The 2024 Age Book of the Year winners have been announced! The awards celebrate outstanding Australian literature and include prizes for both fiction and nonfiction.

Tony Birch has won the Fiction prize for his novel, Women & Children, while Ross McMullin has won the Nonfiction prize for Life So Full of Promise.

The judges for this year’s awards included Readings own Mark Rubbo and writer and former publisher Louise Swinn (fiction); as well as writer Simon Caterson and historian Joy Damousi (nonfiction). The winners were announced last night during the Melbourne Writers Festival opening gala, with each category winner receiving $10,000 thanks to the Copyright Agency’s cultural fund.

Fiction winner | Women & Children by Tony Birch

The fiction judges described Birch’s novel as 'a book that will live with you'.

A powerful, personal novel about women and justice, from one of this country's most loved and clear-eyed storytellers.

It's 1965 and Joe Cluny is living in a working-class suburb with his mum, Marion, and sister, Ruby, spending his days trying to avoid trouble with the nuns at the local Catholic primary school. One evening his Aunty Oona appears on the doorstep, distressed and needing somewhere to stay. As his mum and aunty work out what to do, Joe comes to understand the secrets that the women in his family carry, including on their bodies. Yet their pleas for assistance are met with silence and complicity from all sides. Who will help Joe's family at their time of need?

Read our staff review here.

Nonfiction winner | Life So Full of Promise by Ross McMullin

The nonfiction judges described McMullin’s book as a 'painstakingly researched and profoundly empathetic micro-history'.

Acclaimed historian and biographer Ross McMullin has again combined prodigious research and narrative flair in this sequel to Farewell, Dear People, the winner of multiple awards including the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History. Life So Full of Promise, his second multi-biography about Australia’s lost generation of World War I, features a collection of interwoven stories set in that defining era.

The rich cast includes a talented barrister whose outstanding leadership enabled a momentous victory in France; an eminent newspaper editor who kept his community informed about the war while his sons were in the trenches; an energetic soldiers’ mother who became a political activist and a Red Cross dynamo; an admired farmer whose unit was rushed to the rescue in the climax of the conflict; the close sisters from Melbourne who found their lives transformed; a popular doctor who was more fervently mourned than any other Australian casualty; and a bohemian Scandinavian blonde who disrupted one of Sydney’s best-known families.