In her seventh novel, which follows a young woman in the mid-1980s Melbourne working on a master’s thesis about novelist Virginia Woolf, judges said de Kretser “masterfully tests the limits of the novel as a form to investigate power in all its complexity”.
“Moving between fictional, auto fictional and essayistic modes, this novel is elegant, playful and razor sharp. It plays with and tests readers’ assumptions about authors and narrators, lived experience and fiction, and how these assumptions are shaped by gender, ethnicity and class.”
Other winners, each receiving $80,000 tax-free, are:
Australian history: Critical Care: Nurses on the frontline of Australia’s AIDS crisis by Geraldine Fela, a work examining Australia’s response to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s from the perspective of health care practitioners and patients.
Children’s literature: Leo and Ralph by Peter Carnavas, a book that speaks to children who are quiet, awkward, curious or outside the “popular group” and sometimes side-lined by confident extroverts.
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Young adult literature: The Invocations by Krystal Sutherland. The New York Times bestselling novelist, the judges said, is “at the height of her powers, showcasing a truly impressive command of character and theme”.
Poetry: The Other Side of Daylight: New and Selected Poems by David Brooks. Judges said Brooks’ “abundance of finely observed poems about rural life in the Blue Mountains burn with a passionate conviction for animal welfare and environmental conservation”.
Morton, who is the author of four non-fiction books, including the critically acclaimed bestseller, One Hundred Years of Dirt, wasn’t present at the awards.
He is taking a “a gap year” in Paris, where he is a writing a fiction work he put on hold to dig into the robo-debt scandal. He will use the prize money to sustain his overseas writing life.
Morton thought he was done with robo-debt when he reported the findings of the royal commission in 2023.
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“I named names and some of the public servants complained to me that I was mean, and it made me realise that was the only thing that these public servants cared about, their reputation, and I wasn’t prepared to let it go after that.
“I think the bare minimum is that when there are such vulnerable lives in their hands, and you are involved in robo-debt, even innocently, that they still lose their jobs,” Morton says.
“There’s a lesson there as to how white-collar crime is treated.”
