This year’s Miles Franklin winner, Jennifer Down, is one of 12 writers on the shortlists for The Age book of the year awards as the prize expands in 2022. For the first time since 2012, when the awards began a nine-year hiatus, a non-fiction category will be added.
The book of the year awards will again be part of the opening gala of the Melbourne Writers Festival on September 8, which features Down, novelist Mohsin Hamid and Indigenous activist professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson discussing the festival theme: ambition.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert’s memoir of her time in jail in Iran is on the shortlist for the non-fiction award.Credit:Scott McNaughton
Each of the award winners will receive $10,000 thanks to the Copyright Agency’s cultural fund. Down’s novel Bodies of Light is joined on the fiction shortlist by In Moonland (by Miles Allinson), Cold Enough for Snow (Jessica Au), After Story (Larissa Behrendt), The Signal Line (Brendan Colley) and Love & Virtue (Diana Reid). The last two are debut novels.
The shortlist for non-fiction consists of: Whole Notes: Life Lessons Through Music by Ed Ayres; Leaping Into Waterfalls: The Enigmatic Gillian Mears by Bernadette Brennan; The Boy in the Dress by Jonathan Butler; The Uncaged Sky: My 804 Days in an Iranian Prison by Kylie Moore-Gilbert; Astronomy: Sky Country by Karlie Noon and Krystal De Napoli; and Childless: A Story of Freedom and Longing by Sian Prior.
The judges were author and reviewer Simon Caterson, Joy Damousi, director of the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Australian Catholic University, author Bram Presser, and former literary editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and author Susan Wyndham.
Diana Reid has been shortlisted for her first novel, Love & Virtue.Credit:Wolter Peeters
The Age awards were first presented in 1974 when David Foster won the fiction prize and overall book of the year award for The Pure Land and Manning Clark received the non-fiction prize for A History of Australia Volume III. A poetry prize was introduced in 1993, with the first winner being John Tranter for At the Florida. This year will be the 40th occasion on which the awards have been presented.
Previous winners of the awards have included Luke Davies, Peter Carey, Dorothy Porter, David Marr, Peter Porter, Tim Winton, Don Watson, Christos Tsiolkas, Gillian Mears and David Malouf.
The festival program is included in Spectrum on Saturday. The Age is a festival partner. mwf.com.au
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