ACT Book of the Year
>>2023 >> About the ACT Book of the Year
Winner
 | Chris Hammer |  |
SYNOPSIS
Yuwonderie's seven founding families have lorded it over their district for a century, growing ever more rich and powerful. But now—in startling circumstances—one of their own is found dead in a ditch and homicide detectives Ivan Lucic and Nell Buchanan are sent to investigate. Could the murder be connected to the execution of the victim's friend thirty years ago—another member of The Seven—or even to the long-forgotten story of a servant girl on the brink of the Great War? What are the secrets The Seven are so desperate to keep hidden? With the killer still on the loose and events spiralling out of control, the closer Ivan and Nell get to discovering the truth, the more dangerous their investigation becomes. Can they crack the case before more people die?
JUDGES COMMENTS
In The Seven Chris Hammer demonstrates total mastery of the crime genre. From the first pages onwards Hammer creates a thrilling narrative filled with suspense that immerses the reader in gripping, page-turning intrigue.
Hammer conveys a beautiful sense of place in developing this quintessential Australian story, filled with compelling characters, who are poignantly reflective about their own lives. The narrative, exposing the power of the landed aristocracy in a fictional country town, is skilfully controlled so that the reader is never certain where they will be taken next, until the final resolution. The town itself functions as a powerful metaphor which, with its art deco façade, is an evocative setting for this world-class crime novel.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Hammer is a leading Australian author of crime fiction. His first book, Scrublands, was an instant bestseller when it was published in mid-2018. It won the prestigious UK Crime Writers' Association John Creasey Award for a debut crime novel in 2019 and was shortlisted for various awards in Australia and the United States. He has a Bachelor’s degree in journalism from Charles Sturt University and a Master’s degree in International Relations from the Australian National University. He has two books of non-fiction, including The River: A journey through the Murray-Darling Basin which won ACT Book of the Year in 2011.
Highly Commended
 | Ayesha Inoon |  |
SYNOPSIS
Zia secretly longs to go to university, but as a young woman in a traditional Muslim family, she does what is expected of her and agrees to an arranged marriage to Rashid, a man she barely knows. Cocooned by the wealth and customs of her family, Rashid's dark moods create only the smallest of ripples in their early life together. When growing political unrest spurs them to leave Sri Lanka and immigrate to Australia, Zia is torn between fear of leaving her beloved family and the possibility of new freedoms. While on paper their new country welcomes them with open arms, their visas come with many restrictions, and for the first time, Zia faces isolation, poverty and an increasingly unstable marriage that forms a cage stronger than any she's known before. Determined to carve a place for herself in this new country, Zia sets out on uncertain terrain and discovers friendship, devastating loss and hope for a different future. One that asks her to consider not just who she is, but who she might become.
JUDGES COMMENTS
This debut novel from Ayesha Inoon offers a beautifully nuanced migrant story set in both Sri Lanka and Australia, featuring the city of Canberra with delightful local details. The style of writing is at times very poetic, leaving lasting images with the reader.
For her first novel, Untethered, Inoon demonstrates great promise, and has made a strong impression. Inoon’s strength is that she does not dictate what the reader is to feel, but offers a subtle portrayal of an arranged marriage from a woman’s perspective, providing cross-cultural insights through her protagonist’s journey to her new home.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ayesha Inoon is a Sri Lankan-Australian writer with a unique cultural perspective, which she brings to her writing. Born in Colombo, she travelled widely and worked as a journalist in Sri Lanka before immigrating to Australia in 2013. Winner of the ASA/HQ Commercial Fiction Prize 2022, her debut novel, Untethered, is partly based on her experiences as an immigrant Muslim woman. Ayesha was a recipient of the inaugural 2019 Penguin Random House Write It Fellowship for an early draft of this novel. In 2020 she was selected for the Rosie Scott Writing Residency in NSW, and in September 2022 she was awarded a KSP fellowship by the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre in WA to work on her second novel.
