Nicolas Rothwell’s novel Red Heaven has won the 2022 Prime Minister’s Literary award for fiction.
The Far North Queensland-based writer and former journalist, better known for his works of nonfiction, collected a total of $80,000 for the novel, which is set mainly during the political upheaval of eastern Europe in the 1960s and largely told from the perspective of a young boy deeply influenced by two matriarchal women.
In the judges’ statement, Red Heaven was praised as “a romantic, dramatic, intelligent, cultured, political, cinematic, and, above all, human story that centres on the people who love us and who we love in return, regardless of the cost”.
Announced at a ceremony in Launceston on Tuesday, each category winner collected $80,000, with the remaining shortlisted entries receiving $5,000. Journalist Mark Willacy was named winner in the nonfiction category for Rogue Forces: An Explosive Insiders’ Account of Australian SAS War Crimes in Afghanistan, a follow-up to his 2020 Gold Walkley-winning ABC Four Corners investigation Killing Field.
The judges said Rogue Forces was a confronting but important book.
“Willacy explains that the crimes committed cannot be excused as a consequence of the fog of war,” the judges concluded.
“Rather, there was a serious, sometimes-fatal breakdown of military discipline that saw non-commissioned officers exercise unrestrained authority – and which complicated and even compromised the task of winning the hearts and minds of the very people the SAS was ostensibly defending.”
The poetry award was won by Andy Jackson for his collection Human Looking, an unsentimental exploration of the poet’s own life living with Marfan’s syndrome, which was praised by the judges as “blistering in their power, wonderfully subtle, objective and with no self-pity”.
The Australia history prize went to New Zealand-born anthropologist Christine Helliwell for Semut: The Untold Story of a Secret Australian Operation in WWII Borneo.
Four years in the making, Helliwell interviewed surviving Australian soldiers and more than 100 Dayak people, who risked their live to help Australian forces combat the Japenese during the second world war.
New Zealand-born writer Sherryl Clark won the prize for children’s literature for Mina and the Whole Wide World, illustrated by Briony Stewart, a verse novel which tackles the issues of refugees and bullying.
Victorian writer Leanne Hall won the young adult literature prize for The Gaps.
Judges praised Hall’s book, about the disappearance of a 16-year-old girl and how it affects her classmates, as a complex and absorbing dual narrative psychological thriller.
“Readers will find this book confronting yet compelling, and parents of teen girls would do well to process the truths contained and prosecuted therein,” the judges concluded.
Controversy is no stranger to the prestigious annual literary awards, established 15 years ago by Kevin Rudd, who promptly used his prime ministerial prerogative to overturn the 2013 judges’ decision and transfer the prize for Australian history from Frank Bongiorno’s The Sex Lives of Australians to Ross McMullin’s Farewell, Dear People.
In 2014, newly installed prime minister Tony Abbott made a captain’s call, making Steven Carroll’s A World of Other People share the prize for fiction with Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which had already won the 2014 Booker prize.
In an editorial published earlier this month, Peter Rose from the Australian Book Review took aim at the Prime Minister’s Literary awards over the makeup of this year’s judges panel. Eight of the 10 judges of the fiction/poetry and nonfiction/Australian history categories are based in New South Wales, and six of them have “close associations” with the Australian newspaper, including three current or former literary editors, and three regular columnists.
A spokesperson for the department that administers the awards said this year’s judging panel was appointed by the previous government in early 2022.
“Each year the judges and the composition of the panels are reviewed,” the statement to the Guardian said.
“Diversity, in all ways including across geographic location, gender, expertise and differing backgrounds, will be considered by the current government for the appointment of the 2023 awards’ judges.”
This article was corrected on 13 December 2022. An earlier version said the prize won by Rothwell was $85,000; category winners actually receive $80,000 and runners-up receive $5000. Rothwell is based in Far North Queensland, not Darwin
