Australian literary talent is extraordinary – and extraordinarily undersung. Take this year, for instance: a bumper year for Australian letters but you wouldn’t know it from looking at international best-of lists, or the pool of Booker prize contenders.
Next year’s publishing calendar is again jam-packed with Ozlit brilliance. Here are some titles we’re most looking forward to.
Writing about writing
Novels about novelists have always been popular but the focus has shifted to those caught in the creative crossfire: wives, lovers, children. In her assured debut, My Brilliant Sister (January, Scribner), Amy Brown imagines what Stella (Miles) Franklin’s sister, Linda, might have dared to write had her life not been cut short. Fresh from her own novel about young Stella (Salonika Burning, 2022), Gail Jones turns her lyrical eye to Joseph Conrad in One Another (February, Text).
There’s a whiff of Virginia Woolf in Miranda Darling’s ink-black suburban satire, Thunderhead (April, Scribe), which stars a character called Mrs Dalloway. And The Drover’s Wife – Henry Lawson’s iconic snake-battler – continues to haunt the Australian literary imagination in The Story Thief by the first-time novelist Kyra Geddes (May, Affirm).
Other writerly delights: The End of the Morning by Charmian Clift (May, New South); Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower: The Letters by Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham (May, New South); Joan Lindsay: The Hidden Life of the Woman Who Wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock by Brenda Niall (October, Text).
Knotty, ambitious fiction
Next year marks the 200th anniversary of the Bathurst wars. Anita Heiss’s new novel, Dirrayawadha (August, Simon & Schuster), takes its title from the Wiradyuri command “to rise up” and is set during these pivotal frontier conflicts. After the success of Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray (2021), it’s a thrill to see Heiss return to Wiradyuri history.
Fresh from her Miles Franklin triumph, Shankari Chandran returns in 2024 with Safe Haven (May, Ultimo), a novel of asylum seekers, wilful silences and media scapegoating. Having taken on nationalist mythmaking (Australiana, 2022) and class friction (The Lovers, 2022) in the space of a year, the valiant Yumna Kassab now confronts war, revolution and violent displacement in Politica (January, Ultimo).
In March Liam Pieper will stir the cultural pot with Appreciation (PRH), a cancel-culture satire that sounds like an absolute riot. In June the next eight-book tranche of UQP’s First Nations Classics series will arrive – many that have been out of print for decades and are essential reading. And October will see the release of Rodney Hall’s Vortex (Macmillan). Hall is pushing 90 and criminally underappreciated – a lifelong literary radical.
Other bold fiction: Like Fire Hearted Suns by Melanie Joosten (March, Ultimo); Ghost Cities by Siang Lu (May, UQP); Hurdy Gurdy by Jenny Ackland (June, Allen & Unwin); Honeyeater by Jessica Tu (July, Allen & Unwin); The Burrow by Melanie Cheng (September, Text).
Debut trailblazers
2023 was a bonanza of big names – Alexis Wright, Melissa Lucashenko, Richard Flanagan, Christos Tsiolkas, Charlotte Wood, Anna Funder – and so it’s heartening to see that the 2024 publishing calendar is fostering the next generation of Aussie voices.
There’s excitement brewing around two tales of Melbourne from two alliterative gents: Raeden Richardson and Murray Middleton. Their debut novels sound like counterweights. The first is a quiet exploration of loneliness and departure (The Degenerates: July, Text); the second a frenetic state-of-the-nation novel that “comes at you in a mad, sweaty, sweary rush” (No Church in the Wild: April, Macmillan).
Winnie Dunn is one of the engines behind the Sweatshop Literacy Movement in western Sydney – one of the country’s most vibrant literary incubators. Her much-anticipated first novel, Dirt Poor Islanders, is out in March (Hachette).
It’s always exciting to see high-profile writers take a creative risk. The veteran journalist Louise Milligan has penned her first novel – a pacy thriller about a young reporter who finds herself the subject of a high-profile story (Pheasants Nest, March, Allen & Unwin). And the crowd favourite Bri Lee also has a novel out next year – a tale of secrets and lies in the New York art world (The Work, March, Allen & Unwin) being described as “complex, opulent and horny”.
Other first-timers: The Great Undoing by Sharlene Allsopp (February, Ultimo); Lead Us Not by Abbey Lay (March, PRH); Ordinary Human Love by Melissa Goode (May, Ultimo); Big Time by Jordan Prosser (June, UQP); The End and Everything Before It by Finegan Kruckemeyer (July, Text).
Bodies, desire and eco-grief
It promises to be a strong year for memoir in 2024, in particular, memoirs of the body – tales of the pleasures, cruelties and glorious absurdities of life in our mortal cage.
Next year will see authors grapple with compulsive hair-pulling (The Pulling by Adele Dumont: January, Scribe); organ transplant recovery and survivor’s guilt (Breath by Carly-Jay Metcalfe: March, UQP); memory loss (How to Knit a Human by Anna Jacobson: May, New South); and post-partum psychosis (Because I’m Not Myself, You See by Ariane Beeston: May, Black Inc).
In March, the incomparable Peter Goldsworthy – a doctor and poet – shares lessons from his incurable cancer diagnosis (The Cancer Finishing School, PRH). And in July the sexologist and scholar Hilary Caldwell takes on the limbic and cultural landscapes of desire in Slutdom (UQP).
We are living in a golden age of eco-writing: part call to arms, part love letter, part Anthropocene elegy. In Everything Is Water (June, UQP), Simon Cleary walks the course of the Brisbane River – a 344km pilgrimage. And in Deep Water (April, PRH), the spec-fic wizard James Bradley (author of Ghost Species, 2020), turns to nonfiction to consider the dark depths of our oceans and the dark depths of ourselves.
And speaking of dark human depths, Guardian Australia’s own Amy Remeikis will tackle the politics of civility – and its pernicious myths – in The Truth About Nice (July, Hachette).
Other true tales of Australian life: Peripathetic: Notes on (un)belonging by Cher Tan (May, NewSouth); Black Witness by Amy McQuire (June, UQP); Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Colonised Australia by Santilla Chingaipe (August, Scribner); Running with Pirates by Kári Gíslason (August, UQP); Australian Gospel by Lech Blaine (November, Black Inc); Weaving With Words by Larissa Behrendt (November, UQP).
Short and sharp
That the last two Stella prize winners have been poets is no accident – Australian poetry is alive and electric. The freedom of the form lends itself to voices of critique, dissection and reconfiguration, and next year will see new collections from a number of brilliant First Nations poets, including Jeanine Leane (Gawimarra, February, UQP), Elfie Shiosaki (Refugia, July, Magabala) and Jazz Money (The Fire Inside, August, UQP). And Nam Le fans rejoice! Fifteen years after The Boat (2008), Le is returning to the page with 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem (March, Scribner).
Other tiny delights: Only the Astronauts by Ceridwen Dovey (July, PRH) – a collection of tales narrated by human-made objects adrift in space; The Gorgon Flower by John Richards (April, UQP) – gothic short stories with unsettling twists.
As yet untitled
Some of the most anticipated books of the year are yet to be named. A new novel from snarky genius Diana Reid is due in the second half of the year (Ultimo). The rock star historian Clare Wright has completed the last volume in her masterful Democracy Trilogy (October, Text). And there’s a new nonfiction offering from Helen Garner. The author spent her 80th year shadowing her grandson’s under-16s football team. There’s no predicting what shape Garner’s book might take – she defies prediction. What is certain is that it will be written with interrogative humour and human(e) grace.
