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Becoming Kirrali Lewis
About the book
Set within the explosive cultural shifts of the 1960s and 1980s, Becoming Kirrali Lewis chronicles the journey of a young Aboriginal teenager as she leaves her hometown in rural Victoria to take on a law degree in Melbourne in 1985. Adopted at birth by a white family, Kirrali doesn't question her cultural roots until a series of life-changing events force her to face up to her true identity.

About the author
Jane Harrison
Jane Harrison is a descendant of the Muruwari people of NSW. She is an award-winning playwright and has a Master of Arts in Playwriting from the Queensland University of Technology. In 2002, her first play Stolen was the co-winner of the Kate Challis RAKA Award. It has since been performed throughout Australia as well as the UK, Hong Kong and Japan. Her most recent play The Visitorsformed part of the Melbourne Theatre Company’s 2014 Cybec Electric Series. Jane has received several playwriting awards and her essays have been published in various journals. Jane lives in Melbourne with her two daughters.

Judges’ comments
Judges' Comments
Becoming Kirrali Lewis is a richly textured novel about identity, family and community that takes place in Melbourne when Indigenous artists, writers and actors were making their presence felt. Kirrali Lewis is a young Indigenous woman who has grown up in a loving white family in a small country town. But when she leaves home to enrol in law at Melbourne University in 1985, her life will profoundly change. Kirrali’s true identity is the mystery at the heart of the novel. In answering the puzzles of her past, the novel rewards the reader with vivid portrayal of a young woman at a crucial time of life and in Australian social history.
Secrets can’t stay hidden forever, not in the big city where lives jostle and tangle and soon the truth of Kirrali’s past, which she herself does not know, begins to emerge. The story moves from the 1960s, when Kirrali is giving up in forced adoption, through to the 1980s and shows the world through the eyes of both mother and daughter. Daughter, mother, uncle, lover and friends—the book is crowded with strong and complex characters and restless, searching energy. Jane Harrison’s background as playwright is turned to powerful effect in the way she voices these characters. “Our stories are changing things”, one character reflects, and herein lies is the truth of the novel. It is a way to understand not only a person’s past, but also perhaps also a nation’s history
Illuminae: The Illuminae Files _01
About the book
The year is 2575, and two rival mega-corporations are at war over a planet that's little more than an ice-covered speck at the edge of the universe. Too bad nobody thought to warn the people living on it.
After Kady hacks into a tangled web of data to find the truth, it's clear only one person can help her bring it all to light—a boy she swore she'd never speak to again. With an enemy warship in hot pursuit, Kady and Ezra are forced to fight their way onto the evacuating fleet.

About the authors
Amie Kaufman
Jay Kristoff
Amie Kaufman is the award-winning co-author of the Starbound series. Jay Kristoff is the award-winning author of the Lotus War series. They live in Melbourne, Australia, with two long-suffering spouses, two rescue dogs and a plentiful supply of caffeine. They met thanks to international taxation law and stuck together due to a shared love of blowing things up and breaking hearts.

Judges’ comments
Judges' Comments
If anyone doubted that young adult fiction is not the place to break the rules of writing and storytelling then even a glance at Illuminae should dispel that. Co-authors Kaufman and Kristof have concocted a hugely entertaining space opera composed of found and assembled documents, emails, transcripts, cross-sections, concrete poetry and more. The book is peppered with literary allusions, from Greek philosophers to Walt Whitman and George Orwell. In the year 2575 a planet containing useful minerals is unexpectedly attacked. Hundreds of innocent people are killed and communities devastated. At the centre of the story are teenage couple Kady and Ezra, who have just broken up, just three hours before the attacks. As powerful corporations seek the other’s annihilation, Kady and Ezra must work together to save each other. Between a malevolent artificial intelligence program, a deadly virus and pursuit by a killer spacecraft, what hopes for romance? A tour-de-force of storytelling.
A Single Stone
About the book
Every girl dreams of being part of the line—the chosen seven who tunnel deep into the mountain to find the harvest. Jena is the leader of the line—strong, reliable and small; her years of training have seen to that. It is not always easy but it is the way of things. And so a girl must wrap her limbs, lie still, deny herself a second bowl of stew. Or a first. But what happens when one tiny discovery makes Jena question everything she has ever known? What happens when moving a single stone changes everything?

