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21 February 2018
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Faces of the nation
26 February 2018
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5 March 2018
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Floundering
About the book
Tom and Jordy have been living with their gran since the day their mother, Loretta, left them on her doorstep and disappeared. Now Loretta’s returned, and she wants her boys back. Tom and Jordy hit the road with Loretta in her beat-up car. The family of three journeys across the country, squabbling, bonding, searching and reconnecting. But Loretta isn’t mother material. She’s broke, unreliable, lost. And there’s something else that’s not quite right with this reunion. This beautifully written and gripping debut is as moving as it is frightening, and as heartbreaking as it is tender.
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Published by:
The Text Publishing Company
About the author
Romy Ash is the author of Floundering, her first novel, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, Commonwealth Writer’s Prize and Prime Minister’s literary award, amongst others. She was awarded the SMH Best Young Australian Novelists of the year award for 2013. She lives in Melbourne.
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The Chemistry of Tears
About the book
When her lover dies suddenly, all Catherine has left is her work. In an act of compassion her manager at London's Swinburne Museum gives her a very particular project: a box of intricate clockwork parts that constitute a nineteenth-century automaton, a beautiful mechanical bird. It's an object made of equal parts magic, love, madness and science, a delight that contains the seeds of our age's downfall. When Catherine discovers the diary of the man who commissioned it, one obsession merges into another.
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Published by:
Penguin Random House
About the author
Peter Carey was born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, and now lives in New York. He is the author of fourteen 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).
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Questions of Travel
About the book
A mesmerising literary novel, Questions of Travel charts two very different lives. Laura travels the world before returning to Sydney, where she works for a publisher of travel guides. Ravi dreams of being a tourist until he is driven from Sri Lanka by devastating events.
Around these two superbly drawn characters, a double narrative assembles an enthralling array of people, places and stories - from Theo, whose life plays out in the long shadow of the past, to Hana, an Ethiopian woman determined to reinvent herself in Australia.
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Published by:
Allen & Unwin
About the author
Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka and immigrated to Australia when she was 14. Educated in Melbourne and Paris, Michelle has worked as a university tutor, an editor and a book reviewer. She is the author of The Rose Grower, The Hamilton Case, which won the Commonwealth Prize (SE Asia and Pacific region) and the UK Encore Prize, and The Lost Dog, which won a swag of awards, including: the 2008 NSW Premier's Book of the Year Award and the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, and the 2008 ALS Gold Medal.
The Lost Dog was also shortlisted for the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, the Western Australian Premier's Australia-Asia Literary Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Asia-Pacific Region) and Orange Prize's Shadow Youth Panel. It was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction.
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Judges’ comments
Judges' Comments
Michelle de Kretser has written a brave account of two extraordinary and apparently separate lives, and all the lives that intersected with theirs that will have readers examining their own sense of place in the world.
The two travellers in these gorgeously addictive parallel tales could not be more different: Laura the restless Australian and perpetually dissatisfied tourist, and Ravi the Sri Lankan, forced to become a refugee.
As they criss-cross the world and each others' paths, never quite escaping the ties of home, de Kretser's novel assembles an array of encounters and experiences for each of her travellers to raise questions that are droll, piquant, satirical, sometimes devastating. In prose of sparkling wit, she seduces, teases and challenges her readers into looking at their own assumptions about what it means to be on the move.
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Lost Voices
About the book
Young Hugh Dixon believes he can save his father from ruin if he asks his estranged great-uncle Walter – a wealthy lawyer who lives alone in an inherited Tasmanian farmhouse – for help. As he is drawn into Walter's rarefied world, Hugh discovers that both his uncle and the farmhouse are links to a notorious episode in the mid nineteenth century. Dramatic, insightful and evocative, Lost Voices is an intriguing double narrative that confirms Koch as one of our most significant and compelling novelists.
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Harper Collins
About the author
Christopher Koch was an award-winning Australian novelist. Born and educated in Tasmania, he spent most of his life in Sydney where he worked for some years as a radio producer in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. His novels won international praise and a number of awards. One of his novels, The Year of Living Dangerously, was made into a film by Peter Weir. Koch twice won the Miles Franklin Award for fiction: for The Doubleman and Highways to a War. In 1995 he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for his contribution to Australian literature.
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Mateship with Birds
About the book
On the outskirts of an Australian country town in the 1950s, a lonely farmer trains his binoculars on a family of kookaburras that roost in a tree near his house. Harry observes the kookaburras through a year of feast, famine, birth, death, war, romance and song. As Harry watches the birds, his next door neighbour has her own set of binoculars trained on him. Ardent, hard-working Betty has escaped to the country with her two fatherless children. Betty is pleased that her son, Michael, wants to spend time with the gentle farmer next door. But when Harry decides to teach Michael about the opposite sex, perilous boundaries are crossed.
Mateship with Birds is a novel about young lust and mature love. It is a hymn to the rhythm of country life - to vicious birds, virginal cows, adored dogs and ill-used sheep. On one small farm in a vast, ancient landscape, a collection of misfits question the nature of what a family can be.
