Six books have been shortlisted for the 2024 ACT Book of the Year award, including First Nations history, poetry, crime fiction, and horror.

The ACT Book of the Year Award recognises quality contemporary literary works including fiction, non-fiction and poetry published in the previous calendar year by local authors.

The eligible nominated books are read and judged by an independent, three-person panel, experienced in writing, editing and/or publishing. This year’s judging panel included Helen Ennis, T. R. Napper, and Barina South.

The winner will be announced at the Tuggeranong Library on Tuesday 6 August.

Tara Cheyne, ACT Minister for Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy, congratulated the shortlisted authors.

“Canberra’s literary scene is bursting with creativity, and this year we have another difficult task on our hands with six compelling works by both new authors and those who have well established careers.

“With 41 eligible nominations for this year’s award, it’s a significant achievement to be shortlisted.

“The shortlisted works span a range of genres, including crime fiction, short stories, poetry, non-fiction, and children’s fiction. Congratulations to all the authors.”

The Measure of Sorrow: Stories by J. Ashley-Smith (Meerkat Press)

Blurb: Shirley Jackson Award-winning author J. Ashley-Smith’s first collection, The Measure of Sorrow, draws together ten new and previously acclaimed stories of dark speculative fiction. In these pages, a black reef holds the secret to an interminable coastal limbo; a father struggles to relate to his estranged children in a post-bushfire wilderness; an artist records her last days in conversation with her unborn child; a brother and sister are abandoned to the manifestations of their uncle’s insanity; a suburban neighbourhood succumbs to an indescribable malaise; teenage ravers fall in with an eldritch crowd; a sensitive New Age guy commits a terminal act of passive-aggression; a plane crash opens the door to the Garden of Eden; the new boy in the village falls victim to a fatal ruse; and a husband’s unexpressed grief is embodied in the shadows of a crumbling country barn. Intelligent and emotionally complex, the stories in The Measure of Sorrow elude easy classification, lifting the veil on the wonder and horror of a world just out of true.

Author bio: J. Ashley Smith is a British–Australian author of dark fiction and co-host of the Let The Cat In podcast. His first book, The Attic Tragedy, won the Shirley Jackson Award. Other stories have won the Ditmar Award, Australian Shadows Award, and Aurealis Award. He lives with his wife and two sons beneath an ominous mountain in the suburbs of North Canberra, gathering moth dust, tormented by the desolation of telegraph wires.

The Great Gallipoli Escape by Jackie French (HarperCollins)

Blurb: Renowned for her historical fiction titles, Jackie French now tells the story of the brilliant and famous evacuation of Gallipoli.

Sixteen-year-old Nipper and his Gallipoli mates Lanky, Spud, Bluey, and Wallaby Joe are starving, freezing, and ill-equipped. By November 1915, they know that that there is more to winning a war than courage. The Gallipoli campaign has been lost.

Nipper has played cricket with the Turks in the opposing dugout, dodged rocket fire, and rescued drowning, freezing men when the blizzard snow melted. He is one of the few trusted with the secret kept from even most of the officers: how an entire army will vanish from the Peninsula over three impeccably planned nights.

Based on first-hand accounts of those extraordinary last weeks of the Gallipoli campaign, this is the fascinating ‘lost story’ of how 150,000 men – and their horses and equipment – were secretly moved to waiting ships without a single life lost. An unforgettable story told through the eyes of a boy who lied about his age to defend his country.

Author bio: Jackie French AM is an award-winning writer, wombat negotiator, the 2014–2015 Australian Children’s Laureate, and the 2015 Senior Australian of the Year. In 2016, she became a Member of the Order of Australia for her contribution to children’s literature and her advocacy for youth literacy. She is regarded as one of Australia’s most popular children’s authors and writes across all genres — from picture books, history, fantasy, ecology and sci-fi to her much-loved historical fiction for a variety of age groups. ‘A book can change a child’s life. A book can change the world’ was the primary philosophy behind her two-year term as Laureate.