About the author
Meg McKinlay
Meg McKinlay grew up in Bendigo, Victoria, in a book-loving, TV-and car-free household. On the long and winding path to becoming a children’s writer, she has worked a variety of jobs including as a swim instructor, tour guide, translator and teacher. These days, she lives with her family near the ocean in Fremantle and divides her time between teaching and writing—a balance that swings wildly between chaos and calm.

Judges’ comments
Judges' Comments
There is something strange and unsettling in this novel. When mountains have collapsed after long generations of mining, survivors evolve a way of life defined by cultish rules and rituals. Central to the way of life are the girls and young women raised in self-sacrifice to burrow deep into mountain tunnels for a rare mineral crucial to village life in winter. Jenna leads the line of seven girls, dedicated to this dangerous task. “Make the harvest, find the light” and “if the rocks allows it” are meditations among the cruelty of their lives. A Single Stone deals in themes of power, the environment and identity in nuanced ways. Girls are raised to shape their bodies through controlled eating, self-sacrifice and submission to the group. And what does the society give back in return? At the heart of Jena’s world there is a secret, and who controls that knowledge controls her life.
Inbetween Days
About the book
At 17, Jacklin Bates is all grown up. She’s dropped out of school. She’s living with her runaway sister, Trudy, and she’s in love with Luke, who doesn’t love her back. She’s stuck in Mobius, stuck working in the roadhouse and babysitting her boss’s demented father. A stranger sets up camp in the forest and the boy-next-door returns. Trudy’s brilliant façade is cracking and Jack’s only friend, Astrid, has done something unforgivable. Jack is losing everything, including her mind. As she struggles to hold onto the life she thought she wanted, Jack learns that growing up is complicated.

About the author
Vikki Wakefield
Vikki Wakefield’s first young adult novel, All I Ever Wanted, won the 2012 Adelaide Festival Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction, as did her second novel, Friday Brown, in 2014. Friday Brown was also an Honour Book, Children’s Book Council of Australia, in 2013. Among other awards, it was shortlisted for the prestigious Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Young adult fiction in 2013. Vikki lives in the Adelaide foothills with her family.

Judges’ comments
Judges' Comments
The waiting is the hardest part. For 17-year-old Jack (Jacklin), she can’t wait for her real life to begin. She is living with her older sister, who has returned home from years living abroad. Jack has dropped out of school, from boredom more than anything. She lives in a town called Mobius, where life seems to go nowhere as though on some endless loop. Two crummy part-time jobs and a one-way romance aren’t taking her anywhere, either. What does the future hold and can she kick over the hurdles that lay ahead? With a small group of friends, and an unlikely older ally, Jack starts to find a way when they embark on reviving an old drive-in cinema. Vikki Wakefield captures the intense yearning and restlessness of teenage years with perfect accuracy. She can pivot from seeming devastation to piercing insight in a sharp turned phrase. Inbetween Days is a novel rich authenticity and memorably complex characters.
Green Valentine
About the book
Astrid Smythe is smart and popular. She's a straight-A student and a committed environmentalist. She's basically perfect. Hiro's the opposite of perfect. He's rude and resentful. Despite his brains, he doesn't see the point of school. When Astrid meets Hiro at the shopping centre where he's wrangling trolleys, he doesn't recognise her because she's in disguise—as a lobster. And she doesn't set him straight.
Astrid wants to change the world, Hiro wants to survive it. Both believe that the world needs to be saved from itself. Can they find enough in common to right all the wrongs between them?

About the author
Lili Wilkinson
Lili Wilkinson was first published at age 12 in Voiceworks magazine. After studying Creative Arts at Melbourne University and teaching English in Japan, Lili worked on insideadog.com.au (a book website for teen readers), the Inky Awards and the Inkys Creative Reading Prize at the Centre for Youth Literature, State Library of Victoria. She is completing a PhD in Creative Writing at Melbourne University and spends most of her time reading and writing books for teenagers.

Judges’ comments
Judges' Comments
Green Valentine is a contemporary urban rom-com with a political edge. Astrid Katy Smythe wants to save the endangered Margaret River Hairy Marron and stalks the local shopping mall dressed as a giant prawn. No one will sign her petition. Most people think she’s promoting the seafood store. But when Astrid meets Hiro (aka Shopping Trolley Guy) an unlikely romance blossoms and they move on to local concerns, taking on the role of night guerrilla gardeners. They populate their boring suburb with an astonishing array of edible plants. But pushing against the staid norms of power they also uncover a secret plan to sell off community assets to big business. Astrid and Hiro’s winning combination shows that you can fight City Hall.
Adelaide's Secret World
About the book
Adelaide leads a quiet life in the midst of the city. At night she listens to the song of the stars, but during the day she watches over the others like her—the still ones, the quiet ones, those who dance and dream alone.
Little does Adelaide know her secret world will soon be transformed into something unexpected and full of joy.

