Shortlisted authors, illustrators, judges and invited guests gathered at Parliament House in Canberra today where this year’s winners were announced by Minister for the Arts, Senator the Hon Mitch Fifield.
Acknowledging the extraordinary contributions literature makes to Australia’s cultural and intellectual landscape, the Minister thanked the 15 judges who had the enormous task of considering more than 450 entries and congratulated the winners and shortlistees.
The winners are:
Natalie has been absolutely devouring books this year, and here is her top five!!
From the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist: a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself.
I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.
In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as "wildly undisciplined," Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care.
In Hunger, she explores her past-including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life-and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself.
With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and power that have made her one of the most admired writers of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to learn to take care of yourself: how to feed your hungers for delicious and satisfying food, a smaller and safer body, and a body that can love and be loved-in a time when the bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.
An extraordinarily intimate memoir of the the brushes with death that have made Maggie O'Farrell the woman and the writer she is today, for readers of The Last Act of Love and When Breath Becomes Air.
I Am, I Am, I Am is Sunday Times bestseller and Costa Novel-Award winner Maggie O'Farrell's electric and shocking memoir of the near death experiences that have punctuated her life; it will appeal to readers of Cheryl Strayed's Wild or Joan Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking.
A childhood illness she was not expected to survive. A teenage yearning to escape that nearly ended in disaster. A terrifying encounter on a remote path. A mismanaged labour in an understaffed hospital.
This is a memoir with a difference: seventeen encounters with Maggie at different ages, in different locations, reveal to us a whole life in a series of tense, visceral snapshots. It is a book to make you question yourself: what would you do if your life was in danger? How would you react? And what would you stand to lose?
I Am, I Am, I Am is a book you will finish newly conscious of your own vulnerability, and determined to make every heartbeat count.
A compulsive, brilliant novel about race, identity, family and secrets for fans of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Zadie Smith.
The brilliant new novel by the author of the New York Times bestseller, Everything I Never Told You.
Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down.
In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is meticulously planned from the layout of the winding roads, to the colours of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principal is playing by the rules.
Enter Mia Warren an enigmatic artist and single mother who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than just tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the alluring mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past, and a disregard for the rules that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.
When the Richardsons' friends attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town and puts Mia and Mrs. Richardson on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Mrs. Richardson becomes determined to uncover the secrets in Mia's past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs to her own family and Mia's.
Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of long-held secrets and the ferocious pull of motherhood-and the danger of believing that planning and following the rules can avert disaster, or heartbreak.
'I read Little Fires Everywhere in a single, breathless sitting' Jodi Picoult
A moving celebration of what Bill Hayes calls "the evanescent, the eavesdropped, the unexpected" of life in New York City, and an intimate glimpse of his relationship with the late Oliver Sacks.
Bill Hayes came to New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at forty-eight years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound consolations of the city's incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves, kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-night strolls with his camera.
And he unexpectedly fell in love again, with his friend and neighbor, the writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks, whose exuberance "I don't so much fear death as I do wasting life," he tells Hayes early on is captured in funny and touching vignettes throughout. What emerges is a portrait of Sacks at his most personal and endearing, from falling in love for the first time at age seventy-five to facing illness and death (Sacks died of cancer in August 2015). Insomniac City is both a meditation on grief and a celebration of life. Filled with Hayes's distinctive street photos of everyday New Yorkers, the book is a love song to the city and to all who have felt the particular magic and solace it offers.
"A beautifully written once-in-a-lifetime book, about love, about life, soul, and the wonderful loving genius Oliver Sacks, and New York, and laughter and all of creation." - Anne Lamott
The unforgettable and achingly tender new novel from Sarah Winman, author of the international bestseller When God was a Rabbit and the Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller A Year of Marvellous Ways.
It begins with a painting won in a raffle: fifteen sunflowers, hung on the wall by a woman who believes that men and boys are capable of beautiful things.
And then there are two boys, Ellis and Michael, who are inseparable. And the boys become men, and then Annie walks into their lives, and it changes nothing and everything.
Tin Man sees Sarah Winman follow the acclaimed success of When God was a Rabbit and A Year of Marvellous Ways with a love letter to human kindness and friendship, loss and living.
The Costa Book Awards honour some of the most outstanding books of the year written by authors based in the UK and Ireland. There are five categories – First Novel, Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children’s Book – with one of the five winners chosen as Book of the Year.
Dominic Paul, managing director of Costa, says: ‘These shortlists are a showcase of everything the Costa book awards celebrate: terrific books with broad appeal that will be enjoyed by readers of all tastes.’
Here are the shortlistees in each category.
