We asked Australia’s top authors, poets and illustrators – nominees for the 2019 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards – about the book they most wish they had written, and their answers are as varied as their own creations.
Read on!
Melissa Lucashenko, Too Much Lip (Fiction):
The one I’m currently working on!! A novel of colonial Brisbane, called Edenglassie.
Alison Whittaker, Blakwork (Poetry):
I could never, for obvious reasons, but Giovanni’s Room (James Baldwin). What was it like to be in and of a mind that could make that?
Clare Atkins, Between Us (Young Adult Fiction):
The only books I wish I had written are the ones that are half-formed in my mind but not yet on the page, because I know there’ll be years of hard work to write them in the future! I don’t wish I’d written any other author’s book because each writer’s voice is so distinctive; I can’t even imagine their story being mine. That said, I probably wouldn’t complain if I had written an international bestseller like Harry Potter that allowed me the financial freedom to focus purely on writing for the rest of my life!
Billy Griffiths, Deep Time Dreaming (Australian History):
Orlando by Virginia Woolf.
Judith Beveridge, Sun Music: New and Selected Poems (Poetry):
Anything from Shakespeare, Wallace Stephens, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson.
Cynthia Banham, A Certain Light (Non-Fiction):
I wish I wrote like Natalia Ginzburg, so something by her.
Keri Glastonbury, Newcastle Sonnets (Poetry):
Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems.
Laura Elizabeth Woollett, Beautiful Revolutionary (Fiction):
My Year Of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh.
Matt Ottley, The Incredible Freedom Machines (Children’s Fiction):
The Magus by John Fowles, because it is poetic, magical, intriguing and beautifully crafted.
Michael Gerard Bauer, The Things That Will Not Stand (Young Adult Fiction):
A toss-up between Catch-22 and The Grapes of Wrath.
Paul Genoni, Half the Perfect World (Non-Fiction):
I come across many books that I wish, at some level, I could have written, but I know that for almost all of them this would have been impossible—for reasons of knowledge, experience, temperament, capacity. But I would have been very happy to claim cultural historian Greil Marcus’ Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘N’ Roll Music as my own. I acquired my first copy in the mid-1970s, and have probably read it more than any other book over the years. As a reader, it brought together many things I had been trying to understand; as a writer, it gave me a sense of the direction my own writing might eventually take. But sadly, once again, it’s is a book I could not have written!
Rodney Hall, A Stolen Season (Fiction):
The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The greatest book written in my lifetime.
Sharon Kernot, The Art of Taxidermy (Young Adult):
Almost every second book I pick up. I always find a phrase or a character or something that I love and think – that’s amazing, I wish I’d written that.
Suneeta Peres da Costa, Saudade (Fiction):
That’s a difficult question, as I admire so many, both classics and contemporary works. And I think I admire certain books precisely because they come from someone else’s imagination. In terms of style, I would have to say Moby Dick is a book which is a staggering, virtuosic narrative and imaginative feat. Quite sure I would not have been able to pull it off!
Tanya Dalziell, Half the Perfect World (Non-Fiction):
There is an idea that we all ‘write’ the books we read in so far as we bring to them different meanings. Writing as a shared and shifting process appeals to me, more than wishing I had written a particular book.
Ten Terrifying Questions with Charlie Archbold! 
Illustrator Andrea Edmonds on how she created the pictures for The Voyage 
The 2019 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards shortlists are here!
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