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Member only guide to the Australian book industry.
MIN READ
The Australian Society of Authors (ASA) is delighted to announce the shortlist for the 2024 Barbara Jefferis Award:
This year’s judging panel was chaired by internationally bestselling author Hannah Kent. Kent was joined on the panel by acclaimed authors, editors, and critics, Jennifer Mills and Melanie Saward.
The judges were impressed by the exceptionally high quality of the titles under consideration for this years’ Award, saying, “It was a great honour and privilege to read a wealth of Australian literature for this Award, and the judges would like to extend their gratitude to all writers who entered.
“The many entries to this year’s prize reflected a healthy diversity of genre, form, settings and narratives. Common to many were themes of migration and exile, resilience and recovery from trauma, social isolation and renewed connection, thwarted ambition, and violence against bodies and minds. The representations of women and girls were varied and often original. We would welcome more expansive representations of gender diversity. The judges noticed and were encouraged by the many authors who sought to offer new perspectives of, or who wrote against past erasure in Australian history, or who embraced and celebrated complexity, resilience, and community. In our reflections, we noticed that few writers focused on the future, and we wondered whether this revealed a wider desire for, and interest in, historical reckoning for this country.
“The shortlisted titles were decided unanimously by the judges. All six books are of exceptional literary merit, and we found that with all authors demonstrating writing ability of the highest calibre, our final discussions veered towards the works’ success in ‘positively depicting women or girls’ and how narratives were driven by such representation.
“We found all six books deeply affecting, and many highly memorable for their unswerving demands for social justice and reclamations of power. We would like to extend our congratulations to their authors.”
The judging panel also recognised three highly commended titles this year:
ASA CEO, Olivia Lanchester says, “Our heartfelt congratulations to the shortlisted and highly commended authors. We’re delighted to administer the Barbara Jefferis Award every two years to have the opportunity to honour the exceptional talent present in contemporary Australian writing and recognise books that meaningfully engage with the power of representation.”
The winner of the 2024 Barbara Jefferis Award will be announced at a ceremony in Sydney on Wednesday 13 November 2024.
Gail Jones, Salonika Burning (Text Publishing)
Gail Jones writes prose that can stop time. In Salonika Burning she transports readers to a period of shocking destruction, both historically specific and uncannily familiar. The individual stories of Stella, Grace, Olive and Stanley – four famous figures who served in Thessaloniki during the First World War – are woven seamlessly together in a narrative that centres on a war hospital inundated with the wounded following the burning of Salonika and consequent conflict. The use of four, equally-weighted protagonists has a prismatic effect on the events on the Eastern Front described: it is an expansive approach, affording wide exploration of issues of class, colonialism, racism, and violence. The literary skill of Jones is extraordinary. Salonika and the people within the city, abutting the city, in hostility with or grieving over the city, are evoked in powerful images not easily forgotten, and the precision of Jones’ sentences creates an atmospheric pressure exhilarating in its intensity.
Melissa Lucashenko, Edenglassie (University of Queensland Press)
Clever, satirical and deeply political, Edenglassie is at once an Aboriginal love story, a takedown of colonial structures, and a guide to decolonising our present. Moving back and forth between Magandjin (Brisbane) one generation after colonisation in the early nineteenth century, and the present day, Edenglassie follows the stories of Yugambeh man Mulanyin as he falls in love with Nita, a Ngugi woman ‘taken in’ by the white Petrie family, and nonagenarian Yagara woman Eddie Blanket who, hospitalised after a fall, suddenly receives much publicity as ‘Queensland’s oldest Aboriginal’. In the to and fro between the timelines, Lucashenko removes any sense of historicity – all is immediate, the past not at all dislocated from the present – and such dissolution of temporal boundaries emphasises that the violence of the 1800s continues, as does the sovereignty of First Nations peoples. Lucashenko’s gifts as a writer are abundant in Edenglassie. There is great humour and joy here, a cracking pace, compelling characters, and no shyness in speaking truth.
Mirandi Riwoe, Sunbirds (University of Queensland Press)
In Sunbirds, Mirandi Riwoe transports the reader into a time and place not often explored by Australian writers. Set in the 1940s in what was then West Java, Sunbirds follows the stories of Anna van Hoorn, the daughter of Dutch tea plantation family, and Diah, the family’s housekeeper. When a local woman, Fientje, is murdered by a Dutchman, and the broader threat of Japanese invasion and world war looms over the van Hoorns and those who serve them, differences of gender, class, and racialised status gradually become visible, then brutal. In vibrant, sensuous prose, Riwoe captures the struggle for selfhood and nationhood under colonial rule with an attention to detail that is utterly enthralling. Sunbirds is at once a gripping wartime romance and a powerful story about survival and the struggle for independence.
Sarah M Saleh, Songs for the Dead and the Living (Affirm Press)
Songs for the Dead and the Living is a rich, emotive and deeply illuminating work that interrogates political, social and personal understandings of home and belonging alongside themes of war, colonisation, and dispossession. Through the story of a family of Palestinian refugees living in Beirut at the time of the Lebanese Civil War, Saleh unravels a history of loss and endurance. Jamilah, the novel’s protagonist, is superbly drawn, and it is through her progression from girlhood to womanhood, and from Lebanon to Egypt to Australia, that Saleh captures the consequences of displacement, as well as the strength and resilience of the displaced. Saleh’s prose has a lyricism that gives Songs for the Dead and the Living a profound emotional resonance and timelessness and makes it stand out as a novel that is urgent, intimate and filled with joy. Songs for the Dead and the Living is a book to change hearts and minds.
Lucy Treloar, Days of Innocence and Wonder (Pan Macmillan Australia)
In this powerful novel, Till, a young woman haunted by a childhood experience of loss, escapes Melbourne with her greyhound and washes up in South Australia’s mid-north in the small town of Wirowie. The spectrum of reactions to her arrival veers from deep kindness to latent violence, and as Till settles in an abandoned train station, the town’s inhabitants are forced into a reckoning with their personal histories of generosity, hostility, loss and pain. Days of Innocence and Wonder is a book of richly-textured characters, in which the legacies of violence upon Country return upon its inhabitants in nuanced but undeniable ways. In addressing the many kinds of harm done to women and girls, Treloar never relinquishes her protagonist’s power to set the terms of her survival. The psychological and physical manifestations of Till’s trauma are described with such accuracy and empathy they are experienced on a physical level by the reader; so too the relief of her agency and autonomy. As a non-Indigenous writer, Treloar also demonstrates ways in which Australian authors can approach the writing of Indigenous characters: with relationships to custodians that are respectful, ongoing, and reciprocal.
Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional (Allen & Unwin)
Ostensibly quiet and shot through with stunning prose, Stone Yard Devotional is a masterful and meditative novel about a woman who at first retreats, and then more permanently recluses herself in an isolated convent on the Monaro Plains. As three ‘visitations’ attend its nuns and the narrating woman – first, a plague of mice, then the bones of a member of the order who was murdered in Thailand, and finally Sister Helen Parry, a famous climate activist – Wood addresses moral questions of attention, retreat, despair and accountability at a time of climate disaster. The protagonist and the surrounding nuns possess multidimensionality that makes them terrifically alive for the reader, and the way Wood explores selfhood as being comprised, too, of community – its inevitability, necessity – within a context of threat and the tenuous nature of life, is extraordinary. This interrogation of the im/possibility of seclusion, when so much of our humanity stems from connection, makes Stone Yard Devotional a profound and moving novel for these times.