The category winners will be announced at an awards ceremony on 2 January, 2018, and the overall winner will be revealed on 30 January, 2018. Read more about the Costa book awards here.
A fascinating graphic novel about microbes has been named the winner of year’s Most Underrated Book Award (MUBA). Now in its sixth year, this is a unique prize run by the Small Press Network (SPN) that celebrates hidden gems – engaging and creative books across all genres that deserve to reach a wider audience.
The Invisible War by Ailsa Wild, Briony Barr, Gregory Crocetti, Ben Huchings and Jeremy Barr is a one-of-a-kind publication, funded through a Pozible campaign, created by a team of writers, illustrators and scientists, and combining the format and narrative of a graphic novel with science education writing.
The story opens in France, 1916. While treating a patient with dysentery, Sister Annie Barnaby encounters a strain of lethal bacteria. As the invaders journey deep into her gut, the resident microbes must fight to survive. Annie’s life hangs in the balance. Enter the phage, deadly predators, ready to wage war to protect their host.
The 2017 judging panel, which includes Toni Jordan, Sarah L’Estrange and Megan O’Brien, said: ‘A graphic novel about dysentery during WWI doesn’t sound like the makings of an engaging work, but The Invisible War is a cleverly created comic that’s informative, interesting and surprising…. In this book, even the bacteria go “ka-boom”. The Invisible War is an educational and entertaining book and demonstrates an exciting style of science writing that is far from textbook.’
The Invisible War is published by Scale Free Network. Publisher and co-creator Gregory Crocetti says: ‘We’re thrilled to have won the Most Underrated Book Award. This award means a lot to a tiny publisher like ourselves, who are able to take risks to creative innovative new works, but simply don’t have the marketing budget and networks to promote it.’
The Invisible War was shortlisted alongside three other terrific books: The Island Will Sink by Briohny Doyle (Brow Books), Loopholes by Susan McCreery (Spineless Wonders) and Horse Island by Christina Laidley Kennedy and Jason Busch (Zabriskie Books).
The MUBA 2017 is sponsored by the Australian Booksellers Association. Find out more about the prize here.
13-year-old Jojo and his younger sister Kayla live with their grandparents in rural Mississippi. When their father, a white man, is released from prison, their mother Leonie packs the children into her car with a friend, and together they set off to collect the man she loves with a toxic passion. Rich with Jesmyn Ward’s distinctive, lyrical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first century America.
As an added note, Ward has previously won the National Book Award for Fiction for her first novel, Salvage the Bones.
Masha Gessen follows the lives of four Russians, born as the Soviet Union crumbled, at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children or grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own - as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers and writers, sexual and social beings. A powerful and urgent cautionary tale by contemporary Russia’s most fearless inquisitor.
Gathered together, the poems of Frank Bidart perform one of the most remarkable transmutations of the body into language in contemporary literature. His pages represent the human voice in all its extreme registers, whether it’s that of the child-murderer Herbert White, the obsessive anorexic Ellen West, the tormented genius Vaslav Nijinsky, or the poet’s own. And in that embodiment is a transgressive empathy, one that recognises our wild appetites, the monsters, the misfits, the misunderstood among us and inside us.
After 16-year-old Grace gives up her baby for adoption, she decides that the time has come to find out more about her own biological mother. Although her biological mum proves elusive, her search leads her to two half-siblings she never knew existed. When these three siblings come together, they find in themselves the place they can belong, while the secrets they guard threaten to explode…
This year’s Voss Literary Prize shortlist has been announced and includes four debut novels. Our congratulations to the six shortlisted authors and publishers.
Launched in 2014, the Voss Literary Prize is awarded to the best novel published in Australia in the previous year, and is dedicated to the memory of historian Vivian Robert Le Vaux Voss.
The full 2017 shortlist is:
For more information about the 2017 shortlist, please visit the Voss Literary Prize website.
The Small Press Network (SPN) have announced the four titles shortlisted for the 2017 Most Underrated Book Award (MUBA). Open to all members of the Small Press Network, the MUBA is designed to highlight hidden gems – wonderful books that deserve to find a wider audience.
France, 1916. While treating a patient with dysentery, Sister Annie Barnaby encounters a strain of lethal bacteria. As the invaders journey deep into her gut, the resident microbes must fight to survive. Annie’s life hangs in the balance. Enter the phage, deadly predators, ready to wage war to protect their host. Created by a team of scientists, artists, educators, writers & historians, The Invisible War is a graphic novel like no other.
The Invisible War is published by Scale Free Network.
