2023 Davitt Award for crime and mystery writing winners

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2023 Davitt Award for crime and mystery writing winners

5 September 2023

The winners of the annual Davitt Awards for crime and mystery writing were announced in Melbourne on Saturday 2 September 2023.

All That’s Left Unsaid, the debut novel of Sydney based author Tracey Lien, won the Best Adult Novel award. Seven Days by Fleur Ferris won the Best Young Adult Novel prize, while The Sugarcane Kids and the Red-bottomed Boat by Charlie Archbold, won the Best Children’s Novel Award.

In other categories, Dirt Town by Hayley Scrivenor won the Debut award, and Out of the Ashes by Megan Norris won the Best Non-Fiction Book. Meanwhile The Unbelieved by Vikki Petraitis, was chosen as the People’s Choice winner for 2023.

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Australian literature, literary awards

2023 Ned Kelly Australian crime writing award winners

1 September 2023

Book cover of Exiles, written by Jane Harper.

Exiles by Melbourne based Australian author Jane Harper, published by Pan Macmillan Australia, has been named winner in the best crime fiction category of the 2023 Ned Kelly Awards for Australian crime writing. Written in 2022, Exiles tells the story of an investigation into the disappearance of a woman from a small community in South Australia:

At a busy festival site on a warm spring night, a baby lies alone in her pram, her mother having vanished into the crowds.

A year on, Kim Gillespie’s absence casts a long shadow as her friends and loved ones gather deep in the heart of South Australian wine country to welcome a new addition to the family.

Aaron Falk, federal investigator, is joining the celebrations. But as he soaks up life in the lush valley, he begins to suspect this tight-knit group may be more fractured than it seems. As hidden truths slowly emerge, Falk faces the darkest of questions.

In other award categories Wake, by Shelley Burr won in the Best Debut crime fiction, Betrayed, by Sandi Logan won in Best True Crime, while The Lemon Man, by Dublin based Irish writer Keith Bruton, won the Best International Crime prize.

Named for one of Australia’s best known outlaws, the 2023 Ned Kelly Awards attracted over one hundred and sixty entries, an increase over last year.

Karina Kilmore, chair of the Australian Crime Writers Association which presents the awards, stressed the importance of the role of literary prizes in supporting authors, particularly in light of the threat artificial intelligence technologies (AI) pose. Kilmore said as things stand, AI will do away with the human elements of creativity in all forms of story-telling.

Entries for 2024 Stella Prize for Australian literature now open

26 August 2023

It seems like only last week the winner of the 2023 Stella Prize — Sarah Holland-Batt with her poetry collection The Jaquar — was announced, when in fact that happened four months ago.

The year is marching on.

Entries are now open for the 2024 prize, but only for about the next month and a half. There are a few cut-off dates for submissions, but Friday 13 October 2023 is the final day an entry can be made.

The 2023 Readings Young Adult Prize shortlist

24 August 2023

The 2023 Readings Young Adult Prize shortlist was announced earlier today. Six titles are in contention for this year’s award:

Dancing Barefoot, by Alice Boyle
If You Could See the Sun, by Ann Liang
Completely Normal (and Other Lies), by Biffy James
Spice Road, by Maiya Ibrahim
The Upwelling, by Lystra Rose
Where You Left Us, by Rhiannon Wilde

Presented annually since 2014 by Readings, an independent Melbourne based bookseller, the Readings Young Adult Prize is awarded to the best contribution to Australian youth literature, by emerging Australian writers. The winner will named at a ceremony in late October this year.

2024 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards open for entries

21 August 2023

Entries for the 2024 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards (VPLA) are open until Sunday 10 September 2023. The VPLA is one of Australia’s most valuable literary awards, and the shortlists — which will likely be announced sometime in December — are always filled packed with quality titles.

Venomous Lumpsucker wins 2023 Arthur C. Clarke book award

21 August 2023

Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman, book cover

Book cover of Venomous Lumpsucker, written by Ned Beauman.

British novelist and screenwriter Ned Beauman has been named winner of the 2023 Arthur C. Clarke Award science fiction book of the year, with his fifth novel, Venomous Lumpsucker, which was published by Penguin Random House.

