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This year’s Best Young Australian Novelists revealed
This year’s Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelists have delivered a savagely funny short fiction collection, a tender love story set in the 1950s and a thought-provoking exploration of masculinity and sexual violence.
The winners of the prestigious prize for emerging writers, now in its 27th year, are Katerina Gibson for Women I Know, George Haddad for Losing Face and Jay Carmichael for Marlo.
They each win $5000, thanks to the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. The awards are open to Australian fiction writers aged 35 and younger at the time of publication of their nominated books. Previous winners include Gillian Mears, Christos Tsiolkas, Hannah Kent and Elliot Perlman.
Honorable mentions went to Paul Dalla Rosa for short story collection An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life, Grace Chan for sci-fi debut Every Version of You and Eliza Henry-Jones for her novel set on a remote Scottish island Salt and Skin.
The judges for the prize were critic and novelists Fiona Kelly McGregor and Bram Presser and Spectrum SMH editor Melanie Kembrey.
The judges said Gibson’s imaginative debut collection Women I Know showed “astonishing skill with the form - moving easily from actual to fantastical worlds, from sharp, straightforward prose to concrete poetry.”
Gibson said it felt “fantastic and relieving” to be named a Herald Best Young Australian Novelist.
“Short stories are a form with an incredible, rich history. I love the form; I think there’s something you can do with a short story that isn’t possible in longer writing. You can take more stylistic risks or try bolder concepts. The point of a short story is really to pull off one moment or feeling for a reader, and satisfying that is difficult,” she said.
Haddad’s debut novel Losing Face moves deftly between the perspectives of restless young man Joey, who is arrested for a violent crime, and his grandmother Elaine.
The judges said Haddad’s novel “rings with the sights and sounds of various locales in contemporary western Sydney” and brought new insights into sexual violence.
“It was really important for me to contribute to the conversation and to snapshot characters and situations that reflected contemporary Australian society as accurately as I knew it. The novel was always in me, but it was particularly sparked by my doctoral research on the intersection of masculinities, shame and suburbia,” Haddad said.
The judges said Carmichael’s poetic second novel Marlo - a perfectly crafted story of love between two men set in conservative post-war Melbourne - “makes history immediate, every page pulsing with heart and sensuality”.
Carmichael said it felt “surreal” to win the prize. The beginnings of the novel emerged from Carmichael’s own move from regional Victoria to Melbourne.
“The 50s, in particular, was such a peculiar setting for Marlo’s characters, given how government-sanctioned discrimination filtered down to all levels of society. Despite being set in the past, what happened then still strongly resonates in today’s world,” Carmichael said.
The Best Young Australian Novelists’ advice to writers looking to publish? Carmichael recommends writing what is meaningful to you; Gibson says to take your time; and Haddad encourages you to try your hand with smaller formats such as essays and short stories.
Jay Carmichael, Katerina Gibson and George Haddad will be in conversation at a free event at the Sydney Writers’ Festival at 3:30pm on Sunday, May 28.
This project is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.