About the author
Elise Hurst
Elise Hurst is an illustrator and author of children's books, as well as a traditional artist. She has illustrated more than 50 books over the years. The Night Garden (ABC Books), which she wrote and illustrated, was shortlisted for a Children's Book Council of Australia award in 2008. She lives in Melbourne with her husband, Peter, and their twin boys.

Judges’ comments
Judges' Comments
In Greek mythology the ‘red thread' helps a king escape from the labyrinth. In Chinese tradition the red thread joins people who will one day meet and help each other. In Adelaide's Secret World, by writer and artist Elise Hurst, a red thread ultimately brings together two lonely dreamers and revives a world once full of bustling wonders. Adelaide lives alone in a place that had once been a creative haven. To escape her loneliness, Adelaide ventures into the city where she encounters a creator just like herself. And when she comes into possession of their special book, Adelaide knows just what to do.
Artist Elise Hurst creates a richly imagined world with a palette of velvety reds, deep blues and her anthropomorphic characters include a hare, bears, a lion, foxes, cats and even the occasional human. Her sumptuous images render the line between fancy and realism permeable and enchant the reader more with each reading. Adelaide's Secret World contains enigmas that invite the reader to imagine other realities and a rich inner world.
Sister Heart
About the book
A young Aboriginal girl is taken from the north of Australia and sent to an institution in the distant south. There, she slowly makes a new life for herself and, in the face of tragedy, finds strength in new friendships. Poignantly told from the child's perspective, Sister Heart affirms the power of family and kinship.

About the author
Sally Morgan
Sally Morgan was born in Perth, in 1951. She has published books for both adults and children, including her acclaimed autobiography, My Place. She has also established a national reputation as an artist and has works in many private and public collections.

Judges’ comments
Judges' Comments
Sister Heart is a story about children of the Stolen Generation quietly told in verse. This is a powerful, deeply personal story that will stay in the minds and hearts of readers for a long, long time. As a young child Annie is taken from her family in North West of Western Australia, perhaps to Moore River, though the specific place is never stated. Here she endures all of the cold and cutting kindness of state care. Annie befriends Janey, a girl from the south, and her younger brother Tim. Together the children share the hardships and do their best to care for each other. Sally Morgan tells their stories with terse lines eerily catching the cadence of each child's voice.
Sister Heart is a story of friendship, tragedy and remembering. And in that remembering, sorrow is redeemed and hope delivered. The historic scar of the Stolen Generation gave us a great book in Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence. It has given us one more in Sister Heart.
Perfect
About the book
On a perfect day, the hours stretch endlessly ahead. Scribbling with chalk, running with kites, digging for shells, paddling, climbing, and dreaming. Hour unfolds upon hour, with reassuring comfort and sleep beckoning at the end.
Children's Book Council of Australia (CBCA) shortlisted author, Danny Parker captures the simplicity, spontaneity and freedom of an idyllic childhood. Kate Greenaway and multiple CBCA winner Freya Blackwood's paintings of three children roaming a rolling beachside idyll capture the light—and even the smell and feel—of a perfect summer day.

About the author
Danny Parker
Danny lives with his wife and two children in sunny Perth. They have two dogs (Barney and Charlie) and a cat (Tiny). Danny arrived here from the UK on something of an adventure and is glad to say it's turned out to be an awfully big adventure.

About the illustrator
Freya Blackwood
Freya grew up in Orange, New South Wales, and produced many illustrated books as a child. She loves creating characters, giving them emotions and their own small world to live in. She lives in Orange with her divine daughter Ivy, a rather naughty whippet called Pivot and four noisy chickens.

Judges’ comments
Judges' Comments
Three small children pass a perfect day as they play, explore and discover the domestic and the natural world around them. Remarkably, and rather delightfully, these adventures take place without the hovering presence of adults. Children truly are the centre of the world in this book. Only a stripy grey cat is there through the day. They make cakes and draw on pavements with chalk, dig holes at the beach, climb on a rock walls and a tree, wave at a yacht, fly kites and revel in the coast and farmland that surrounds them.
There is lightness and strength in Freya Blackwood's images of children. She designs her pages and paces the book with a filmmaker's eye, exploiting unusual angles and tracking her young characters in the world. There is softness, almost a silence surrounding the children. Danny Parker's rhymed text offers clear navigation and leaves more than enough space for young readers and their elders to explore their world again and again and again. Perfect.
The Greatest Gatsby : A Visual Book of Grammar
About the book
Introducing a new, visually engaging way of presenting grammar. Appealing to the senses and the emotions with colour, texture, humour and drama, this book seeks to make the subject of grammar not only more intelligible to more people, but more memorable.