This collection of microfiction provides glimpses into the everyday challenges of family life, relationships, ageing and loss. The characters are typical humans – flawed, vulnerable, frustrating and frustrated. Told with empathy and wit, and honed with a wordsmith’s skill, Loopholes makes us see ourselves and each other differently.
Loopholes is published by Spineless Wonders.
This work of science fiction is set in the not-too-distant future in which we are perpetually on the brink of collapse, and catastrophe is our most popular entertainment. The energy crisis has come and gone. EcoLaw is enforced by insidious cartoon panda bears and their armies of viral-marketing children. The world watches as Pitcairn Island sinks into the Pacific, wondering if this, finally, will be the end of everything. And in the midst of it all, Max Galleon, anxious family man and blockbuster auteur, lives a life that he cannot remember.
The Island Will Sink is published by Brow Books.
Horse Island, the private retreat of Christina and Trevor Kennedy, sits tucked away in an estuary of Tuross Lake on the South Coast of NSW. It is a stunning location but what is most surprising in this place of great natural beauty is the remarkable garden created by Christina, featuring only Australian indigenous plants. This book is the author’s inspiring gardening story, and features gorgeous photography by Jason Busch.
Horse Island is published by Zabriskie Books.
The MUBA 2017 is sponsored by the Australian Booksellers Association. The winner will be announced during SPN’s Independent Publishing Conference in Melbourne on Friday 17 November 2017.
Congratulations to George Saunders who has been named the winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize for Fiction!
Lincoln in the Bardo is the first novel from Saunders, who is internationally renowned for his short stories, and it is an extraordinary work.
As the American Civil War rages, President Lincoln’s beloved 11-year-old son lies gravely ill. In a matter of days, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns to the crypt several times alone to hold his boy’s body. From this seed of historical truth, Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of realism, entering a thrilling, supernatural domain both hilarious and terrifying.
Chair of 2017 judges, Baroness Lola Young, writes: ‘The form and style of this utterly original novel, reveals a witty, intelligent, and deeply moving narrative. This tale of the haunting and haunted souls in the afterlife of Abraham Lincoln’s young son paradoxically creates a vivid and lively evocation of the characters that populate this other world. Lincoln in the Bardo is both rooted in, and plays with history, and explores the meaning and experience of empathy.’
Alongside Lincoln in the Bardo, the shortlist included 4321 by Paul Auster, History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund, Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, Elmet by Fiona Mozley, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders and Autumn by Ali Smith.
The Man Booker Prize for Fiction is a £50,000 prize literary prize awarded each year for the best original novel, written in the English language, and published in the UK.
The £30,000 Baillie Gifford prize (formerly known as the Samuel Johnson prize) is the UK’s most prestigious award for nonfiction writing. This year’s shortlist has been revealed.
Chair of Judges, Sir Peter Bazalgette, says: ‘The exceptional shortlist for the 2017 Baillie Gifford Prize covers religion, culture, science and sexuality… and that’s just for starters. But what all the six books have in common is that they’re incredibly well-written, they’re really enjoyable and they tell great stories.’
The 2017 shortlist includes:
The Islamic Enlightenment: The Modern Struggle Between Faith and Reason by Christopher de Bellaigue
How to Survive A Plague by David France
Border: A Journey to The Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova
An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and An Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn
To Be A Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O’Connell
Belonging: The Story of The Jews, 1492-1900 by Simon Schama
Each of the shortlisted authors will receive £1,000 and the 2017 winner will be announced on 16 November.
This year’s Nobel prize for literature has been awarded to Kazuo Ishiguro.
Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and moved with his family to England when he was five. He is the author of seven novels, four of which have have been nominated for the Man Booker Prize including The Remains of the Day which went on to win the prestigious prize in 1989. Ishiguro is also the writer of short stories, and screenplays.
The Swedish Academy praises Ishiguro, ‘who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world’.
The shortlists for this year’s National Book Awards have been announced. Congratulations to all the finalists.
The Centre for Youth Literature has announced the winners of the 2017 Inky Awards!
The Inky Awards recognise high-quality young adult literature, with the shortlist selected by young adults, and the winners voted for online by teens. There are two awards: the Gold Inky Award for an Australian book, and the Silver Inky Award for an international book.
The Gold Inky Award winner is Words in Deep Blue by Cath Crowley.
Words in Deep Blue is a love story. It’s the story of Howling Books, where readers write letters to strangers, to lovers, to poets, to words. It’s the story of Henry Jones and Rachel Sweetie. They were best friends once, before Rachel moved to the sea.
Now, she’s back, working at the bookstore, grieving for her brother Cal. She’s looking for the future in the books people love, and the words that they leave behind.
The Silver Inky Award is Radio Silence by Alice Oseman.
