, poetry, children’s literature, and young adult. Six-hundred-and-forty-five entries were received this year, indicating Australian writers are busy. The winners will be named on Monday 29 September 2025, at a ceremony in Canberra.

Ghost Cities, by Siang Lu, wins 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award

25 July 2025

Ghost Cities, by Australian author Siang Lu, who is based between Brisbane, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, was yesterday named winner of the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award.

The Miles Franklin is one of Australia’s most prestigious literary awards for novel writing, with the winner receiving sixty-thousand Australian dollars.

I’m yet to read Ghost Cities, but it certainly has an award-winning synopsis:

Ghost Cities — inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China — follows multiple narratives, including one in which a young man named Xiang is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate after it is discovered he doesn’t speak a word of Chinese and has been relying entirely on Google Translate for his work.

How is his relocation to one such ghost city connected to a parallel odyssey in which an ancient Emperor creates a thousand doubles of Himself? Or where a horny mountain gains sentience? Where a chess-playing automaton hides a deadly secret? Or a tale in which every book in the known Empire is destroyed — then re-created, page by page and book by book, all in the name of love and art?

The Miles Franklin judging panel had this to say:

Siang Lu’s Ghost Cities is at once a grand farce and a haunting meditation on diaspora. Sitting within a tradition in Australian writing that explores failed expatriation and cultural fraud, Lu’s novel is also something strikingly new. In Ghost Cities, the Sino-Australian imaginary appears as a labyrinthine film-set, where it is never quite clear who is performing and who is directing. Shimmering with satire and wisdom, and with an absurdist bravura, Ghost Cities is a genuine landmark in Australian literature.

Lu also wrote The Whitewash in 2022, which won the Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer, and was shortlisted in both the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and the Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIAs).

But writing books isn’t Lu’s only claim to fame, he’s also created SillyBookstagram (Instagram page). I know all about Bookstagram (Instagram’s book readers’ community), but SillyBookstagram is a new one on me. It looks like a fun offshoot of Bookstagram though.

The 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award Shortlist

26 June 2025

Six titles have been included on the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award Shortlist, which was announced yesterday:

Chinese Postman, by Brian Castro
Theory & Practice, by Michelle de Kretser
Dirt Poor Islanders, by Winnie Dunn
Compassion, by Julie Janson
Ghost Cities, by Siang Lu
Highway 13, by Fiona McFarlane

2025 could be a good year for Michelle de Kretser if Theory & Practice wins the Miles Franklin, the title won this year’s Stella Prize. I don’t know about anyone else, but I thought the exclusion of Juice, by Tim Winton was puzzling.

The inclusion of Fiona McFarlane’s Highway 13 has also surprised some people. It’s a collection of short stories, and is the first time the format has reached a Miles Franklin shortlist.

The Miles Franklin honours excellence in Australian novel writing annually, and the winner will be announced on Thursday 24 July 2025. See you then.

Touch Grass by Mary Colussi wins Penguin Literary Prize 2025

17 June 2025

Sydney based Australian writer Mary Colussi has been named winner of the 2025 Penguin Literary Prize, with her manuscript Touch Grass. Going by this brief outline of the story, Touch Grass sounds like a work of speculative fiction:

Touch Grass tells the story of a depressed deletion specialist as she starts to leave her body at unexpected moments and finds herself at the surreal centre of a global panic.

Awarded annually, the Penguin Literary Prize was established in 2017 “to discover, nurture and develop literary fiction writers, providing a platform for new and diverse voices to emerge.”

Melbourne journalist and writer Chloe Adams (Instagram page) won the 2024 award, with the manuscript for her novel The Occupation, which will be published next month.

We’ll probably have to wait on a little while before learning more about the synopsis of Touch Grass.

Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser wins 2025 Stella Prize

24 May 2025

Sydney based author Michelle de Kretser has been named winner of the 2025 Stellar Prize, for her 2024 novel, Theory & Practice, a novel Stella judges say does not read like a novel:

In her refusal to write a novel that reads like a novel, de Kretser instead gifts her reader a sharp examination of the complex pleasures and costs of living.

The novel that does not read like a novel, is indeed a curious work:

It’s 1986, and ‘beautiful, radical ideas’ are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda she meets artists, activists, students — and Kit. He claims to be in a ‘deconstructed’ relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, her work on the Woolfmother falls into disarray. Theory & Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and unmakes fiction as we read, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain.

Established in 2013, the Stellar Prize, which is awarded annually, honours the work of Australian women and non-binary writers.

Nam Le wins 2025 NSW Literary Awards Book of the Year prize

21 May 2025

Vietnamese Australian lawyer turned writer Nam Le has won the Book of the Year Award prize, with 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, a collection of poetry, in the 2025 NSW Literary Awards.

Earlier, Le was named recipient of the Multicultural NSW Award. Winners of the NSW Literary Awards, previously known as the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, which span eleven categories, including the people’s choice prize, were announced at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, on Monday 19 May 2025. The Book of the Year recipient is selected from the winners of the Award’s other categories.

Other recipients include Fiona McFarlane, who won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction with Highway 13, and Emma Lord, who took out the Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature prize for her debut novel Anomaly. The full list of 2025 winners can be seen here.

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