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Published by:
Pan Macmillan
About the author
Carrie Tiffany was born in West Yorkshire and grew up in Western Australia. She spent her early twenties working as a park ranger in the Red Centre and now lives in Melbourne, where she works as an agricultural journalist. Her first novel, Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living (2005) was shortlisted for numerous awards including the Orange Prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Guardian First Book Award and the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, and won the Dobbie Award for Best First Book (2006) and the 2006 Western Australian Premier's Award for Fiction. Mateship with Birds is her second novel.
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Jam Tree Gully
About the book
In this daring new collection, Australia's preeminent environmental poet confronts the legacy of Thoreau's Walden. With Walden as his inspiration, John Kinsella moved with his family back to rural Australia, where he wrote the poems in this original collection exploring the nature of our responsibility and connection to the land.
One of the most original and poignantly authentic poets writing in English."—Harold Bloom
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Published by:
Wiley Publishing
About the author
John Kinsella is a poet, novelist, critic, and editor. The author of more than forty books, he is the international editor of the Kenyon Review and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University. He lives in Western Australia.
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Judges’ comments
Judges' Comments
John Kinsella's poems are an observation of his surrounds in the Western Australian farming community – the animals, the weather, the people. Kinsella shows his extraordinary skills, using a wide variation of verse forms to great effect in this outstanding collection.
This book of poems is an extraordinarily attentive chronicle of living in a West Australian place. Referencing Thoreau's wish, in Walden, to 'live deliberately', Kinsella's poems offer keen observations of animal life (wild, feral and domesticated), landscape, weather, and the social life of Australian country towns and the small properties that encircle them.
These are also poems of great technical virtuosity and variation, exploring traditional verse forms and freer, experimental modes of language. They capture the continual unexpectedness of the world, its violent weather, the proximate lives of animals, the depredations of settlement, the demands of the seasons. This is a poetic voice finely tuned to the shocks and delight of country life.
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Crimson Crop
About the book
This volume has at its core a series of elegies, several about his late father Bob Rose (a respected Australian Rules footballer and coach), thus continuing the themes of his bestselling memoir Rose Boys (2001). The volume also contains new ‘Catullan’ poems, imitations of Catullus that Rose has been writing and publishing since the 1980s.
Crimson Crop is elegant, poignant and, at times, wickedly droll.
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Published by:
UWA Publishing
About the author
Peter Rose is a poet, memoirist, novelist and critic. Born in Wangaratta, Peter grew up in country Victoria and studied at Monash University in Melbourne. Throughout the 1990s he was a publisher at the Melbourne Oxford University Press. Since 2001 he has been the editor of the Australian Book Review. His first collection of poetry, The House of Vitriol, appeared in 1990.
Peter has also written two novels and edited two poetry collections. In 2012 Rose’s fifth poetry collection Crimson Crop won the Queensland Literary Award and was shortlisted for both the 2012 Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards and the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. His family memoir, Rose Boys, published in 2001, won the National Biography Award. The Subject of Feeling (UWA Publishing, 2015) is his latest collection.
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Applications open for the Regional Arts Fund
7 March 2018
Check the closing dates in your state or territory for submissions.
Burning Rice
About the book
These poems were written while Eileen Chong was an Australian Poetry Fellow in 2011-2012, mentored by Anthony Lawrence.
The first edition of Burning Rice was published by Australian Poetry in 2012 as part of its New Voices series and sold out in record time.
In 2012 it was highly commended for the “Anne Elder Award for a first collection of poetry published in Australia.
The poems in Burning Rice pull you in with their sumptuous images and seductive memories. Eileen Chong’s poetry is a gift of the interconnection of past and present, the personal and the communal. Judith Beveridge
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Pitt Street Poetry (2012 publisher Australian Poetry)
About the author
Eileen Chong was born in Singapore. Her first collection, Burning Rice, was published in 2010. It was shortlisted for the Anne Elder Award 2012, the Australian Arts in Asia Award 2013, and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award 2013. Her second collection, Peony (2014) and third collection Painting Red Orchids (2016) were published by Pitt Street Poetry. She has lived in Sydney since 2007.
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The Sunlit Zone
About the book
Set on the east coast of Australia between 2020 and 2050, this surprising verse novel imagines a futuristic world in which technology has changed the daily texture of human life but life itself hasn’t changed much at all. Jacobson uses a casual-seeming voice that belies the craft and care in the writing. In a world radically different from ours in some ways, in others it is disconcertingly the same. Designer babies and hybrid pets abound. Yet the love stories and family tragedies depicted have the same qualities as those we know, as do the experiences of loss and recovery.
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Published by:
Five Island Press
About the author
Lisa Jacobson is the author of four poetry collections: Hair & Skin & Teeth (Five islands Press, 1995); The Sunlit Zone (Five Islands Press, 2012), which won the Adelaide Festival John Bray Poetry Award and was shortlisted in four other national awards; South in the World (UWA Publishing, 2014) and The Asylum Poems (IPSI, 2016). She lives in Melbourne, and is an Honorary Research Fellow at La Trobe University.