About the author
Tohby Riddle
Tohby Riddle is an award-winning writer, illustrator, cartoonist, designer and sometime editor based in Sydney. He has written and illustrated numerous well-loved picture books, written a novel (published as a young adult book), was the cartoonist for Good Weekend (the Saturday magazine of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age) for nearly 10 years, and is a former editor of The School Magazine, a literary magazine for children published by the NSW Department of Education

Judges’ comments
Judges' Comments
In The Greatest Gatsby author and illustrator Tohby Riddle produces a skilfully designed information book about English grammar that is a delight to read and look at. The guiding principle is simple: “Words put together properly are able to carry meaning. Grammar gives words names…and groups them into word classes.” Tohby Riddle explains this in what may be the simplest and clearest definition of every schoolchild's nightmare.
The Greatest Gatsby shows that grammar is mostly a game that has rules and then smartly demonstrates what those rules look like—literally—using a string of visual puns. Rather than give us rules and their tedious exceptions, Riddle virtually performs the concepts in visual terms.
Riddle's design draws upon letterpress, text written on an old typewriter, collage and found images. Riddle has shown in numerous books already that he is the sly master of diversity and he makes light work of one of the heaviest topics known to schoolchildren everywhere and in all times. Here at last is a book for young people about grammar that is, astonishingly, both a pleasure to look at and to read.
Mr Huff
About the book
Award-winning and much-loved author and illustrator Anna Walker gives us a gentle, poignant, affirming and wise picture book sure to delight all ages. Mr Huff is a story about the clouds and the sunshine in each of our lives. Bill is having a bad day. Mr Huff is following him around and making everything seem difficult. Bill tries to get rid of him, but Mr Huff just gets bigger and bigger! Then they both stop, and a surprising thing happens…

About the author
Anna Walker
Anna Walker writes and illustrates children's books and is based in Melbourne. Her charming studio is shared with a printmaker, Rosy the lamp, a few friendly plants, and knitted, woolly creatures. Working with pencil, ink and collage, Anna develops her characters and enjoys spending time with them before they venture out into the world. Her illustrations are inspired by the everyday details of life and the amusing antics of her menagerie. Anna's latest book as author/illustrator with Penguin, Mr Huff, is an exploration of how kids deal with the worrying feelings that can accompany a bad day.
Judges’ comments
Judges' Comments
Nothing is going right today for Bill. His favourite socks are missing and his cereal is soggy. That cloud of concern has grown bigger and turned into its own depressing presence. Mr Huff is an exquisitely drawn and designed book about a child's anxiety, depression and resilience. Anna Walker's seamless images—digitally composed from etchings, gouache, pencil and collage—produce an arrangement so light and right to explore a child's experience of anxiety, depression and resilience.
In rendering those grey feelings into the shape-shifting figure of Mr Huff, here is a picture book that allows young readers to see and name a nameless dread. The interplay between Bill and Mr Huff is perfectly weighted. Mr Huff is first a stranger, then an unwelcome guest, then a deep enemy and something to be confronted. Bill's world is laced with tenderness and profound empathy.
As a storyteller Walker shows young readers that in his struggle, Bill's feeling will pass, and that a day that starts out cloudy with a chance of showers can be followed with the chance of sunshine.
The Golden Age
About the book
This is a story of resilience, the irrepressible, enduring nature of love, and the fragility of life.
It is 1954 and thirteen-year-old Frank Gold, refugee from wartime Hungary, is learning to walk again after contracting polio in Australia. At the Golden Age Children's Polio Convalescent Hospital in Perth, he sees Elsa, a fellow-patient, and they form a forbidden, passionate bond. The Golden Age becomes the little world that reflects the larger one, where everything occurs, love and desire, music, death, and poetry.

About the author
Joan London
Joan London is the author of two prize-winning collections of stories, Sister Ships and Letter to Constantine, which have been published in one volume as The New Dark Age. Her first novel, Gilgamesh, won the Age Book of the Year for Fiction in 2002 and was longlisted for the Orange Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel, The Good Parents, won the 2009 Christina Stead Prize for fiction in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards. Joan London's books have all been published internationally to critical acclaim.

