Each of the award winners will receive $10,000 thanks to the Copyright Agency’s cultural fund. Down’s novelBodies of Light is joined on the fiction shortlist byIn Moonland (by Miles Allinson),Cold Enough for Snow (Jessica Au),After Story (Larissa Behrendt),The Signal Line (Brendan Colley) andLove&Virtue (Diana Reid). The last two are debut novels.
The shortlist for non-fiction consists of:Whole Notes:Life Lessons Through Music by Ed Ayres;Leaping Into Waterfalls:The Enigmatic Gillian Mears by Bernadette Brennan;The Boy in the Dress by Jonathan Butler;The Uncaged Sky:My 804 Days in an Iranian Prisonby Kylie Moore-Gilbert;Astronomy:Sky Country by Karlie Noon and Krystal De Napoli;andChildless:A Story of Freedom and Longing by Sian Prior.
The judges were author and reviewer Simon Caterson,Joy Damousi,director of the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Australian Catholic University,author Bram Presser,and former literary editor ofThe Sydney Morning Herald and author Susan Wyndham.
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The Age awards were first presented in 1974 when David Foster won the fiction prize and overall book of the year award forThe Pure Land and Manning Clark received the non-fiction prize forA History of Australia Volume III. A poetry prize was introduced in 1993,with the first winner being John Tranter forAt the Florida. This year will be the 40th occasion on which the awards have been presented.
Previous winners of the awards have included Luke Davies,Peter Carey,Dorothy Porter,David Marr,Peter Porter,Tim Winton,Don Watson,Christos Tsiolkas,Gillian Mears and David Malouf.