Prime Minister's Literary Awards
The Prime Minister's Literary Awards were established in 2008 to celebrate outstanding literary talent in Australia and these author's contribution to the nation's cultural and intellectual life.
A prize of $80,000 is awarded to the winner in each of the six categories, and $5000 is presented to each author who is shortlisted.
Shop the nominees in each category below.
A Handful of Sand: The Gurindji Struggle, After the Walk-Off by Charlie Ward
$34.99 NZD
Category: Prize for Australian History | Series: Australian History Ser.
Fifty years ago, a group of striking Aboriginal stockmen in the remote Northern Territory of Australia heralded a revolution in the cattle industry and a massive shift in Aboriginal affairs. Now, after many years of research, A Handful of Sand tells the story behind the Gurindji people's famous Wave Hil ...Show more
A Long Way from Home by Peter Carey
$29.99 NZD
$33.87 (11% off)
Category: Fiction | Reading Level: near fine
Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in western Victoria. Together they enter the Redex Trial, a brutal race around the ancient continent over roads no car will ever quite survive. With them is their lanky fair-haired navigator, Willie Bachhuber, a quiz show champion and f ...Show more
A Passion for Exploring by Josephine Bastian
$0.00 NZD
Category: Prize for Australian History
'Australian history...does not read like history', Mark Twain complained in 1897, 'but like the most beautiful lies...It is full of surprises and adventures, incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities; but they are all true, they all happened.' He might have been thinking of Matthew Flinders ...Show more
Archipelago by Adam Aitken
$29.99 NZD
Category: Poetry
His most personal poetry to date, Adam Aitken's Archipelago is entirely preoccupied with the experience of living and marrying in France. Much of it written while resident at the Keesing Studio in Paris, and then in the south during a seriously cold spring, many of the poems deal with art, Romantic and ...Show more
Asia's Reckoning - China, Japan, and the Fate of U. S. Power in the Pacific Century by Richard McGregor
$39.99 NZD
Category: Non-Fiction
For more than half a century, American power in the Pacific has successfully kept the peace. But it has also cemented the tensions in the toxic rivalry between China and Japan, consumed with endless history wars and entrenched political dynasties. Now, the combination of these forces with Donald Trump's ...Show more
Atomic Thunder : The Maralinga Story by Elizabeth Tynan
$42.99 NZD
Category: Prize for Australian History
In September 2016 it will be 60 years since the first British mushroom cloud rose above the plain at Maralinga in South Australia. The atomic weapons test series wreaked havoc on Indigenous communities and turned the land into a radioactive wasteland. In 1950 Australian prime minister Robert Menzies bli ...Show more
Beautiful Balts: From Displaced Persons to New Australians by Jayne Persian
$47.99 NZD
Category: Prize for Australian History
170,000 Displaced Persons arrived in Australia between 1947 and 1952 - the first non-Anglo-Celtic mass migrants. Australia's first immigration minister, Arthur Calwell, scoured post-war Europe for refugees, Displaced Persons he characterised as 'Beautiful Balts'. Amid the hierarchies of the White Austra ...Show more
Blindness and Rage - A Phantasmagoria by Brian Castro
$34.99 NZD
Category: Poetry
"Blindness and Rage is a novel told in 34 cantos, somewhat in the manner of Pushkin's great Russian novel in verse, Eugene Onegin. Castro's hero Lucien Gracq is a townplanner from Adelaide who is writing a book-length poem, Paidia. Doubtful of its reception, he travels to Paris to join a literary club w ...Show more
Blue Sky, Yellow Kite (HB) by Janet A. Holmes
$27.99 NZD
Category: Children's Fiction
Sometimes we want a thing so much we can't prevent ourselves from taking it. But when a girl steals her friend's beautiful yellow kite, she is swamped with turmoil. A story about desire, guilt and forgiveness.
Border Districts by Gerald Murnane
$29.99 NZD
Category: Fiction
Giramondo's publication of Gerald Murnane's new work of fiction comes at a time of heightened international interest in this highly regarded author. Border Districts and Murnane's Collected Short Fiction will be released in the United States by distinguished New York publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux ...Show more
Chatelaine by Bonny Cassidy
$29.99 NZD
Category: Poetry
Chatelaine is a collection of poems whose personae, like a family portrait, resemble one another in foxed, latent ways. Its voices stalk across time and space, inhabiting genres of riddle, fragment, confession, lyric and ekphrasis, and returning to images of metamorphosis and possession. A chatelaine is ...Show more
Content by Liam Ferney
$24.00 NZD
Category: Poetry
In his latest collection, Liam Ferney focuses on the deep contradictions at the heart of modern life. Content is a hand grenade tossed into the middle of polite society. Ferney uses the argot of politics and the internet to tackle religion, war, love and late capitalism. This is fast paced poetry that i ...Show more