Judges’ comments
Judges' Comments
The Golden Ageis a novel of great beauty and depth. Wonderfully masquerading as a slight story about a moment in Australian history, and set in the insular and parochial Perth of 1954, it is in fact a large novel writ small. Frank Gold, the young son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, is confined to a convalescent home for polio victims.
Within this severely limited environment, Frank will discover love, death and his vocation as a poet. An encounter with Sullivan, an eighteen year old scholar-athlete who composes poetry in his head, while entombed in an iron lung, will teach Frank about the value of the life of the mind. In recording this young man's poetry on prescription pads, Frank will learn how poetry is made and also about its capacity to make sense of oneself and the world.
Love for a fellow child patient will also shape the poet-in-making, as will the complicated bonds between the protagonist and his deeply deracinated parents wrestling with the trauma of displacement from cosmopolitan Budapest to suburbia. Joan London's novel takes the restricting condition of illness as its starting point and weaves a story of irreducibly powerful emotion.
This is a grand narrative written on a most intimate and modest canvas.
Amnesia
About the book
When Gaby Baillieux releases the Angel Worm into the computers of Australia's prison system, hundreds of asylum seekers walk free. Worse: an American corporation runs prison security, so the malware infects some five thousand American places of incarceration. Doors spring open. Both countries' secrets threaten to pour out.

About the author
Peter Carey
Peter Carey was born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, and now lives in New York. He is the author of thirteen novels (including one for children), two volumes of short stories, and two books on travel.
Amongst other prizes, Carey has won the Booker Prize twice (for Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang), the Commonwealth Writers' Prize twice (for Jack Maggs and True History of the Kelly Gang), and the Miles Franklin Literary Award three times (for Bliss, Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs).

Judges’ comments
Judges' Comments
Amnesia finds Carey looking back to the Australia of his younger days, in particular to the politically charged year of 1975, and the dismissal of the Whitlam Government. But Amnesia is no mere exercise in nostalgia; the novel’s over-arching theme is the complex relationship between Australia and America since the end of World War II.
In the here-and-now, washed-up journalist and hack Felix Moore is engaged by old-friend and shadowy entrepreneur Woody 'Wodonga' Townes to ghost-write the story of Assange-like computer hacker Gaby Baillieux, born in Melbourne on 11&nbps;November 1975. The story of Gaby, her mother and grandmother, takes the reader from the Battle of Brisbane in 1942, the turbulence of the Whitlam sacking, through to recent use of the Internet as a platform to publish classified and secret government information.
Richly told in a bold and colourful vernacular language, and filled with larger-than-life characters, Carey's indefatigable book is big in every sense. By turns comic and angry, and wildly ambitious in scope, Amnesia is a novel that revels in the complexities of Australia's political landscape over the past half-century.
Golden Boys
About the book
Colt Jenson and his brother Bastian have moved to a new, working-class suburb. The Jensons are different.
Their father, Rex, showers them with gifts—toys, bikes, all that glitters—and makes them the envy of the neighbourhood. To Freya Kiley and the other local kids, the Jensons are a family from a magazine, and Rex a hero. Successful, attractive, always there to lend a hand. But to Colt he's an impossible figure in a different way: unbearable, suffocating. Has Colt got Rex wrong, or has he seen something in his father that will destroy their fragile new lives?

About the author
Sonya Hartnett
Sonya Hartnett's work has won numerous Australian and international literary prizes and has been published around the world. Uniquely, she is acclaimed for her stories for adults, young adults and children.
Her accolades include the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Of A Boy), The Age Book of the Year (Of A Boy), the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize (Thursday's Child), the Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year for both Older and Younger Readers (Forest, The Silver Donkey, The Ghost's Child, The Midnight Zoo and The Children of the King), the Victorian Premier's Literary Award (Surrender), shortlistings for the Miles Franklin Award (for both Of A Boy and Butterfly) and the CILP Carnegie Medal (The Midnight Zoo). Hartnett is also the first Australian recipient of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (2008).

