Love Stories wins Trent Dalton Indie Book of The Year

As if a Boy Swallows Universe Netflix series wasn’t enough, Trent Dalton has taken out a top literary award for one of the follow-ups.

He’s done it again. Brisbane author Trent Dalton captured the heart of the nation with his novels Boy Swallows Universe and All Our Shimmering Skies.

A Netflix series adapted from Boy Swallows Universe was recently announced, and now he has won the Indie Book Awards 2022 Book of The Year.

His book Love Stories, published by Fourth Estate Australia, was the result of one of the most unusual literary gambits ever staged.

Dalton set up a stall in Brisbane’s CBD, sat at a desk with an old Olivetti typewriter and asked people to tell him their stories of love and loss.

The funny thing is, they did, and the book he got out of that charmed the nation.

Love stories by Trent Dalton has won Book of The Year at The Indie Book Awards 2022

The awards recognise and celebrate indie booksellers as the number one supporters of Australian authors

Bookseller judge Lindy Jones (from Abbey’s Bookshop) said that “only someone as big-hearted, curious and willing to listen as Dalton could get away with this concept”.

“Coupled with his fine turns of phrase, daggy self-portrayal and evident affection for the city of Brisbane, which he portrays colourfully, this is a book full of feelings that touches the reader with the grace, wonder, thrill, pain and grief of love and loving in its many manifestations. It’s an uplifting book, beautifully structured in a subtle but masterful manner, and feels like just the book readers need in these unsettling times, but one that conveys such joy and openness it will last beyond these strange pandemic-fenced days.”

Dalton won the nonfiction award and Book of the Year which were announced Monday and he said he was “thrilled and gobsmacked and humbled and deeply grateful”.

Trent Dalton with his typewriter in Brisbane collecting love stories for his 2021 book, Love Stories

“ I got all cheeseball weepy when I got the news. I got all sentimental about this beautiful recognition because this book means so much to me and because Australia’s independent booksellers mean everything to the Australian book industry. I sat on a corner for two months asking random strangers to tell me love stories but every passing day of every passing year our independent booksellers are sharing love stories with their incredible customers through that sacred transaction of buying and selling these paper treasures we call books. Thank you to the booksellers for this incredible award. Thank you to the late and miraculous Kathleen Kelly who gifted me her beloved Olivetti typewriter and set this book in motion in the first place.

“Thank you to every last glorious stranger who took the time to sit with me and my typewriter on that corner of Adelaide and Albert Street, Brisbane, and share something beautiful about love. Stories from the heart and from the darkness and from the light. The two months I spent on that corner and walking through the city asking people to tell me love stories were probably the most illuminating and soul-restoring months of my life. Thank you to the storytellers. Love Stories was my big middle finger to the pandemic and all the cruel distance it put between the ones we love.”

The other winners were:

FICTION: Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy (Hamish Hamilton Australia)

DEBUT FICTION: The Silent Listener by Lyn Yeowart (Viking Australia)

ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION: Still Life by Amber Creswell Bell (Thames & Hudson Australia)

CHILDREN’S: Rabbit, Soldier, Angel, Thief by Katrina Nannestad (ABC Books, HarperCollins Australia)

YOUNG ADULT: The Monster of Her Age by Danielle Binks (Lothian Children‘s Books)