Five UQP titles shortlisted for the 2023 Prime Minister's Literary Awards
We're thrilled to share the news that five UQP titles have been shortlisted across the 2023 Prime Minister's Literary Awards. They include:
Fiction
Judges' comments:
Set in Sydney’s west, Losing Face is a portrait of a Lebanese-Australian family told from the perspective of 19-year-old Joey. Joey is passive, self-loathing, rudderless; the inertia of his days only punctured by workouts at the gym, minor spats with his mother Amal, mind-numbing shifts at a supermarket, and casual drug use.
In alternating chapters, a second narrative voice emerges in the form of Elaine, Joey’s grandmother. Having laboured in factories since arriving in Australia from Lebanon, she now lives on a disability pension and keep her pokies addiction from her family.
Joey’s apathy eventually contributes to his being arrested, along with four friends, for a violent crime. He was a bystander, not a participant—but does it matter, when his silence made him complicit?
Racial profiling; class consciousness; casual misogyny; queerness; love and family loyalty. These are big topics and Haddad affords them appropriate gravity—but Losing Face is also sharply funny. The dialogue sings and spits. The relationship between Joey and his grandmother is tender and thorny. The ‘bad men’ of the story are not cartoonish but ordinary, and more believable for it.
Haddad offers no easy redemption or slick endings. Joey is neither hero nor anti-hero: he is utterly real in all his complexity and foibles.
Australian History
Saving the Reef by Rohan Lloyd
Judges' comments:
History doesn’t just happen. In this important environmental history of the Great Barrier Reef, Rohan Lloyd demonstrates that people make history by the actions they take and the decisions they make. His account of campaigns, commissions, institutional responses and political interventions to protect the Reef does not downplay the difficulties of action in the face of vested interests or competing needs and aspirations. But ultimately it offers hope and guidance for future collective actions for both conservation and change.
As a place at once full of promise and under threat, the Reef itself has become a contested entity. Lloyd’s book is threaded with reflective essays on such themes as knowledge, seeing and science, which range broadly across history, geography and culture. How people and organisations experience and know the Reef informs the way they campaign for its protection or use. Whether to present the Reef to public imagination as enduring or endangered is a question with no easy answer: Lloyd is only too conscious that awareness of vulnerability can also lead to despair. His book is a powerful argument for working together across the barriers of competing interests and learned mistrust – not with naivete but with understanding, respect and willed optimism.
Poetry
The Jaguarby Sarah Holland-Batt
Judges' comments:
This is a book of intensely moving poems which explore grief, loss, change and memory in transformative ways. The poet’s metaphorical imagination and control of language ensure that her poems are shapely, richly evocative and affecting.
Through concentration of thought, image and emotion, The Jaguar brings the reader into an animated connection with the poet’s experience of her father’s protracted illness and eventual death. Other poems deftly give voice to the complexities, disappointments and ironies of love and desire, and to encounters with place across continents and states of being.
A poet of meticulous craft, Holland-Batt amalgamates narrative and lyrical strategies to enterprising ends. All the poems in this book are attended by a deep sense of how poetry is a perfect tool for revelation and insight.
Judges' comments:
This linguistically energetic and versatile book explores non-binary, transgender identity in compelling and insightful ways. The poems are deft and witty, and they do not flinch or hold back in their depictions of both overt and covert discrimination directed towards transgender people.
Exactly As I Am breaks apart traditional uses of form and structure and plays with layout, punctuation and with unique and unexpected methods of inquiry. The book demonstrates how poetry can articulate the ways in which non-binary bodies occupy their contested spaces, while inextricably linked to the everyday realities of paying rent, buying groceries, having jobs and negotiating structures which are universally disempowering.
The poems are welcoming and inviting, giving the reader a strong sense that there are many ways of experiencing and accepting identity. The overall tone of the book is one of joy and celebration, of pride, hope and enthusiasm for embracing non-normative ways of being. This book is an impressive and necessary work, one which will help to break down barriers and prejudices faced by transgender people. Essentially, it is a book of love and empowerment.
At the Altar of Touchby Gavin Yuan Gao
Judges' comments:
At the Altar of Touch is an intensely lyrical, intimate and expansive collection of poems. Here, in their debut collection, Gavin Yuan Gao deploys striking imagery and layered metaphor to find a path through suffering towards connection and belonging.
The poems range from heartbreaking elegies to the poet’s mother, tenderly erotic queer love poems, unsettling accounts of bullying and endurance, and ecstatic odes to desire and the natural world. Throughout, the language is associative, yet controlled and immersive, sweeping the reader up in the sensations and meanings held in the body.
The book incorporates, adapts and reimagines cultural touchstones as diverse as blind Chinese folk musician Abing, Telemachus from Greek mythology, Wordsworth, Rachmaninoff, and My Fair Lady. It is invigorating and enlightening, gently subverting our sense of the division of Eastern and Western aesthetics. But the poems also directly tackle, with nuance and courage, acutely contemporary experiences of racism in public places.
Gao’s poems are sinuous and sensual, drawing on archetypal motifs to deepen the resonance of the personal and familial. At the Altar of Touch is an achingly beautiful, rewarding ode to persistence and passion and is a startling poetic debut.
A winner will be announced on 16 November. Stay tuned!