The Seven by Chris Hammer (Allen & Unwin)

Blurb: The latest stunning thriller from the bestselling author of Scrublands and The Tilt.

Yuwonderie’s seven founding families have lorded it over their district for a century, growing ever more rich and powerful.

But now – in startling circumstances – one of their own is found dead in a ditch, and homicide detectives Ivan Lucic and Nell Buchanan are sent to investigate.

Could the murder be connected to the execution of the victim’s friend thirty years ago – another member of The Seven – or even to the long-forgotten story of a servant girl on the brink of the Great War?

What are the secrets The Seven are so desperate to keep hidden?

With the killer still on the loose and events spiralling out of control, the closer Ivan and Nell get to discovering the truth, the more dangerous their investigation becomes. Can they crack the case before more people die?

The Seven is a compelling thriller filled with intrigue, emotional depth and an evocative sense of place – where nothing is ever quite what it seems. Chris Hammer, the acclaimed and bestselling author of the international bestsellers Scrublands, Treasure & Dirt, and The Tilt, can take his place among the world’s finest crime writers.

Author bio: Chris Hammer is a leading Australian author of crime fiction. His first book, Scrublands, was an instant bestseller when it was published in mid-2018. It won the prestigious UK Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey Award for a debut crime novel in 2019, and was shortlisted for various awards in Australia and the United States. Scrublands has been sold into translation in several foreign languages, and adapted for television. His follow-up books – Silver (2019), Trust (2020), Treasure & Dirt (2021) and The Tilt (2022) – are also bestsellers, and all have been shortlisted for major literary prizes.

Before turning to fiction, Mr Hammer was a journalist for more than thirty years, dividing his career between covering Australian federal politics and international affairs. He reported from more than 30 countries on six continents with SBS TV, while in Canberra his roles included chief political correspondent for The Bulletin, senior writer for The Age, and online political editor for the Sydney Morning Herald.

Mr Hammer has also written two non-fiction books, The River (2010) and The Coast (2012). He has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Charles Sturt University and a master’s degree in international relations from the Australian National University.

Sleeplessness by Paul Hetherington (Pierian Springs Press)

Winner of the inaugural Marion Halligan Award.

Blurb: Sleeplessness renders and explores its speaker’s insomnia for the hours between three a.m. and the early morning, presenting a captivating series of reflections on love and desire, language, reading, identity and intersubjectivity. The series of four extended and interlinked poetic sequences moves meditatively and laterally, often in astonishing ways, translating a world of ideas and associations into sensuous language.

The poems foreground the beguiling, if troubling, problematics of interpersonal connections and the challenges involved in translating an individual’s own experiences-and their experiences of another-into authentic ways of saying and understanding. These poems continuously approach the ineffable, sitting at the boundary between bodily knowledge and language’s attempts to catch and name, transforming the idea of in-betweenness into a thrilling threshold between intimacy and strangeness, ardour and uncertainty, and speaking and silence. Night in these poems becomes a doorway into a state of becoming, generating a language that connotes a condition of perpetual and seductive inquiry, asking the reader to understand themselves newly through the act of reading.

Author bio: Dr Hetherington is Professor of Writing at the University of Canberra. He has published 18 poetry collections, a verse novel and 14 chapbooks, and received more than 40 awards and nominations, including the 2021 Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize.

Untethered by Ayesha Inoon (HarperCollins Australia)

Blurb: HIGHLY COMMENDED – ACT Literary Awards 2024, Fiction.

Winner of the 2022 ASA/HQ Fiction Prize. A finely observed debut novel of a young Muslim woman’s experience of immigration to Australia from Sri Lankan-Australian writer Ayesha Inoon.

Zia secretly longs to go to university, but as a young woman in a traditional Muslim family, she does what is expected of her, and agrees to an arranged marriage to Rashid, a man she barely knows. Cocooned by the wealth and customs of her family, Rashid’s dark moods create only the smallest of ripples in their early life together.

