ACT Book of the Year
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Winner 2021
 | Subhash Jaireth |  |
JUDGES COMMENTS
Subhash Jaireth is a writer of international significance, and Spinoza’s Overcoat represents the culmination of decades of work. This major achievement takes a broad literary perspective, pushing form and progression of poetics. This is first-class cultural criticism, in a voice that is daring and rare, moving and lifting. Subhash Jaireth is a superb writer, poet and researcher, and above all true to himself.
SYNOPSIS
'It starts to rain as I step out of my hotel ....' So begins Subhash Jaireth's striking collection of essays on the writers, and their writing, that have enriched his own life. The works of Franz Kafka, Marina Tsvetaeva, Mikhail Bulgakov, Paul Celan, Hiromi Ito, Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza and others ignite in him the urge to travel (both physically and in spirit), almost like a pilgrim, to the places where such writers were born or died or wrote. In each essay a new emotional plane is reached revealing enticing connections. As a novelist, poet, essayist and translator born into a multilingual environment, Subhash Jaireth truly understands the power of words across languages and their integral connections to life of the body and the spirit. Drawing on years of research, translation and travel Spinoza's Overcoat – and its illuminations of loss, mortality and the reverie of writing – will linger with readers.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Subhash Jaireth was born in Punjab, India. Between 1969 and 1978 he spent nine years in Russia studying geology and Russian literature. In 1986 he migrated to Australia. He has published poetry in Hindi, English and Russian. His published works include Yashodhara: Six Seasons Without You (Wild Peony, 2003), Unfinished Poems for Your Violin (Penguin Australia, 1996), Golee Lagne Se Pahle (Before the Bullet Hit Me) (Vani Prakashan, 1994), To Silence: Three Autobiographies (Puncher& Wattmann, 2011), After Love (Transit Lounge, 2012), Moments (Puncher & Wattmann, 2014), Incantations (Recent Work Press, 2016) and Aflame (Gazebo Books, 2021).
Other works by this author available in Libraries ACT.
Highly Commended 2020
 | Moya Pacey |  |
JUDGES COMMENTS
Doggerland is original and cohesive collection of poetry, in a clear and distinctive voice. It has a dream-like quality, evoking memories of the past with a restraint that leaves space for the reader’s emotional response and speaks to a wide audience.
SYNOPSIS
Doggerland is the name of a once fertile and populated land mass, now submerged under the North Sea, that once connected the British Isles with Europe. In the winter of 2017/18, Doggerland was clearly visible once again from the coast near the town where Moya Pacey was born and raised. In Moya Pacey’s hands, this phenomenon works as a metaphor for how memory brings to the surface images, glimpses, stories, people and places appearing and disappearing, in no set order, around the space of this collection of poems.
Doggerland revisits a time of post-World War II northern England, replete with traditional norms and values, and darknesses waiting to emerge above the water of everyday life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Moya Pacey was born and grew up in Middlesbrough in the north of England. She came to Canberra in 1978 and taught English until she retired. Her poems have won prizes, been read on radio, appeared on buses, gallery walls and published in print and on-line in Australia and overseas. Doggerland is her third collection. Moya Pacey is a founding editor of the women’s on-line poetry journal Not Very Quiet and was awarded, with Sandra Renew, a Canberra Critics’ Circle Award in 2019 for her influential work in exposing women’s poetry to view via the journal.
Other works by this author available in Libraries ACT.
 | Bernard Collaery |  |
JUDGES COMMENTS
With deep and thorough research Bernard Collaery has produced a work of political and cultural significance. Oil Under Troubled Water raises important and timely ethical questions for Australia.