Going by the publisher’s outline, Venomous Lumpsucker has the lot. A cli-fi, sci-fi dystopian chiller-thriller set in the near future, in a world possibly irreparably damaged by climate change:

The near future. Tens of thousands of species are going extinct every year. And a whole industry has sprung up around their extinctions, to help us preserve the remnants, or perhaps just assuage our guilt. For instance, the biobanks: secure archives of DNA samples, from which lost organisms might someday be resurrected . . . But then, one day, it’s all gone. A mysterious cyber-attack hits every biobank simultaneously, wiping out the last traces of the perished species. Now we’re never getting them back.

Karin Resaint and Mark Halyard are concerned with one species in particular: the venomous lumpsucker, a small, ugly bottom-feeder that happens to be the most intelligent fish on the planet. Resaint is an animal cognition scientist consumed with existential grief over what humans have done to nature. Halyard is an exec from the extinction industry, complicit in the mining operation that destroyed the lumpsucker’s last-known habitat.

Across the dystopian landscapes of the 2030s — a nature reserve full of toxic waste; a floating city on the ocean; the hinterlands of a totalitarian state — Resaint and Halyard hunt for a surviving lumpsucker. And the further they go, the deeper they’re drawn into the mystery of the attack on the biobanks. Who was really behind it? And why would anyone do such a thing?

The prize, awarded since 1987, is presented annually to the best science fiction novel first published in the United Kingdom in the previous calendar year, and is named after British author and futurist, Arthur C. Clarke, who died in 2008.

Rowan Heath wins 2023 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

18 August 2023

Melbourne based Australian author Rowan Heath was named winner of the 2023 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize at an online ceremony held last night, with a fiction work titled The Mannequin. The prize was created in 2010 to honour the memory of late British born Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley, and is presented annually by the Australian Book Review (ABR).

The Penguin Books 2023 Write It Fellowship Shortlist

28 July 2023

The 2023 Write It Fellowship shortlist was announced earlier this month, and is made up of eleven Australian writers with works of fiction spanning historical, autobiographical, crime, psychological horror, fantasy, memoir, and poetry genres.

The Write It Fellowship was established by book publisher Penguin Random House Australia in 2018. The Fellowship is intended to support unpublished writers from under-represented sections of the community, including those with disabilities, and LGBTQIA+ and First Nations backgrounds.

The winner of the Fellowship will be named on Monday 9 October 2023.

Shankari Chandran wins 2023 Miles Franklin with Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens

25 July 2023

Sydney based author and Australian Tamil lawyer, Shankari Chandran, has been named winner of the 2023 Miles Franklin literary award, with her novel, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, published by Ultimo Press in 2022.

Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens is Chandran’s third work of fiction, and is set in a nursing home in a suburb of Sydney called Westgrove:

Cinnamon Gardens Nursing Home is nestled in the quiet suburb of Westgrove, Sydney – populated with residents with colourful histories, each with their own secrets, triumphs and failings. This is their safe place, an oasis of familiar delights — a beautiful garden, a busy kitchen and a bountiful recreation schedule.

But this ordinary neighbourhood is not without its prejudices. The serenity of Cinnamon Gardens is threatened by malignant forces more interested in what makes this refuge different rather than embracing the calm companionship that makes this place home to so many. As those who challenge the residents’ existence make their stand against the nursing home with devastating consequences, our characters are forced to reckon with a country divided.

To call the field in the 2023 Miles Franklin tight, would be an understatement, and Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens was up against a number of acclaimed Australian novels, including Limberlost by Robbie Arnott, and Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au.

Announcing the winner of the 2023 Lyttle Lytton Contest

24 July 2023

Last month the winners of the Lyttle Lytton Contest were announced. The Lyttle Lytton is a literary prize, but not of the usual variety. Instead of celebrating the good or excellent, Lyttle Lytton honours the worst of the worst. In this case bad, or terrible, would-be opening sentences from novels that will likewise turn out to be awful. The lines are not taken from actual published works though, instead they are devised by contest participants vying to write the best bad sentence they can think of.

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