 | J. Ashley-Smith |  |
SYNOPSIS
Shirley Jackson Award-winning author J. Ashley-Smith's first collection, The Measure of Sorrow, draws together ten new and previously acclaimed stories of dark speculative fiction. In these pages a black reef holds the secret to an interminable coastal limbo; a father struggles to relate to his estranged children in a post-bushfire wilderness; an artist records her last days in conversation with her unborn child; a brother and sister are abandoned to the manifestations of their uncle's insanity; a suburban neighbourhood succumbs to an indescribable malaise; teenage ravers fall in with an eldritch crowd; a sensitive New Age guy commits a terminal act of passive-aggression; a plane crash opens the door to the Garden of Eden; the new boy in the village falls victim to a fatal ruse; and a husband's unexpressed grief is embodied in the shadows of a crumbling country barn. Intelligent and emotionally complex, the stories in The Measure of Sorrow elude easy classification, lifting the veil on the wonder and horror of a world just out of true.
JUDGES COMMENTS
The Measure of Sorrow is a quality collection of short stories crafted by J. Ashley-Smith that effortlessly lead the reader from the edge of reality and into the world of speculative fiction. Ashley-Smith masterfully blends colloquialisms with mystery, where the reader is offered seemingly normal, everyday situations that plunge and twist into unexpected, wonderous and imaginative destinations.
This collection is diverse in its themes but ultimately pulses with imagery. It is an accomplished example of its genre that speaks with the confidence of a storyteller able to make the reader leave the real world behind them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J. Ashley Smith is a British–Australian author of dark fiction and co-host of the Let The Cat In podcast. His first book, The Attic Tragedy, won the Shirley Jackson Award. Other stories have won the Ditmar Award, Australian Shadows Award and Aurealis Award. He lives with his wife and two sons in the suburbs of North Canberra, Australia.
Shortlist
 | Jackie French |  |
SYNOPSIS
Sixteen-year-old Nipper and his Gallipoli mates Lanky, Spud, Bluey and Wallaby Joe are starving, freezing and ill-equipped. By November 1915 they know that that there is more to winning a war than courage. The Gallipoli campaign has been lost. Nipper has played cricket with the Turks in the opposing dugout, dodged rocket fire and rescued drowning, freezing men when the blizzard snow melted. He is one of the few trusted with the secret kept from even most of the officers: how an entire army will vanish from the Peninsula over three impeccably planned nights. Based on first-hand accounts of those extraordinary last weeks of the Gallipoli campaign, this is the fascinating 'lost story' of how 150,000 men - and their horses and equipment - were secretly moved to waiting ships without a single life lost. An unforgettable story told through the eyes of a boy who lied about his age to defend his country.
JUDGES COMMENTS
The Great Gallipoli Escape is an experiential and realistic gateway for young readers to grasp the horror and tragedy of a significant period of world history. Jackie French presents a well-researched retelling of an historical event through the lens of the main character, sixteen-year-old Nipper, whose experiences further serve to highlight the costs of war. The book has genuine moments of pathos and drama intertwined with bleakness as tragic events unfold in the trenches.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jackie was the Australian Children's Laureate for 2014/15 and the 2015 Senior Australian of the Year. She is also an historian, ecologist, dyslexic, and a passionate worker for literacy, the right of all children to be able to read, and the power of books. Jackie is the ACT Children’s Week Ambassador, 2011 Federal Literacy Ambassador, patron of Books for Kids, YESS, and joint patron of Monkey Baa Theatre for Young People with Susanne Gervais and Morris Gleitzman. She is also a director of The Wombat Foundation that raises funds for research into the preservation of the endangered northern hairy nosed wombat. Jackie lives in the Canberra region, in the Araluen Valley, and maintains professional and artistic connections with the
ACT literature sector.