Frances has always been a study machine with one goal, elite university. Nothing will stand in her way; not friends, not a guilty secret - not even the person she is on the inside. But when Frances meets Aled, the shy genius behind her favourite podcast, she discovers a new freedom.
Aled unlocks the door to Real Frances and for the first time she experiences true friendship, unafraid to be herself. Then the podcast goes viral and the fragile trust between them is broken…
Chair of 2017 judges, Baroness Lola Young, writes: ‘Playful, sincere, unsettling, fierce: here is a group of novels grown from tradition but also radical and contemporary. The emotional, cultural, political and intellectual range of these books is remarkable, and the ways in which they challenge our thinking is a testament to the power of literature.’
Here is the full shortlist:
Find out more about the Man Booker Prize, and the shortlisted titles for 2017 here. This year’s winner will be announced on 17 October and will receive £50,000.
The £30,000 Baillie Gifford prize (formerly known as the Samuel Johnson prize) is the UK’s most prestigious award for nonfiction writing. It covers all non-fiction in the areas of current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts.
This year’s longlist has recently been announced. Here is the longlist in full:
Chair of Judges, Sir Peter Bazalgette, says: ‘We’re really excited about this longlist. We’ve got history, science, biography, polemic and memoir. But two things link them all – they’re wonderfully well-written and they’re really contemporary.’
The shortlist will be announced on 6 October, and the winner will be announced on 16 November. The winner will receive £30,000 and each of the shortlisted authors will receive £1,000. Find out more about the Baillie Gifford prize here.
Humorous and poignant, Extinctions is a story about all kinds of extinction – natural, racial, national and personal – and what we can do to prevent them.
The Miles Franklin judges say Extinctions is a ‘compassionate and unapologetically intelligent novel that explores ageing, adoption, grief and remorse, empathy and self-centredness’.
Award-winning author Charlotte Wood also praised this novel’s ‘cool intelligent wit and piercingly observant examination of ageing, time, interracial adoption, family, aesthetics and engineering’. She said: ‘Just when you think you know what this book is, it gives you the slip and surprises you again.’
First awarded in 1957, the Miles Franklin Literary Award is presented annually to a novel of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases. As the winner, Wilson will receive $60,000 in prize money.
You can find out more about the Miles Franklin Literary Award here.
Congratulations to the 2017 winners of the Ned Kelly Awards for the best in Australian crime writing.
Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly by Adrian McKinty is the newest installment in his popular detective series set in 1980s Belfast. In this novel, Detective Inspector Sean Duffy heads down his most dangerous road yet. Hunted by forces unknown, threatened by Internal Affairs and with his relationship on the rocks, he will need all his wits to get out of this investigation in one piece.
Jane Harper’s debut novel follows federal police officer Aaron Falk as he returns to his rural hometown to investigate an apparent murder-suicide, that might be more than it seems. The Dry was one of our best sellers last year.
2017 has seen two books named as co-winners in the true crime category.
Around 80 men died or disappeared in NSW from the late 70s to early 90s during an epidemic of gay-hate crimes. Getting Away With Murder is the story of this time in Australian history.
The Drowned Man by Brendan James Murray is a true story of life, death and murder on HMAS Australia, and search for answers.
This Saturday August 12 is annual Love Your Book Shop Day. Pop in to Oscar & Friends Double Bay or Surry Hills for a chocolate or lolly to make your browsing a little sweeter in this early Spring weather. At Surry Hills, we will offer our early browsers a slice of chocolate mud cake hand made by our friends at Lixie Chocolaterie a few doors up the road. And at Double Bay, Barb and Jeremy will be offering FREE PATS to any dog you bring into the store (and chocolates and balloons to any humanoids). Happy love of books, and shops, and shops that sell books day!
Oscar & Friends are very excited about this year's Man Booker Prize Longlist. Natalie's hankering to read Home Fire, which is not due to be released in Australia until September 7, while Pip's money is behind Days Without End, Ali Smith's Autumn was one of Will's favourite books of 2016, and Oscar & Friends blow-in, Paul, has tipped Solar Bones to win. Come and badger us with your own opinions on who the winner will be, to make the wait more interesting!
the finalists for the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award are:
• AN ISOLATED INCIDENT by Emily Maguire (Pac Macmillan Australia)
• THE LAST DAYS OF AVA LANGDON by Mark O’Flynn (University of Queensland Press)
• THEIR BRILLIANT CAREERS by Ryan O’Neill (Black Inc)
• WAITING by Philip Salom (Puncher & Wattmann)
• EXTINCTIONS by Josephine Wilson (UWA Publishing)