Judges’ comments
Judges' Comments
Golden Boys begins with the arrival of the Jenson family into a working class suburb of Melbourne. Despite their more obvious trappings of wealth, the two Jenson boys, Colt and Bastian, attempt to manoeuvre their way through this unsettling milieu of new families and neighbourhood kids.
Chief among them are the Kileys, Joe and Elizabeth and their six children, including twelve-year old Freya, whose complex relationship with Colt and his father Rex forms one of the many strands of this short but densely narrated story. Set sometime around 1980, Hartnett's novel depicts a world of childhood that is far from innocent. Her children, away from prying adult eyes, inhabit a timeless domain of backyard swimming pools, bike rides through suburban streets, of cruel teasing and bullying, and all-too knowing conversations.
While the novel touches upon themes of domestic violence, its genuine darkness centres on the ambiguous relationship between Colt’s father, Rex, and the other neighbourhood boys.
Hartnett's beautifully written novel, rendered in a seamless and rhythmic prose, is full of mystery and tension. She evokes not just the uncertainty and confusion of childhood, but also the complicated rituals children act out as they navigate a path to adulthood.
In Certain Circles
About the book
Zoe Howard is seventeen when her brother, Russell, introduces her to Stephen Quayle. He's unlike anyone she has ever met, 'a weird, irascible character out of some dense Russian novel'. His sister, Anna, is shy and thoughtful, 'a little orphan'.
Zoe and Russell, Stephen and Anna: they may come from different social worlds but all four will spend their lives moving in and out of each other's shadow.
Set amid the lush gardens and grand stone houses that line the north side of Sydney Harbour, In Certain Circles is an intense psychological drama about family and love, tyranny and freedom.

About the author
Elizabeth Harrower
Elizabeth Harrower was born in Sydney in 1928. In 1951 Harrower travelled to London and began to write. Her first novel, Down in the City, was published there in 1957 and was followed by The Long Prospect a year later.
In 1959 she returned to Sydney, where she worked in radio and then in publishing. Her third novel, The Catherine Wheel, appeared in 1960.
Harrower published The Watch Tower in 1966. Four years later she wrote a new novel, In Certain Circles, but withdrew it from publication. It remained unpublished until 2014.

Judges’ comments
Judges' Comments
In Certain Circles, Elizabeth Harrower's fifth and final novel, explores a series of relationships across two very different social worlds in the glitteringly beautiful Sydney from the post-war period through to the late sixties. Zoe and Russell are the privileged offspring of benign parents.
In a three-act psychological domestic drama, they encounter the orphaned and emotionally abandoned siblings Stephen and Anna. The narrative offers the promise of a love story but leads subtly to the conclusion that one can be reconciled rather than defeated by failure.
The central character Zoe, naively fuelled by the optimism of her class and with the benefit of beauty and talent, will learn the lesson that these attributes are not sufficient to prevail against the dark complexities she encounters in an increasingly unhappy and bitter marriage. In the clash between hope and cynicism, between privilege and disadvantage, these characters' limitations are revealed.
The dynamic between parents and children, siblings, married couples and lovers are explored by Harrower in a spare and economical prose style. In the era of amateur psychologising and self-indulgent introspection, much in the novel is refreshingly left unsaid.
To Name Those Lost
About the book
Summer 1874, and Launceston teeters on the brink of anarchy. After abandoning his wife and child many years ago, the Black War veteran Thomas Toosey must return to the city to search for his son.
He travels through the island's northern districts during a time of impossible hardship—hardship that has left its mark on him too. Arriving in Launceston, Toosey discovers a town in chaos.
Human nature is revealed in all its horror and beauty as Thomas Toosey struggles with the good and the vile in himself and learns what he holds important.

About the author
Rohan Wilson
Rohan Wilson holds degrees and diplomas from the universities of Tasmania, Southern Queensland and Melbourne.
His first book, The Roving Party, won the 2011 The Australian Vogel's Literary Award as well as the Margaret Scott Prize, Tasmanian Literary Awards in 2013, the NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2012, and was shortlisted for the 2011 Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, the 2012 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature Fiction Award, and the 2012 Indie Awards for debut fiction.
Rohan was chosen as one of the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Novelists in 2012.