Two of Jackie's books have been on ACT Book of the Year shortlists. Facing the Flame in 2018 and Pharoah : the boy who conquered the Nile in 2008
 | Paul Hetherington |  |
SYNOPSIS
Sleeplessness renders and explores its speaker's insomnia for the hours between three a.m. and the early morning, presenting a captivating series of reflections on love and desire, language, reading, identity and intersubjectivity. The series of four extended and interlinked poetic sequences moves meditatively and laterally, often in astonishing ways, translating a world of ideas and associations into sensuous language. The poems foreground the beguiling, if troubling, problematics of interpersonal connections and the challenges involved in translating an individual's own experiences-and their experiences of another-into authentic ways of saying and understanding. These poems continuously approach the ineffable, sitting at the boundary between bodily knowledge and language's attempts to catch and name, transforming the idea of in-betweenness into a thrilling threshold between intimacy and strangeness, ardour and uncertainty, and speaking and silence. Night in these poems becomes a doorway into a state of becoming, generating a language that connotes a condition of perpetual and seductive inquiry, asking the reader to understand themselves newly through the act of reading.
JUDGES COMMENTS
Sleeplessness is a beautifully produced collection of poems; it is polished, sophisticated and hypnotic. Paul Hetherington expertly takes the reader on a nighttime journey that unfolds slowly, seductively and unpredictably. The flow of the language and design format mesmerise with their sleepy eroticism, and great turns of phrase project the reader into intimate spaces. Hetherington works effortlessly with an extensive range of literary and cultural references, filtered through the dreamy world of the insomniac.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Hetherington is Emeritus Professor of Writing in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra and a distinguished Australian poet who has published 18 poetry collections, a verse novel and 14 chapbooks, with more than 40 awards and nominations, including winning the 2021 Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize. He has also edited ten further volumes. He is a research leader in the field of poetry as practice-led research and an expert in the field of international prose poetry. Paul chaired the ACT Cultural Council (2005-2013) and the ACT Public Art Panel (2006-2011) and is a former chair of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP). He was one of the founders and a former chair of the
ACT Writers Centre and a former Deputy Chair of the Board of Manning Clark House.
His book, Shadow Swimmer, won the ACT Book of the Year in 1996.
 | Laura Rademaker |  |
SYNOPSIS
The Tiwi people have more than their fair share of stories that turn ideas of Australian history upside down. The Tiwi claim the honour of defeating a global superpower. When the world’s most powerful navy invaded and attempted to settle the Tiwi Islands in 1824, Tiwi warriors fought the British and won. The Tiwi remember the fight, and oral histories reveal their tactical brilliance.
Later, in 1911, Catholic priest Francis Xavier Gsell decided to ‘purchase’ Tiwi women and ‘free’ them from traditional marriage, so girls would grow up into devoted Catholics. But Tiwi women had more power in marriage negotiations than missionaries realised. They worked out how to be both Tiwi and Catholic. And it was the missionaries who came around to Tiwi thinking.
JUDGES COMMENTS
Tiwi Story is a book with a clear agenda and is a valuable example for those wishing to write and record oral histories. It demonstrates the strength of an open, first-person approach. The book’s power is found in the agency of the Tiwi people, in sharing and recording their history, stories and experiences in their own voices.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laura Rademaker is an ARC DECRA research fellow. She is the author of Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission (University of Hawai’i Press, 2018) on language and cross-cultural exchange at Christian missions to Aboriginal people, awarded the 2020 Hancock Prize. Her work explores the possibilities of ‘cross-culturalising’ history, interdisciplinary histories as well as oral history and memory. At present, is contributing to the Deep Human Past project, seeking to tell the ‘deep’ history of Australia and expand notions of history and the past. She is also working on a book about the Tiwi Islands and Aboriginal encounters with Catholicism as well as researching the closing of Christian missions, secularisation and Indigenous self-determination. She is co-editor of the Journal of Religious History and associate monographs editor for Aboriginal History Monographs.
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