When growing political unrest spurs them to leave Sri Lanka and immigrate to Australia, Zia is torn between fear of leaving her beloved family and the possibility of new freedoms. While on paper their new country welcomes them with open arms, their visas come with many restrictions, and for the first time Zia faces isolation, poverty, and an increasingly unstable marriage that forms a cage stronger than any she’s known before.

Determined to carve a place for herself in this new country, Zia sets out on uncertain terrain and discovers friendship, devastating loss, and hope for a different future. One that asks her to consider not just who she is, but who she might become.

Partially drawn from her own experiences, debut author Ayesha Inoon’s novel weaves the threads of family, culture, and tradition together with the uncertainty and freedom of starting anew to create a complex tapestry of identity, resilience, and hope.

Author bio: Ayesha Inoon is a Sri Lankan-Australian writer with a unique cultural perspective, which she brings to her writing. Born in Colombo, she travelled widely and worked as a journalist in Sri Lanka before immigrating to Australia in 2013.

Winner of the ASA/HQ Commercial Fiction Prize 2022, her debut novel, Untethered, is partly based on her experiences as an immigrant Muslim woman. Ms Inoon was a recipient of the inaugural 2019 Penguin Random House Write It Fellowship for an early draft of this novel. In 2020, she was selected for the Rosie Scott Writing Residency in NSW, and in September 2022, she was awarded a KSP fellowship by the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre in WA to work on her second novel.

Her feature articles have been published by SBS Australia, The Sunday Times Sri Lanka, Serendib, and Explore Sri Lanka.

Ms Inoon lives in Canberra with her two children.

Tiwi Story: Turning history downside up by Mavis Kerinaiua and Laura Rademaker (UNSW Press)

Blurb: “I believe history is for healing. But you need to tell the whole story, the good and the bad. Telling the truth to the younger ones, the next generation, will make them strong.” — Mavis Kerinaiua

The Tiwi people have more than their fair share of stories that turn ideas of Australian history upside down.

The Tiwi claim the honour of defeating a global superpower.

When the world’s most powerful navy invaded and attempted to settle the Tiwi Islands in 1824, Tiwi warriors fought the British and won. The Tiwi remember the fight, and oral histories reveal their tactical brilliance.

Later, in 1911, Catholic priest Francis Xavier Gsell decided to ‘purchase’ Tiwi women and ‘free’ them from traditional marriage, so girls would grow up into devoted Catholics.

But Tiwi women had more power in marriage negotiations than missionaries realised. They worked out how to be both Tiwi and Catholic. And it was the missionaries who came around to Tiwi thinking.

Then there are stories of the Tiwi people’s ‘number one religion’: Aussie Rules; Calista Kantilla remembers her time growing up in the mission dormitory; and Teddy Portaminni explains the importance of Tiwi history and culture as something precious, owned by Tiwi and the source of Tiwi strength.

In Tiwi Story, Mavis Kerinaiua, Laura Rademaker and Tiwi historians showcase stories of resilience, creativity and survival.

Author bios: Mavis Kerinaiua is a Tiwi historian, educator and researcher. She has contributed to historical exhibits at the Northern Territory Library and the Patakijiyali Museum, and worked as a researcher for the Australian National University and Flinders University. She has worked in cultural liaison for the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and in education on Bathurst Island. Creator of the Turtuni Framework for research practice, Kerinaiua is an expert in culturally responsive and appropriate research.

Laura Rademaker is a historian of Aboriginal Australia and religion with a PhD from the Australian National University and an interest in oral history. She is the author of Found in Translation (University of Hawai‘i), shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Australian History Prize and awarded the Australian Historical Association’s Hancock Prize. She is also co-author with Traditional Owners of Bible in Buffalo Country, winner of the NT Chief Minister’s Award for History. She has written for ABC Religion and Ethics and The Conversation, and appeared on ABC Radio National.