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Liquid Nitrogen
About the book
Jennifer Maiden’s ‘weaving’ poems are like verse essays or conversations, in which the political issues of our time and the figures who dominate them are presented with the same clear intelligence and eye for detail, as the most personal aspects of the poet’s experience. This is the quality of liquid nitrogen which gives the book its title – ‘the frozen suspension which is risky/ but also fecund and has beauty’ – a substance which permits intense and heated interactions, and at the same time the survival of delicate organisms. In the cool medium of Maiden’s poetry Julia Gillard is considered by her mentor Nye Bevan, Kevin Rudd shares a flight with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Eleanor Roosevelt plays Woody Guthrie for Hillary Clinton. The poems focus on the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, Breivik in Norway, dissidents in Beijing, the protests in Tahrir Square and Gillard’s use of power, alongside tributes to friends and family, the ox and the tiger, music and the power of poetry.
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Giramondo Publishing
About the author
Jennifer Maiden has published sixteen collections of poetry; her most recent book, Pirate Rain (Giramondo, 2010) won the Age Poetry Book of the Year Award and the NSW Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. She is a recipient of the Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement.
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Australia Council Awards
8 March 2018
Eight of Australia’s leading artists and arts workers have been recognised in the annual Australia Council Awards for their outstanding...
Bold Palates: Australia's gastronomic heritage
About the book
In Bold Palates Professor Barbara Santich describes how, from earliest colonial days, Australian cooks have improvised and invented, transforming and 'Australianising' foods and recipes from other countries, along the way laying the foundations of a distinctive food culture.
What makes the Australian barbecue characteristically Australian? Why are pumpkin scones an Australian icon? How did eating lamb become a patriotic gesture?
Bold Palates is lovingly researched and extensively illustrated. Barbara Santich helps us to a deeper understanding of Australian identity by examining the way we eat. Not simply a gastronomic history, her book is also a history of Australia and Australians.
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Published by:
Wakefield Press
About the author
Barbara Santich is an internationally respected culinary historian and the author of seven books. For many years she taught food history and culture, and food writing, at the University of Adelaide. She lives in South Australia and has recently written the history of Haigh's Chocolates, Enjoyed for Generations (Wakefield Press).
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Plein Airs and Graces: The life and times of George Colingridge
About the book
Plein Airs and Graces examines the extraordinary life of George Collingridge de Tourcey, a landscape painter of the late nineteenth century, just ahead of the Australian impressionists. When he emigrated from France to Australia he grew passionate about the possibilities of his new country, and worked tirelessly to contribute to it – not least for his Discovery of Australia (1895), in which on the evidence of ancient maps he argued controversially for Portuguese and Hispanic pre-discovery of Australia.
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Wakefield Press
About the author
Adrian Mitchell retired from academic life at the University of Sydney in 2006, though he has remained an honorary research associate in the Department of English since then. In the respite from that kind of confusion he has managed to publish five previous books, all with Wakefield Press, and all hovering about the interface of fiction and nonfiction. These are all stories of people and communities that should be better known than they are.
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Bradman’s War
About the book
The Australian and English Test cricketers who fought and survived together in WWII came home planning to resume the Ashes in a new spirit of friendship. Australia's legendary captain had something else in mind.
The 1948 'Invincibles' are the only Australian team to complete a tour of England undefeated. Knox exposes the mixed feelings among the fans, commentators and players about how their feats were achieved. At its heart was a rift between players who had experienced the horrors of active duty, epitomised by the fiery RAAF pilot Keith Miller, and those who had not, such as the invalided Bradman
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Published by:
Penguin Random House
About the author
Malcolm Knox is the former literary editor and award-winning cricket writer of the Sydney Morning Herald, where he broke the Norma Khouri story, for which he won one of his two Walkley Awards. His novels include A Private Man, winner of the Ned Kelly Award; The Life; and The Wonder Lover. His many non-fiction titles include The Greatest: The Players, the Moments, the Matches 1993–2008; The Captains: The Story Behind Australia's Second Most Important Job; Boom: The Underground History of Australia, From Gold Rush to GFC, which won the 2013 Ashurst Business Literature Prize; and Bradman's War.
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Uncommon Soldier
About the book
Chris Masters turns his penetrating gaze on the young men and women who make up the Australian Army. Having been taken into their ranks in a way rarely afforded an outsider, he gives heart and soul to the contemporary digger: how they are selected, how they are led, and how they are transformed from civilians to disciplined professional soldiers. And by sharing their experiences, he puts under severe challenge that soldiering is the province of dumb grunts.
Uncommon Soldier is a rich and powerful character study of the modern Australian soldier - war fighter, peacekeeper, street-level diplomat and aid-worker.
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Published by:
Allen & Unwin
About the author
Chris Masters is Australia's best-known investigative reporter, and is the author of the bestselling Jonestown (2006). In 1985, he won Australia's most prestigious award in journalism, the Gold Walkley, for his Four Corners report on the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior. His reports 'The Big League' and 'The Moonlight State' both led to royal commissions that helped transform the nation.
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