Judges’ comments
Judges' Comments
To Name Those Lostcontinues Rohan Wilson’s exploration of Tasmania's dark colonial past, following on from his Vogel award-winning first novel The Roving Party.
Thomas Toosey, who featured as a boy in John Batman's hunting party in the earlier book, returns here as the grizzled veteran of Tasmania’s Black War. Now nearing sixty years of age, and a fugitive from justice, Toosey goes in search of his twelve-year old son William, left abandoned after the sudden death of his wife.
Toosey's journey to Launceston sets him on a collision course with Irishman Fitheal Flynn, from whom he has earlier stolen two hundred pounds. Set against the violent chaos of the anti-railway riots in Launceston in 1874, the novel records Tasmania's emergent society painfully born out of its brutal convict past.
Written in a bold and visceral language, Wilson's book concerns itself with the twin themes of retribution and redemption. As Toosey and Flynn, the fathers, lose themselves to vengeance, it falls to the children to seek forgiveness and forge new beginnings.
Poems 1957–2013
About the book
This substantial volume, Poems 1957–2013, contains all of the poetry written by Geoffrey Lehmann considered by the poet to be worthy of inclusion.
He has taken the prerogative of the mature artist looking back to revise poems, sometimes substantially, and to restore lines and passages he had removed from earlier versions. Displaying the breadth and depth of his poetry, Lehmann explores human nature in settings as diverse as ancient Rome and rural New South Wales, from searing satire to the domestic life of a family.

About the author
Geoffrey Lehmann
Geoffrey Lehmann is an Australian poet and former taxation lawyer.
He grew up in Sydney and attended the University of Sydney where he completed a combined degree in Arts and Law. He also co-edited the university journals Arna and Hermes with fellow student and poet Les Murray.
Lehmann's poetry was first published in The London Magazine when he was eighteen and he was the first Australian poet to be published by the London publishing house Faber and Faber with his first volume of poetry The Ilex Tree, published jointly with Les Murray, which went on to win the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry in 1965. He was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 1994. Since then he has published seven further collections of poetry, as well as a Selected Poems (1976) and a Collected Poems (1997), which won his third Grace Leven Poetry Prize, after Nero's Poems: Translations of the Public and Private Poems of the Emperor Nero also won in 1981.
In addition to his poetry, Lehmann has written a novel and edited several anthologies of Australian poetry.

Judges’ comments
Judges' Comments
Despite the high achievements of his work, and the unquestioning respect accorded to it by his contemporaries, it can be argued that Lehmann has been a neglected figure, not least in regard to the familiar measure of literary prizes.
Poems 1957–2013 is an unusual collection, in that it is not, as at first appears, a standard 'Collected Works' of the author; it is instead a complete reshaping of Lehmann's lifetime of poetry.
Many of the earlier poems have been so substantially re-written as to amount to new poems, while entirely new poems have been added to sequences such as the 'Simple Sonnets' and 'Spring Forest'. At the end of the book are enough new poems to constitute a new collection, while the last of all the poems, 'Why I Write Poetry', is not only one of the very best but a fitting summary of all that has gone before it.
The great strengths of Lehmann's work are his narrative talent and the classical austerity of his style.
Devadatta's Poems
About the book
Devadatta's Poems complement the sequence Between the Palace and the Bodhi Tree, published in Beveridge's earlier collection Wolf Notes, which followed the travels of Siddhattha Gotama before he became the Buddha.
These poems are written from the viewpoint of Devadatta, Siddhattha's jealous and ambitious cousin, who attempted to murder him three times. They are marked by extraordinary richness of language and detail, and a dedication to sensation.

About the author
Judith Beveridge
Judith Beveridge is the author of four previous collections of poetry which together have won the NSW and Victorian Premiers' Awards for poetry, and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award.
She is the poetry editor for Meanjin and teaches poetry writing at postgraduate level at the University of Sydney. Her poems have been widely anthologised, translated and studied in high schools.

Judges’ comments
Judges' Comments
Devadatta was the cousin of Siddhattha Gotama, otherwise known as the Buddha, and Beveridge imaginatively recreates his voice to evoke the physical presence, in lush sensuous detail, of a long-distant time and place.
That voice is both rivalrous and lascivious, as Devadatta envies his cousin's achievements as much as he lusts after his wife. Some of these eloquent, image-rich poems intentionally take liberties with what is known of the historic record but in doing so they examine the nuances of a complex familial relationship.
The tension between the cousins supplies a narrative framework for these lyrical glimpses into the mind of a restless and disappointed character.
Earth Hour
About the book
In this full volume of poetry, David Malouf once again shows us why he is one of Australia's most respected writers. David Malouf's new collection comes to rest at the perfect, still moment of 'silence, following talk' after its exploration of memory, imagination and mortality.
With elegance and wit, these poems move from profound depths to whimsy and playfulness. As Malouf interweaves light and dark, levity and gravity, he offers a vision of life on 'this patch of earth and its green things', charting the resilience of beauty amidst stubborn human grace.

