ACT Book of the Year
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Winner 2022
 | Lucy Neave |  |
SYNOPSIS
As a teenager in the 1970s, Sarah is forced to leave her home in upstate New York to accompany a missionary to Idaho. When she falls pregnant, she is dispatched to relatives in Sydney, who place her in a home for unmarried mothers. Years later her daughter, Bet, pieces together her mother’s life story, hoping to understand her better. As she learns more about Sarah’s past, Bet struggles to come to terms with her own history and identity – yet is determined to make peace with Sarah’s choices before it’s too late. Moving and deeply personal, Believe in Me explores the relationships between mothers and their children across three generations of one family. This book questions what we can ever truly know of our parents’ early lives, even as their experiences weave ineffably into our identities and destinies.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lucy Neave grew up in Australia, Toronto, London and Kathmandu, and has spent several years living in the United States: first as a Fulbright scholar completing a Master of Fine Arts in writing, then teaching English in universities, and in 2019 as a visiting scholar in the English department at New York University. Lucy’s first novel, Who We Were, was shortlisted for the ACT Book of the Year. Her short fiction has been published in a range of Australian and American literary journals and in Best Australian Stories, and she was awarded a Griffith Review novella prize in 2018. Believe In Me was Highly Commended for the 2022 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards. She teaches creative writing at the Australian National University, where she is Associate Dean, Student Experience. She is the mother of two children.
Highly Commended
 | Merlinda Bobis |  |
SYNOPSIS
An oriole sings to a dying father. A bleeding-heart dove saves the day. A crow wakes a woman's resolve. Owls help a boy endure isolation. Cockatoos attend the laying of the dead. Always there are birds in these linked stories that pay homage to kindness amidst loss, grief, discord and displacement, from Australia to the Philippines.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Award-winning writer Merlinda Bobis grew up in Albay, Philippines at the foot of an active volcano and now lives in Ngunnawal Country (Canberra), Australia. Novelist, poet, short story writer, dramatist and performer, she dreams up stories across different geographies and languages: English, Filipino and Bikol. She defies borders by transforming them into flourishing spaces of interconnection.
 | Omar Musa |  |
SYNOPSIS
The island of Borneo was once the most heavily wooded in the world, and its people have always carved wood beautifully. In KILLERNOVA, grappling with his heritage, Omar Musa remixes this ancient art form with fiery poetry forged in the stars. With equal parts swagger, humour and vulnerability, Musa charts a journey through the colonial history of South-East Asia, environmental destruction, oceans, bushfires, race in Australia, the isolation and addiction of COVID lockdown, family, lost love and, ultimately, recovery. Relentlessly on beat, visually captivating and deceptively intimate, this is a collection of words and art that burns blindingly bright.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Omar Musa is a Bornean-Australian author, visual artist and poet from Queanbeyan, Australia. He has released four poetry books (including Killernova), four hip-hop records, and received a standing ovation at TEDx Sydney at the Sydney Opera House.
 | Dylan van den Berg |  |
SYNOPSIS
On the precipice of something life changing, a young Palawa man plunges into an exploration of self and Country. Carried with the winds of a metaphysical Flinders Island--the place where it all happened--he is drawn back to the dawn of colonisation; to a woman who bore the brunt of the oppressors' violence and then forward to her granddaughter, who buried the truth as a means of survival. Stirring up stories together, with parts both achingly sad and unexpectedly funny, what unfolds reveals by slow degrees painful but important truths. Do we own the stories of our ancestors? And does the passage of time undermine a connection to Country?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dylan Van Den Berg is a Palawa man, actor and writer based in Canberra. He graduated from ANU with a Bachelor of Arts (Drama) and trained in acting at the State University of New York, the Upright Citizens Brigade improvisation troupe (NYC) and the Canberra Youth Theatre senior ensemble. He is the winner of the 2021 Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting at the NSW Premiers Literary Awards and the 2020 Griffin Award for new Australian playwriting for his play: way back when.
 | Kaya Wilson |  |
SYNOPSIS
When Kaya Wilson came out to his parents as transgender, a year after a near-death surfing accident and just weeks before his father's death, he was met with a startling family history of concealed queerness and shame. This is a trans story. As Beautiful As Any Other weaves this legacy together with intimate examinations of the forces that have shaped Wilson's life, and his body: vulnerability and power, grief and trauma, science and narrative. This is also my story. In this powerful and lyrical memoir, Wilson makes a case for the strength we find when we confront the complexities of our identity with compassion.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kaya Wilson is a writer and tsunami scientist based in Australia. He was the winner of the 2019 Writing NSW Varuna Fellowship, a runner-up in the 2019 Kill Your Darlings New Critic Award and was shortlisted for Penguin Australia’s 2019 Write It Fellowship. As Beautiful as Any Other is his first book.
Shortlisted
 | Tim Bonyhady |  |
SYNOPSIS
From the complete coverage of chadaris to mini-skirts, and back again. From ancient carpet designs to woven depictions of tanks and Kalashnikovs. From photographs of unveiled women to an image of horror--the execution of a kneeling woman known as Zaremeena, videoed covertly by one of the few watching women. This remarkable book provides a history of Afghanistan through the visual. The Kabul Stadium looms large because it was there, one afternoon in August 1959, that women first appeared in western dress at a celebration of Afghanistan's independence--a turning point, not only for women in Afghanistan's cities but also for the country itself, symbolising its embrace of the modern. It was also there, one afternoon in November 1999, that the Taliban killed Zarmeena. Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium offers both a new way of seeing Afghanistan and a new way of understanding it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Professor Tim Bonyhady is one of Australia’s foremost environmental lawyers, cultural historians and curators.
Australian colonial art was the subject of his first three books. Then his interests extended to art, science and exploration in Burke and Wills: From Melbourne to Myth. In his first prize-winning book The Colonial Earth he brought his legal and cultural interests together as he examined the origins of environmental concern in Australia. In his next prize-winning book Good Living Street his focus switched to Vienna, with questions of art, religion and identity looming large in a multi-generational family history. Since then, he has written two more prize-winning books, The National Picture: The Art of Tasmania's Black War and The Enchantment of the Long-haired Rat: A Rodent History of Australia. His latest book is Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium: A History of Afghanistan through Clothes, Carpets and the Camera.
Tim has also been an advisor to Commonwealth and State inquiries into environmental law and has curated exhibitions for the National Portrait Gallery of Australia, the National Library of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the National Gallery of Australia and the Australian National University including one exhibition about colonial portraiture, another about fin-de-siecle Vienna and two devoted to Afghan war rugs.
 | Hugh Poate |  |
SYNOPSIS
On 29 August 2012 Private Robert Poate, Lance Corporal Rick Milosevic and Sapper James Martin were killed during an insider -- or green on blue -- attack in Afghanistan. Their killer: a supposed ally, was a Taliban sleeper in the ranks of the Afghan National Army. Information provided to the families by rank-and-file soldiers after the event shocked them. When the heavily redacted internal investigation report excluded a plethora of incriminating facts. This book is the result of a father's quest to find out truth behind the death of his soldier son. Hugh's search reveals a labyrinth of excuses, denials, half-truths, cover-ups, contrived secrecy, incompetence, negligence, orders not followed and lessons not learnt.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hugh Poate is the father of Private Robert Poate. A retired public servant and agricultural economist, Hugh and his wife Jannie have spent the years since their son's death researching the events surrounding the fatal attack and the failure of command that allowed it. They have been active in supporting the veteran community, particularly through the charity, Soldier On.
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