ACT Book of the Year
Winner 2020
 | Lisa Fuller |  |
JUDGES COMMENTS
The judging panel considered Ghost Bird a complex and ambitious novel that uses young adult supernatural fiction to drive a harrowing analysis into colonial trauma.
SYNOPSIS
Stacey and Laney are twins – mirror images of each other – and yet they’re as different as the sun and the moon. Stacey works hard at school, determined to get out of their small town. Laney skips school and sneaks out of the house to meet her boyfriend. But when Laney disappears one night, Stacey can’t believe she’s just run off without telling her.
As the days pass and Laney doesn’t return, Stacey starts dreaming of her twin. The dreams are dark and terrifying, difficult to understand and hard to shake, but at least they tell Stacey one key thing – Laney is alive. It’s hard for Stacey to know what’s real and what’s imagined and even harder to know who to trust. All she knows for sure is that Laney needs her help.
Stacey is the only one who can find her sister. Will she find her in time?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lisa Fuller is a Wuilli Wuilli woman from Eidsvold, Queensland, and is also descended from Gooreng Gooreng and Wakka Wakka peoples. She won the 2017 David Unaipon Award for an Unpublished Indigenous Writer, the 2018 Varuna Eleanor Dark Flagship Fellowship, was a joint winner of the 2018 Copyright Agency Fellowships for First Nations Writers, and placed second in the 2018 Feminartsy Memoir Prize. Lisa's young adult novel, Ghost Bird, won the Griffith University Young Adult Book Award in the Queensland Literary Awards, the Norma K Hemming Award, and Readings Young Adult Prize in 2020, and was shortlisted for the Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature in the 2021 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. She has previously published poetry, blogs and short fiction. Lisa is an editor and publishing consultant, and is passionate about culturally appropriate writing and publishing. Lisa is a member of Us Mob Writing, the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild, the First Nations Australia Writers Network, and the Canberra Society of Editors.
Highly Commended 2020
 | Nigel Featherstone |  |
SYNOPSIS
Egypt, 1941. Only hours after disembarking in Alexandria, William Marsh, an Australian corporal at twenty-one, is face down in the sand, caught in a stoush with the Italian enemy. He is saved by James Kelly, a childhood friend from Sydney and the last person he expected to see. But where William escapes unharmed, not all are so fortunate. William is sent to supervise an army depot in the Western Desert, with a private directive to find an AWOL soldier: James Kelly. When the two are reunited, James is recovering from an accident, hidden away in the home of an unusual family - a family with secrets. Together they will risk it all to find answers. Soon William and James are thrust headlong into territory more dangerous than either could have imagined.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nigel Featherstone is an Australian writer who has been published widely. His works include the story collection Joy (2000), his debut novel Remnants (2005), and The Beach Volcano (2014), which is the third in a series of novellas. He wrote the libretto for The Weight of Light, a contemporary song cycle that had its world premiere in 2018. He has held residencies at Varuna (Blue Mountains), Bundanon (Shoalhaven River), and UNSW Canberra at the Australian Defence Force Academy.
Bodies of Men was shortlisted for the 2019 Queensland Literary Awards - Fiction, Longlisted for the 2020 ARA Historical Novel Prize and winner of the 2019 Canberra Critics Circle Award - Fiction.
 | Tim Bonyhady |  |
SYNOPSIS
The fascinating story of a much-maligned and little-understood native Australian rodent.
The long-haired rat breeds and spreads prodigiously after big rains. Its irruptions were plagues to European colonists, whofeared and loathed all rats, but times of feasting for Aboriginal people.
Tim Bonyhady explores the place of the long-haired rat in Aboriginal culture. He recounts how settler Australians responded to it, learned about it and, occasionally, came to recognise the wonder of it. And he reconstructs its changing, shrinking landscape—once filled with bilbies, letter-winged kites and inland taipans, but now increasingly the domain of feral cats.
An astonishing history, The Enchantment of the Long-haired Rat illuminates a species, a continent, its climate and its people like never before.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tim Bonyhady is one of Australia’s foremost environmental and cultural historians. His many books include Images in Opposition: Australian Landscape Painting 1801–1890, Burke and Wills: From Melbourne to Myth, Places Worth Keeping: Conservationists, Politics and Law, the award winning The Colonial Earth and The Enchantment of the Long-haired Rat.
The Enchantment of the Long-haired Rat was shortlisted for the 2020 prime Minister's Literary Award - non-fiction and for the Douglas Stewart Prize for non-fiction in the 2020 NSW Premier's Literary Award.
Shortlist 2020
 | John Clancy |  |
SYNOPSIS
Although set a hundred years ago, this novel powerfully captures the devastating and persistent reality of a fundamental flaw in the role of our major institutions. Central to this novel is James Pearse, an essentially good but circumstantially weak man, who is forced to examine his role at the St Barnabas Home for Children, an orphanage that has betrayed the individuals entrusted to its care. He must face the devastating wider consequences of a life of moral equivocation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Clanchy was born in Melbourne in 1943, but has lived in Canberra, working as a counsellor and academic at the Australian National University, since 1975.
He was for some years head of an academic advisory centre for students at the Australian National University and foundation director of the Graduate Teaching Program in the university's Graduate School. John has published nine volumes of fiction (five novels and three collections), as well as many uncollected short stories in magazines, newspapers and anthologies.
His stories have won many awards, in Australia, Europe, the US and New Zealand. His novel The Hard Word won the 2003 ACT Book of the Year in 2003, and his collection of stories Vincenzo's Garden won both the same prize in 2006 and the Steele Rudd Award the year before.
In addition to literary fiction, John has co-authored two detective thrillers with Mark Henshaw If God Sleeps and And Hope to Die, both now appearing in French and German. His book Her Father's Daughter, five long stories dealing with the complex and often fraught relations between fathers and daughters, was shortlisted for the ACT Book of the Year in 2009.
 | Sandra Renew |  |
SYNOPSIS
These poems interrogate the choices made in living and performing gender, sexuality and desire—of struggling to be queer in an Australia of Holden utes and rotting mangoes, XXXX stubbies and Bundy rum, boudoir drawers and country roads, toad princes and wanting to be Wesley Hall. It is a book of not wanting to conform, charting the myriad pressures society places on conformity as a mode of survival. It is a brave, and sometimes funny book, filled with wry and deeply felt images and observations
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sandra Renew has international, national and local publication of her work in journals and anthologies, as hard copy and on-line. She has a local and national reputation as a performance poet and was a featured poet at the National Folk Festival Spoken Word for three years from 2017 to 2019.
Sandra also writes short form prose and micro-lit and was a finalist for both the 2018 and 2019 joanne burns Microlit Award.
She is experimenting with using traditional forms to write about LGBTIQ presence in the world with the express aim of upsetting the order of the social order.
It’s the sugar, Sugar is her fourth collection after Acting Like a Girl (Recent Work Press 2019), The Orlando Files (Ginninderra Press 2018) and Who Sleeps at Night (Ginninderra Press 2017). One Last Border: Poetry for refugees was co-written as a fundraising project with Hazel Hall and Moya Pacey (Ginninderra Press 2015)
Sandra is a founding editor, with Moya Pacey, of Not Very Quiet an online journal for women’s poetry and co-hosts the Not Very Quiet women’s poetry nights at Smith’s Alternative. Sandra and Moya were awarded a Canberra Critics Circle Award for their influential contribution to women’s poetry in 2019.
Acting Like a Girl won the ACT Writer's Centre 2020 Writing and Publishing Award.
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