About the author
David Malouf
David Malouf AO is the internationally acclaimed author of novels including Ransom, The Great World(winner of the Commonwealth Writers' prize and the Prix Femina Etranger), Remembering Babylon(winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), An Imaginary Life, Conversations at Curlow Creek, Dream Stuff, Every Move You Make and his autobiographical classic 12 Edmondstone Street.
His Collected Stories won the 2008 Australia-Asia Literary Award. In 2000 he was the sixteenth Neustadt Laureate. Earth Hour is his most recent poetry collection, released for his 80th birthday.

Judges’ comments
Judges' Comments
The award-winning novelist, essayist, librettist, and short story writer David Malouf began his literary career as a poet, and now, in Earth Hour, he has returned to his beginnings.
In his early books, Bicycle and Neighbours in a Thicket the most striking poems were reminiscences of the author's suburban childhood in Brisbane, while the most striking feature of the writing was its syntax, the long sentences spilling over lines and stanzas while calling up, often in lovingly elaborated lists, the particular sights and sounds and scents of a remembered yet lost age. In his new book he returns to that style of writing, though the memories now lie at a greater distance than before, and he has reached 'the Age of the Seven Pills daily'.
All the same, the poems in this book are as fresh and sharply observed as those that first earned Malouf a reputation, as long as forty years ago; they are intimate, natural, and never self-admiring. Earth Hour is a book that is deeply involved with the human spirit and deeply humane; it is a precious rebuttal to the horrors of our time.
Towards the Equator: New & Selected Poems
About the book
A substantial volume of poetry by Alex Skovron spanning some thirty years of writing, it opens with the book-length new collection Towards the Equator, then continues with poems selected from his five previous collections, book by book, from The Rearrangement (1988) to the prose-poems of Autographs(2008).
The poetry encompasses a broad range of interests, concerns, styles and techniques. Among the poetry's preoccupations are time, history and memory; music and art, faith and philosophy; the creative impulse and the erotic; and the quest after self-knowledge.

About the author
Alex Skovron
Alex Skovron is the author of six collections of poetry and a prose novella.
Many journals and anthologies in Australia and overseas have published his work, and his novella, The Poet (Hybrid, 2005), was recently translated into Czech.
The numerous public readings Alex has given have included appearances in China, Serbia, India, Ireland, and on Norfolk Island. The Attic, a selection of his poetry translated into French, was published by PEN Melbourne in 2013.

Judges’ comments
Judges' Comments
Alex Skovron's poetry combines a degree of intellectual sophistication with an atmosphere of unspecified totalitarian menace that is somewhat at odds with the middle class security of his home in Melbourne.
Towards the Equator, Skovron's new collection of poems, is the length of any conventional poetry book, yet it carries on its back a comprehensive collection of the author's previously published works, helping to set the new work in context.
The interface between old and new is smooth and consistent, as both sections of this book contain many poems that allude to the music, philosophy and art of the Old World, evoking cities with cobblestones and bell towers, while 'the bombers are still over the horizon'.
John Olsen: An Artist's Life
About the book
This biography graphically depicts the forces that drove John Olsen to become one of Australia's greatest artists.
An exhilarating book, both trenchant and tender, it strips away the veneer of showmanship and fame to show the substance of a painter driven by a need to depict his country's landscape as Australians had never seen it before.
From a child who was never taken to an art gallery, Olsen became the famous artist in the black beret, the writer and poet, the engaging public speaker, the bon vivant—whose life has been defined by an absolute need to paint.

About the author
Darleen Bungey
Darleen Bungey has been an advertising copywriter, an associate editor and writer for British magazines, and a freelance journalist.
In 1999 she began researching her seminal biography of Arthur Boyd, which was published to critical acclaim in 2007 and for which she was awarded a PhD. It won the Dobbie Literary Award and the Australian Book Industry Award for Biography of the Year.

Judges’ comments
Judges' Comments
Darleen Bungey has reconstructed Olsen's progress, starting with his childhood, crushed by a father who was distant, dissolute, an alcoholic and gambler.
The strong spirit that helped Olsen seek a cure for a speech impediment and enrol in evening art classes also steered him to a new worldview in Dattilo-Rubbo's atelier in Pitt Street, Sydney. Later, he continued to develop as an artist in the United Kingdom, France and Spain.
After returning to Australia in the 1960s, he developed a lifelong bond with the landscape, and became a prominent figure in the visual arts of the nation.
While exploring Olsen's pictures and story with insight and eloquence, Bungey takes the reader through decades of social change in Australia.