A debut novel exploring trauma, displacement and political exile has won the $80,000 Prime Minister’s Literary award for fiction.
When it was reviewed by Guardian Australia, Andre Dao’s Anam was described as “a work of unusual power and beauty”. But it began as a nonfiction project documenting his grandfather’s 10-year detention in a Vietnamese prison without trial.
Letters, photographs, government documents and recorded interviews were collected over more than a decade for the project. But when Dao’s grandfather died in 2012, it prompted the author to turn his research into a work of fiction – and, in 2021, the work won the Victorian Premier’s Literary award for an unpublished manuscript.
“I became drawn to the novel as a form that was more open and more capacious than … memoir,” Dao told the Guardian. A novel, he said, gives “people more scope to really explore the question of truth and imagination that I realise was at the heart of the project.
“Novels announce their fictionality from the beginning, and yet I think the best novels are also forms of truth telling.”
Further merging the line between fact and fiction, Dao used a photograph of his grandfather on the cover of the book. “What I hadn’t anticipated was how important that choice would end up being for my family, and especially my grandmother,” he said.
“She can’t speak or read English, but the book as an object became an important thing for her, just because it had her husband on the cover.”
Dao’s grandmother, who resettled in France after fleeing Vietnam, died this year, shortly after her grandson had brought his family to see her in Paris. A friend had translated all the published reviews of Anam using Google and she would proudly show them to visitors.
The judges praised Dao’s first work of fiction as “a poignant narrative” spanning generations and continents.
“Dao extends the novel form, breaking rules, forming new ones and demonstrating how the ‘imaginative power of a novel’ is perfect for witnessing uncomfortable truths,” the judges said.
“While offering reflections on philosophy, history, language and memory, Anam is primarily a story of family relationships. Lovingly domestic in parts, boldly theoretical in others, for a country full of migrants, living amid unresolved questions of place and belonging, Anam is a profoundly relevant novel.”
Dao paid tribute to victims to the war in Palestine in his speech, saying, “Let us create a humanitarian visa for Palestinians. Let us fulfil our international obligations by withdrawing all support, direct and indirect, for Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory, starting with an arms embargo.”
While Anam is the Melbourne-based author’s debut novel, his nonfiction writing has appeared extensively in literary publications, including the Sydney Review of Books, Griffith Review, New Philosopher and the Monthly.
He is a cofounder of Behind the Wire, an oral history project documenting the experiences of asylum seekers in detention both within Australia and offshore on Manus and Nauru.
Dao, himself the son of Vietnamese asylum seekers, said the border control policies of successive Australian governments have had a corrosive effect on the country’s psyche. In Anam, the corrosive force is French colonialism.
“All forms of colonialism come back to haunt the colonial power,” he said.
This is the second year the awards have been managed by Creative Australia (formerly the Australia Council), under the Albanese government’s election promise of arm’s length-funding for artists and arts organisations. Each category winner receives a tax-free prize of $80,000.
The nonfiction prize was won by the Bundjalung and Kullilli journalist Daniel Browning for Close to the Subject: Selected Works.
The book is a set of essays and interviews on cultural and political life interweaved with poetry and memoir, which the judges praised as “a collection of courageous and superbly crafted scratchings at this country’s ear, demanding a hearing of further truth-telling”.
“[Browning] is at his best dismantling the shibboleths of journalistic objectivity,” they said. “Much of our media pretends to an ideal of impartiality that is only ‘possible’ because the starting position is European white and increasingly middle class. Browning shatters this understanding by being honest: we are each a hive of biases.”
Will Kostakis collected the prize for young adult literature for We Could Be Something, a book set in Sydney’s inner city that tackles relationship breakdown and cultural dislocation.
The children’s literature prize was won by a team of writers, artists, linguists and academics who collectively produced Tamarra: A Story of Termites on Gurindji Country, written in the traditional Gurindji and Gurindji Kriol languages as well as English.
A modern reappraisal of the Greek goddess of beauty and love, Aphrodite by Amy Crutchfield, won the poetry prize. Judges praised The Cyprian, Crutchfield’s first book, for the author’s “fully fledged and entirely in command” voice.
And Ryan Cropp, a University of Sydney academic, won the Australian history prize for Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country, described as both a social history and an intellectual journey.
