Judges' Comments
The irrepressible Bani Adam is back! This time, as an Australian father murmuring home truths to the bundle of joy, the blasphemous new blood, that has arrived in his tribal life. Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s latest addition to his Western Sydney trilogy takes us into the explosive intimacy of race and religion in Australia. The Other Half of You is the body-bruising, soul-searing confessional letter to a child, that anyone who has had to wrestle with the fluid-oozing, flesh-tearing oppositional pulls of family and freedom, community and calling, conformity and mutiny, will recognise. This is the howl of an Australian voice striving to be heard among the “nips, fobs, wogs and lebs” who animate the Bankstown line from centre to periphery, who crave Kentucky Fried Chicken, eschewing indiscriminatingly the delights of Lebanese kousa and born-again veganism. We accompany Bani on his journey from the fabled corridors of a sandstone university, where his English literary idols tell him in a thousand ways how he does not belong, into the arms of Sahara, warrior princess and hirsute love of his life. But love is a myriad-hued jewel, as Bani will discover: it exists equally in the tender image of Fatima wanting her freedom to wear pink g-strings and glued-on belly button rings, as it does in the anti-Arab skin of the White woman for whom Bani will exile himself from the House of Adam. In Kahlil, the White Wog son of Oli, the “half-insider, half-outsider” descendant of Alawites, Bani will also find the voice that sings the brilliant aria of Australia today.

Judges' Comments
Scary Monsters is a witty, meticulously witnessed and boldly imaginative work that rages against racism, ageism and misogyny. In this her seventh novel, Michelle de Kretser offers a provocative, disturbing yet often humorous take on some of the ways in which immigration ‘breaks people’. Through the twin narratives of Lili and Lyle, two South Asian migrants, she interrogates issues of belonging and authenticity, centre and periphery. Can immigrants to this country ever be thought of as something other than a ‘gimmicky trick’? And what of the gulf between being from Australia and being Australian? Lyle lives in the outer suburbs of Melbourne in a near dystopian future where Islamic worship is no longer tolerated, and a permanent fire zone and catastrophic sea levels have made much of Sydney uninhabitable. He works for ‘The Department’ in security and surveillance and to survive has become hollow, invisible and adept at ‘screaming inside [his] heart.’ Lili is on a gap year, teaching English in Montpelier before heading to Oxford. She is twenty-two, clever, ambitious and all too aware how her gender and skin colour circumscribe her opportunities. Mitterrand sweeps to victory but in Scary Monsters personal autonomy and the lived migrant experience are no match for ‘History’. Of central concern in this novel is the question: ‘What comes first, the future or the past’?

Judges' Comments
In Bodies of Light, Jennifer Down crafts a story of almost impossible regeneration from the ashes of unbearable pain and loss. The five-year-old Maggie, who will come to be known to us as Josie and Holly, undergoes a harrowing journey through state care, only to emerge with a new self. Through Maggie’s unreliable narration, we learn about her unstable life of being and becoming, and, as readers, we become increasingly unsettled ourselves. With ethical precision, Down insists that we do not look away from the destructive consequences of life on the fringes, that we do not render invisible those who come through, miraculously, despite decades spent in the shadows of institutionalised neglect, socially sanctioned loneliness, unforgivable poverty and the attendant abuse that accompanies these conditions.
Can a sense of self exist if there are no records of a life? If there is no-one to remember? Maggie wrestles with such questions. And more than once is almost destroyed by them. Ultimately, however, Bodies of Light is a novel of affirmation, resilience and survival, told through an astonishing voice that reinvents itself from age six to sixty. Through recounting her story and recording her memories, Maggie builds herself a body and realises that finally she is known.

Judges' Comments
In One Hundred Days, Alice Pung astutely explores the agencies of girls to unravel the bounds of gender, race and class and attempt to determine their futures for themselves. The novel follows the story of sixteen-year-old Karuna, who moves into a housing commission tower in Melbourne with her Philippines-born Chinese mother, Grand Mar, in the afterlife of her parents’ divorce. When Karuna falls pregnant, Grand Mar locks her in their flat for one hundred days before the birth of her child. Within this story, mothering practices transcend the ordinary and intimate, becoming instead an epic site of intergenerational cultural struggle between mother and daughter. Questioning the extent to which children belong to their parents, Pung sophisticatedly explores the co-existence of love, protection, control and abuse. While One Hundred Days carries the heaviness of Karuna’s captivity with suspense and claustrophobia, it is full of warmth and humour. Pung deftly revitalises traditional fairy tales by imbuing prickly and tenacious Karuna with lucid human agency, exploring diverse and complex narratives of hero(ine)ism, resilience and precariousness. We are fully immersed into the lived experiences of young women who attempt to resist a prescribed fate. Pung has gifted us with a novel of national significance, by making visible the stories of those deemed powerless, and vividly patterning the mosaic of Australian literature.

Judges' Comments
Grimmish is based on the true story of a boxer named Joe Grim — a terrible boxer who somehow managed to sustain a professional career in the early twentieth century solely on the basis of his ability to take a savage beating without falling over. Around the historical tale of Grim’s unusual career, Michael Winker has crafted an equally unusual novel that is by turns playful, funny, heartfelt and deeply reflective. Interweaving comical and philosophical passages with the tall tales told by the narrator’s drunk “uncle” (one of which features a foul-mouthed talking goat), Grimmish sets out to anatomise the phenomenon of physical pain in mock-scholarly fashion. In doing so, it gently disentangles the ugly knot of violence and self-destructiveness at the heart of masculinity. Winker approaches his subject with keen eye for life’s absurdity, grotesquery and tragedy. The novel’s metafictional dimension — it begins with a “review” of itself — is deployed to great effect, the ironies of its formal self-consciousness acting as cover for its underlying sincerity and its distinct note of melancholy. Daring and hilarious, Grimmish is a uniquely witty and original contribution to Australian literature.