Australian fiction
Joint winners of the 2024 Barbara Jefferis Award: Sarah M. Saleh and Lucy Treloar
Australian Society of Authors (ASA) has announced joint winners for the 2024 Barbara Jefferis Award: Sara M Saleh for Songs for the Dead and the Living and Lucy Treloar for Days of Innocence and Wonder.
Administered by the ASA, the award celebrates women in literature and is awarded biennially for ‘the best novel written by an Australian author that depicts women and girls in a positive way or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in…
Alexis Wright wins the 2024 Melbourne Prize for Literature
Alexis Wright has been sweeping Australian literary awards since the release of her novel Praiseworthy, and now her fully body of work has been celebrated by the Melbourne Prize for Literature.
The annual prize is awarded to a Victorian author whose body of published work has made an outstanding contribution to Australian literature and to cultural and intellectual life, and it is one of Australia's most valuable and prestigious literary awards. Past winners of the prize include Christos Tsiolkas…
Top picks for book clubs this month
Looking for something juicy to discuss in your book club? Try one of these new releases, chosen by our booksellers to appeal to a wide range of readers and provide plenty to talk about.
Australian fiction
This Kingdom of Dust by David Dyer
The whole world has just watched Neil and Buzz walk on the Moon. Now they are struck by terror: the lunar module's engine has failed. There is no back-up, no other way off the surface. If the…
Our October 2024 bestsellers
True to form, Sally Rooney's Intermezzo has maintained its number one status this month, correctly proving the book is worth all the hype!
Two great Australian crime authors have released books this month: Christian White's The Ledge, a mind-bending novel where past and present run breathlessly, tensely parallel, leading to a cliff-hanger nobody will see coming; and Chris Hammer's The Valley, which sees the return of Nell Buchanan and Ivan Lucic in a page-turning plot with an evocative…
Australian fiction to pick up this month
Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser
It's 1986, and 'beautiful, radical ideas' are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda she meets artists, activists, students – and Kit. He claims to be in a 'deconstructed' relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, her work on the Woolfmother falls into disarray.
Theory & Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and…
Foreword with Joe Rubbo
The start of a new month means that there's a new issue of Readings Monthly available online and in our shops. Below you can read the foreword from the latest issue – and keep an eye on the blog for more updates and recommended new releases throughout the month!
This is the last issue of the Readings Monthly for the year. We’ve been publishing this newsletter for over 30 years now. It is a lot of work to put together…
Fiction inspired by real women's lives
One way of acknowledging women whose lives have had little or no recognition in the history books is to write about them in a fictional setting – imagining, and in some cases, reimagining, what their lives might have been like. We've chosen some wonderful books inspired by the lives of a few famous, and many less so, female figures.
✒️ Studious women
Rapture by Emily Maguire
The motherless child of an English priest living in ninth-century Mainz, Agnes is a…
ARA Historical Novel Prize 2024 winners announced
The winners of the 2024 ARA Historical Novel Prize have been announced! The annual prize recognise the outstanding literary talents of Australian novelists who explore stories of the past, to illuminate our present and future.
The prize is one of the richest literary prizes in Australia, with a prize pool of $150,000 split between the winners and shortlisted authors in the two categories. Read more about the winning books and the judges' comments below.
Adult category winner
Edenglassie by Melissa…
Q&A with Emma Darragh, winner of The Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction 2024
We are proud and excited to announce Emma Darragh as this year's winner of The Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, for her unflinching, tender and darkly funny debut novel Thanks for Having Me, which explores what we give to our families and what we take from them – whether we mean to or not.
We've asked Emma about the inspiration for her work, the creative process, her perfect reader, favourite writing advice and what she hopes readers take…
The Readings Prize 2024 winners
Nearly 100 submissions, 18 shortlisted books and now we celebrate four winners!
It’s a fantastic achievement just being shortlisted for this prize for emerging Australian talent, and we have one final shout-out to our highly recommended shortlisted books and authors at the end of this post.
Our winners represent a diverse snapshot of quality writing in Australia today. A contemporary Muddleheaded Wombat, an action-packed tale of the repercussions of one bad decision, a heartfelt journey in search of identity and…
Browse our blog by category