SYNOPSIS
In May 2018, Bernard Collaery, a former Attorney-General of the Australian Capital Territory and long-term legal counsel to the government of East Timor, was charged by the Australian Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions with conspiracy to breach the Intelligence Services Act 2001. He was forbidden from talking about the charges against him, but under parliamentary privilege independent MP Andrew Wilkie revealed what has since been described as 'Australian politics' biggest scandal'. Five years earlier, after ASIO officers raided Bernard Collaery's home and office, he told journalists that ASIO had been bugging the East Timorese government during negotiations over Timor Sea oil. He was about to represent East Timor; as well as calling the evidence of a former senior ASIO agent known publicly only as Witness K, at The Hague in a case against the Australian government. Oil Under Troubled Water relates the sordid history of Australian government dealings with East Timor.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bernard Collaery is an Australian solicitor and barrister who specialises in litigation in high-profile catastrophic personal injury cases. He has acted for families of victims of the Thredbo landslide, the Royal Canberra Hospital demolition tragedy, the Glenbrook rail disaster in the Blue Mountains, the fire aboard HMAS Westralia and the tragic loss of an RAAF F111 in the South China Sea. Throughout his career as a solicitor, advocate and politician Bernard has been a fearless advocate for human rights. During his tenure as Attorney-General for the Australian Capital Territory, he introduced an independent law reform process that culminated in the drafting of human rights legislation, including anti-discrimination legislation. Bernard Collaery advised the East Timor Resistance for more than thirty years, providing advice on international law and other matters during the United Nations Transitional Administration from 1999. He acted for East Timor at the International Court of Justice in relation to a maritime sea boundary dispute with Australia. Currently Bernard Collaery is patron and honorary solicitor of various charitable and non-profit organisations serving Indigenous Australians and marginalised sectors of the community.
Shortlisted 2021
 | PS Cottier |  |
JUDGES COMMENTS
The judging panel agreed Utterly by PS Cottier is lively and moving, with a lightness of touch regarding challenging themes.
SYNOPSIS
Utterly has many poems about the environment and climate change, as well as more personal concerns.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PS Cottier is a poet who lives in Canberra, with a particular interest in speculative poetry. She has been published widely at home and in Canada, England, New Zealand and the USA. Two of her horror poems were finalists in the Australian Shadows Awards for 2020. Her latest books are Monstrous, which is a volume of speculative poems, and Utterly, which is non-genre. PS Cottier is the Poetry Editor at The Canberra Times.
Other works by this author available in Libraries ACT.
 | Penelope Layland |  |
JUDGES COMMENTS
The judging panel agreed Nigh by Penelope Layland is an intriguing and diverse collection of poems.
SYNOPSIS
A new collection of poems steeped in a sense of dark foreboding. Jumping from the global to the everyday, many of the poems in Nigh chime with the mood that all is not right with the world. Even in the seemingly mundane, or the overtly beautiful, lay some uncomfortable truths, waiting to be unpicked. Nigh fully displays the confidence of a poet looking and thinking deeply about the world and offering it up in crisp and beguiling.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Penelope Layland is an award-winning poet and a former journalist, speechwriter and communications professional. Her 2018 collection Things I've thought to tell you since I saw you last was shortlisted for both the 2019 Kenneth Slessor Prize and the 2019 ACT Book of the Year, and won the ACT Publishing and Writing Award for poetry in 2019. Her most recent book is Nigh (Recent Work Press 2020).
Other works by this author available in Libraries ACT.
 | Patrick Mullins |  |
JUDGES COMMENTS
The judging panel agreed The Trials of Portnoy by Patrick Mullins was commendable in its depth of research and ability to shed light on an important cultural question.
SYNOPSIS
Fifty years after the event, here is the first full account of an audacious publishing decision that - with the help of booksellers and readers around the country - forced the end of literary censorship in Australia. For more than seventy years, a succession of politicians, judges, and government officials in Australia worked in the shadows to enforce one of the most pervasive and conservative regimes of censorship in the world. The goal was simple: to keep Australia free of the moral contamination of impure literature. Under the censorship regime, books that might damage the morals of the Australian public were banned, seized, and burned; bookstores were raided; publishers were fined; and writers were charged and even jailed. But in the 1970s, that all changed. In 1970, in great secrecy and at considerable risk, Penguin Books Australia resolved to publish Portnoy's Complaint- Philip Roth's frank, funny, and profane bestseller about a boy hung up about his mother and his penis. In doing so, Penguin spurred a direct confrontation with the censorship authorities, which culminated in criminal charges, police raids, and an unprecedented series of court trials across the country. Sweeping from the cabinet room to the courtroom, The Trials of Portnoy draws on archival records and new interviews to show how Penguin and a band of writers, booksellers, academics, and lawyers determinedly sought for Australians the freedom to read what they wished - and how, in defeating the forces arrayed before them, they reshaped Australian literature and culture forever.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patrick Mullins is a Canberra-based writer. He is author of Tiberius with a Telephone (2018), The Trials of Portnoy (2020), and the co-author, with Matthew Ricketson, of Who needs the ABC? (2022).
Other works by this author available in Libraries ACT.
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