Dr Lucy Neave, creative writing teacher at the Australian National University, has been awarded the $10,000 ACT 2022 Book of the Year prize for her second novel, Believe in Me.

Dr Neave said she was honoured; she had read many of the other works on the shortlist, and called them “fantastic”.

• 2022 ACT Book of the Year finalists (3 April)

“I feel really fortunate to have won the lottery this time,” she said. “It’s very exciting, and I’m very grateful to the ACT Government for continuing to support the arts and literature.

“There’s a huge benefit to authors for winning literary awards, because often literary novels like mine don’t sell particularly well in bookstores. To have $10,000 as part of the award is really important in terms of being able to keep writing.”

Believe in Me (University of Queensland Press, 2021)explores the relationships between mothers and their children across three generations of one family, and questions what we can ever truly know of our parents’ early lives, even as their experiences weave ineffably into our identities and destinies.

“My book is about the act of the imagination, and how the main character imagines the life of her mother to try to make peace with her,” Dr Neave said.

“Neave writes assuredly, and is never weighed down by her subject matter,” the panel of judges declared. “The novel is moving and beautiful, combining deep feeling with insight and compassion.”

Dr Neave is writing her next novel, True Animal War Music, three linked novellas about war as a backdrop to our lives.

“Since I’ve been in my twenties, there has always been a war going on,” Dr Neave said. “[The novel] asks how that affects you as a person living in quite a privileged Western society having this armed conflict with a lot of bloodshed going on in the background.”

Dr Neave believes that literary fiction plays an important rôle in society.

“Literary works ask complicated questions about how we live. They can make people uncomfortable in the way that they ask questions and demand that people think about aspects of our society and the way we go about our business.”

Believe in Me was Highly Commended for the 2022 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.

Dr Neave’s first novel, Who We Were, was shortlisted for the ACT Book of the Year in 2018. Her short fiction has been published in Australian and American literary journals and in Best Australian Stories, and she was awarded a Griffith Review novella prize in 2018.

Three other works were Highly Commended:

The Kindness of Birds, short stories by Merlinda Bobis, a Filipina-Australian writer and academic.

Judges called it “a poetic anthology of short stories, offering an escape in times of crisis, a return to nature, a cast of graceful, touching, and dignified characters animal and human. This collection is carefully researched and deeply rooted in Australian history, Indigenous stories, and immigrant experiences. It is a spiritual reminder to look up at the sky.” The work is a Canberra Critics’ Circle winner, and was shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.

Milk, a play by Dylan van den Berg, a Palawa writer / performer.

“An assured and moving playscript by an emerging Palawa playwright,” judges said. “Dwelling on family history and violence, this haunting play is adept at its illumination of family, place, violence and inheritance. The play confirms the author as an elegant fresh voice in Australian contemporary theatre.” Milk won the 2021 Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.

Killernova, poems and woodcuts by Omar Musa, a Bornean-Australian author, visual artist and poet.

“It is a complete work of art – an assured blend of vibrant, poetry and highly charged woodcut print illustrations,” judges said. “Eclectic and energetic, the author ranges across seas and time to bring the old and new together and find in their collision, brilliant sparks of life. It showcases his powers as a poet while adding new dimensions to his standing as an artist.”

Three works were shortlisted: Tim Bonyhady’s Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium, a social history of Afghanistan that was shortlisted for the Mark & Evette Moran NIB Literary Award, 2022; Failures of Command, Hugh Poate’s investigation of Defence after his son’s death in Afghanistan; and Kaya Wilson’s transgender memoir, As Beautiful As Any Other.

All books can be bought in local bookshops or borrowed from ACT libraries.

“The calibre of nominations this year has been outstanding, and highlights the excellence of the talented ACT writing community,” Tara Cheyne, ACT Minister for the Arts, said.

Nominations for the 2023 ACT Book of the Year open on 1 May.