The 2020 Prime Minister’s Literary Award nominees share their favourite books!

We asked Australia’s top authors, poets and illustrators – nominees for the 2020 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards – about their all-time favourite books and poems, and the best thing they’ve read this year. Read on!

Carrie Tiffany (Exploded View, Fiction)

Some of my great reads in the last year are Helen Garner’s One Day I’ll Remember This, Annie Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story, Claire Louise Bennett’s Pond, and two NZ poets – Jackson Nieuwland, I Am A Human Being and Amy Brown, Neon Daze.

Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia, Nonfiction)

I recently read The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason, which I thought was marvellous. Two other recent books that I really admired were Maya Jasanoff’s biography of Joseph Conrad, The Dawn Watch, and Charles King’s Gods of the Upper Air, about the students of Franz Boaz, the anthropologist. I don’t have an all-time favourite book, but I am a mad fan of both Conrad and Patrick O’Brian.

Jasmine Seymour (Cooee Mittigar with Leanne Mulgo Watson, Children’s Literature)

My all-time favourite book is Tracks by Robin Davidson. I was gifted it when I was 13 years old and it remains one of the most incredible stories I have ever read. That Girl! The Desert. The Camels. Incredible, her fearlessness in that moment. I always wonder if I could have done it.

The best books I have read this year are all the books coming out of Magabala. Magabala are really championing diverse Indigenous Australian voices. Aboriginal people have very different lived experiences from place to place. All Voices. All truths. That what we need more of.

Johanna Bell (Cheeky Dogs: To Lake Nash and Back with Dion Beasley, Children’s Literature)

My two favourite books at the moment are Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter and Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill. Both play with form and neither book sticks to the rules. It’s hard to tell if you’re reading poetry, a novel or a play. In the world of picture books, my all-time favourite is The Red Tree by Shaun Tan. It’s a moving exploration about depression and the best visual depiction of big feelings that I’ve seen.

Judith Brett (From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia Got Compulsory Voting, Australian History)

I don’t have an all time favourite book or poem. The best book I’ve read this year is Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf.

Peter Davies (Sludge: Disaster on Australia’s Goldfields with Susan Lawrence, Australian History)

Two titles stand out: Wilding by Isabella Tree describes how the owners of the Knepp estate in Sussex returned their farm back to nature, with astonishing results for biodiversity and conservation. Greenwood by Michael Christie weaves a tale of trees and family over generations in Canada. It’s a bit like The Overstory (Richard Powers) but also quite different.

Lisa Gorton (Empirical, Poetry)

I don’t know the answer to the first question. But the recent new selection of Martin Johnston’s poetry, called Beautiful Objects (Ligature Press, 2020), is a great thing.

L.K. Holt (Birth Plan, Poetry)

I have too many all-time favourite poems, but the ones I’ve been reading the most this year are by Medbh McGuckian, Tomas Tranströmer, Kim Hyesoon, William Bronk, and good old Stevens. Prose-wise, my favourite books this year have been ‘Die, My Love’, by Ariana Harwicz, and ‘Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life’ by Yiyun Li.

Lucy Treloar (Wolfe Island, Fiction)

I love Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘At the Fishhouses’. I don’t think I could narrow down my book loves to a single favourite. Even a top five is stressful. But any list would always include Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son.

Malla Nunn (When the Ground is Hard, Young Adult Literature)

I have favourite books and poems; plural. Here’s a taster plate: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress. Mary Oliver’s poem, ‘Wild Geese’.

And on and on …

The best book of the year for me is a republished Scottish classic. Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon.

Meg McKinlay (Catch a Falling Star, Children’s Literature)

I struggle with the idea of favourites and bests but here goes: All-time favourite: Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding; while it isn’t a children’s book, its depiction of 12-year-old-ness rings so utterly true to me. I actually named Frankie in Catch a Falling Star after McCullers’ protagonist.

This year’s favourite: Wayne Macauley, Some Tests. I came to Macauley quite late and just love the surreal yet familiar worlds he creates. His work is so unsettling and he’s one of the few writers whose work I feel I inhabit entirely while reading.

Neil Grant (The Honeyman and the Hunter, Young Adult Literature)

‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’ by Sylvia Plath was read at our wedding, so I have a particular soft spot for that one. I became a member of Tough Guy Book Club this year, which has led me to many surprising gems, including Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, which is a beautiful and grotesque rendering of the Iraq War and its considerable human cost.

Omar Sakr (The Lost Arabs, Poetry)

I won’t even attempt the first part, but I’ve read a number of brilliant books this year, including Deluge by Leila Chatti, Birthright by George Abraham, Felon by Reginald Dwayne Betts and Guillotine by Eduardo C. Corral.

PiO (Heide, Poetry)

What is your all-time favourite book or poem? No such animal – too many to list – no Hierarchies!!!!!!!!! Stupid idea in Literature!

And the best book you’ve read this year? Jeltje Fanoy’s My Mother and The Cat.

Tiffany Shellam (Meeting the Waylo: Aboriginal Encounters in the Archipelago, Australian History)

The best book I have read this year is by Sisonke Msimang, The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela. I have many favourite books, and that list grows each year, it is too hard to name a particular one.

See the winners of the 2020 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards here.

Find out more about the 2020 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards here!

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