MEDIA RELEASE: 2024 Roderick Shortlist Announced

Friday 9th August 2024

The shortlist for the 2024 Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award has been announced today by the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies (FALS) at James Cook University.

The Award is given to the best book of the year, first published in Australia, that deals with any aspect of Australian life. In 2024 the Award gives the winning writer a $50 000 prize, and the H.T. Priestley Memorial Medal.

An astonishing 235 entries have been whittled down to just eight books: Lola in the Mirror by Trent Dalton; Life As We Knew It: The Extraordinary Story of Australia’s Pandemic by Aisha Dow and Melissa Cunningham; Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville; Two Sparrowhawks in a Lonely Sky by Rebecca Lim; The Conversion by Amanda Lohrey; Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko; A Brilliant Life by Rachelle Unreich, and Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright.

This list is dominated by some of Australia’s most awarded and renowned writers, including Grenville, Lohrey, Lucashenko and Wright, although two books by first-time authors have also made it through: A Brilliant Life, and Life As We Knew It. Dominated by adult fiction, the list also includes a biography, a history, and Lim’s novel for younger readers.

It is no surprise to see Miles Franklin and Stella Prize winner Praiseworthy (Giramondo), by Alexis Wright, make it to the short list. Wright’s book has also taken out the Queensland Literary Award for fiction. Described in the New York Times as ‘the most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century’, Praiseworthy invents forms of story-telling and ways of seeing on an epic scale, engaging with climate change and reconciliation.

Restless Dolly Maunder (Text Publishing) is an imagined history of the grandmother of novelist Kate Grenville. Forbidden by her father to follow her dream of becoming a teacher, Dolly heaves loads of washing, scrubs floors, milks cows, cooks bread and meat. After struggling to manage on a meagre and uncertain income she becomes an entrepreneur, able sometimes to fulfill her ambitions.

A similar impulse – to bring out the extraordinary in the ordinary – underpins another book about family, Rachelle Unreich’s A Brilliant Life (Hachette). As a biography of the author’s mother, Holocaust survivor Mira Unreich, A Brilliant Life recounts one woman’s experience of the vicious lotteries that left millions dead and a handful alive. The author shows how her mother managed to live a dazzling life, after having borne witness to unrelenting violence and injustice.

Rebecca Lim also sets a family saga against the backdrop of mass tragedy, in Two Sparrowhawks in a Lonely Sky (Allen & Unwin). Two children and their mother struggle to stay alive amidst China’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ (1958-1962), which caused the death of millions by famine. As the family try to reach their father, who had earlier fled China for Australia, their reunion is imperilled by the White Australia policy. By presenting the world through the eyes of children, readers are encouraged to see historical events – and the present – through fresh eyes.

Fresh perspectives and social upheaval are also central to Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie (University of Queensland Press), the title coming from an early colonial name for Meanjin/Brisbane. By focusing on two young couples – one living in the early nineteenth-century, one in the present – Edenglassie takes readers into the experience of colonisation, and its reverberations in the contemporary world. Details of a horrific past are blended with comic interludes in the present, in a story that asks how people might live with the burden of violence.

Trent Dalton’s Lola in the Mirror (Fourth Estate/HarperCollins) is likewise set in Meanjin. A book with a whiplash ending, Lola has Dalton’s trademark ‘thriller’ elements: violent threats, a frenzied chase, weird family mysteries and resonant symbols, the most powerful of which is the Brisbane River. Dalton’s experience as a journalist, in building and releasing tension, shines through the book.

Similar journalistic craft is shown in Life As We Knew It (Scribe Publications). The book gives sharply-drawn pictures of key players at work in managing Australia’s response to the pandemic, not shrinking from describing scandals, and failures of policy. Simultaneously pacy and level-headed, this is a book that anyone who lived through the early years of Covid-19 will want to read.

Amidst all this drama, Amanda Lohrey’s The Conversion (Text Publishing) stands out for its emphasis on contemplation. Lohrey’s novel focuses on Zoe – the Greek form of the name ‘Eve’, meaning ‘life’ – who is widowed by a partner who was having an affair. Unexpectedly, Zoe responds to her bereavement by living out the dream that seemed to belong to her late husband: to convert a country church into a home.

The three judges of the Roderick Award, Dr Leigh Dale (chair), distinguished Townsville journalist Mary Vernon, and Professor Emerita Susan K. Martin of La Trobe University, now embark on an intensive rereading of the shortlist. They will then meet to decide the winner, to be announced at a ceremony in Townsville in October.

For further information contact:

Marg Naylor
0428585877
fals@jcu.edu.au / marg.naylor@jcu.edu.au