Speaker 1: The book isn't even out yet, so people haven't even
Speaker 1: seen a winner of the Australian Fiction Prize on the shelves.
Speaker 2: What happens next year if we.
Speaker 1: Get a thousand, We're going to have to recruit, you know,
Speaker 1: half of Sydney to come in and do the blind reading.
Speaker 3: From the Australian. This is the front.
Speaker 4: I'm Claire Harvey and today we're curling up with.
Speaker 3: A good book.
Speaker 4: In fact, it's an award winning book, the inaugural winner
Speaker 4: of the Australian Fiction Prize for an unpublished manuscript. This
Speaker 4: story takes us to a hidden corner of Australia, Mariah Island,
Speaker 4: off Tasmania's East coast, where porcelain beaches and honeycomb cliffs
Speaker 4: meet the sea. There's a shipwreck, a girl breaking free
Speaker 4: from the rules, and a journalist on a search for
Speaker 4: the truth. Today, our literary editor Caroline Overington joins us
Speaker 4: to step into this magical world and to find out
Speaker 4: what does it take to write and knock your socks
Speaker 4: off story?
Speaker 3: Carolin, what is the Australian Fiction Prize.
Speaker 1: It is the newest and the most exciting litterary prize
Speaker 1: on the Australian Calendar, the Australian newspaper is the main sponsor,
Speaker 1: but also the key thing that makes it so beautiful
Speaker 1: is part of the prize is publication by HarperCollins Australia,
Speaker 1: the leading Australian publisher.
Speaker 4: This prize is for an unpublished manuscript, but you don't
Speaker 4: have to be a complete outsider to win. The winner
Speaker 4: being announced this weekend is an accomplished science journalist who's
Speaker 4: already written four books, but this is the one that
Speaker 4: captivated the judges attention.
Speaker 3: Carolyn, tell me who is it.
Speaker 1: It's Catherine Johnson. She comes out of Tasmania. She's fifty
Speaker 1: three years old, originally born in Brisbane, and she has
Speaker 1: written a book that is based on Mariah Island, which
Speaker 1: is off the coast of Tasmania, and it's a wild
Speaker 1: and extremely special place. The way that she's evoked this island,
Speaker 1: the description makes you want to go there immediately. Although
Speaker 1: like a lot of Tasmania, it has of course that
Speaker 1: very brutal history. It was the first convict settlement actually
Speaker 1: even before Port Arthur, so it has layers of history,
Speaker 1: layers of natural beauty. And now Catherine has set this
Speaker 1: beautiful beautiful.
Speaker 2: Book there.
Speaker 1: That the heart of it is a young woman. She's
Speaker 1: eighteen years old. Her name is Minn min Now. Min
Speaker 1: and her father live on Mariah Island, and he has
Speaker 1: been absurdly protective of her, not allowing her to grow
Speaker 1: and develop in a way that a young woman should.
Speaker 1: And so you've got that sense of a young girl
Speaker 1: coming of age in this wild place as well.
Speaker 3: So thrilled.
Speaker 5: I'm so thrilled.
Speaker 4: Here's Catherine speaking to Caroline after she got the good news.
Speaker 5: There's publication at the end of it, and there's an
Speaker 5: opportunity to hopefully connect with with readers, which is one
Speaker 5: of the most wonderful things about writing, connecting with readers
Speaker 5: and hearing what people made of it and what it
Speaker 5: meant to them.
Speaker 2: Tasmania also makes magnificent gin. But how will you be celebrating?
Speaker 5: How will I be celebrating. I think I'll gather some
Speaker 5: people together.
Speaker 2: That'll be nice.
Speaker 5: I'm just so delighted, I'm so thrilled, and I'm so
Speaker 5: incredibly grateful because it's the sort of thing that makes
Speaker 5: all the difference in a writing career.
Speaker 3: So I'm just filled brimming with gratitude.
Speaker 4: One of the things great publishing houses like HarperCollins do
Speaker 4: in collaboration with an author is to finesse and fill
Speaker 4: it book title ideas until they land on one that
Speaker 4: conjures up the right feeling and catches the eye amid
Speaker 4: all the other books piled up on the bookshop counter.
Speaker 4: That means the name might change again, but for now
Speaker 4: this manuscript is tentatively titled A Wild Heart. With this prize,
Speaker 4: Caroline and all the judges want this book to be
Speaker 4: not just a literary achievement, but a wildly popular book
Speaker 4: that frankly sells a truckload of copies.
Speaker 1: It's so crucial that we not only tell our stories,
Speaker 1: but that we also hear our stories, that we read
Speaker 1: our own stories. If you look at the top ten
Speaker 1: in Australia, it's almost all foreign. It's American basically and English.
Speaker 1: But isn't it great to tell our own stories? But
Speaker 1: also we want the book to sell. We're not in
Speaker 1: the business of doing our little niche prize. We are
Speaker 1: in the business of creating a book that many thousands
Speaker 1: of Australian.
Speaker 2: People will read.
Speaker 3: Why A Wild Heart?
Speaker 1: Women are the backbone of the book trade. They buy
Speaker 1: something like eighty percent of the books, and that also
Speaker 1: includes all of the books that are aimed at men,
Speaker 1: because women buy them as gifts for their husbands, partners, brothers,
Speaker 1: particularly at Christmas time. Now, one of the things that
Speaker 1: women are buying and loving at the moment are stories
Speaker 1: about their own agency, about their own development, about the
Speaker 1: place they have in the world. Because at the moment
Speaker 1: for women in the world, it's such a beautiful time
Speaker 1: to be a woman.
Speaker 2: And so the idea that.
Speaker 1: You can break out of whatever the constraints you had
Speaker 1: your childhood, your background, your education, and just not shoot
Speaker 1: the lights out. I think that's the era in which
Speaker 1: we're living, and that's why wild Heart really spoke to me.
Speaker 1: A young girl who's growing up on a very barren,
Speaker 1: wild island, but she has dreams, she has ambitions, she
Speaker 1: has hope for the future.
Speaker 3: Women are writing books too, and they're also winning literary prizes.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 4: You and I have spoken before about how after many
Speaker 4: years in which women didn't win a lot of prizes,
Speaker 4: now women are dominating the long list, the short lists
Speaker 4: and the winners' lists of the big international literary prizes.
Speaker 4: That's also been the case here for the Australian fiction Prize.
Speaker 4: You were one of the judges. Why were women's books
Speaker 4: dominant this year?
Speaker 1: We found the majority of entries were by women, and
Speaker 1: our short list was majority female as well, and ultimately
Speaker 1: our winner is female. It's a really interesting development and
Speaker 1: I actually have an essay that we're about to run
Speaker 1: in the Australian by a male author who says that
Speaker 1: male authors actually right now feeling a little bit forgotten,
Speaker 1: because you're quite right. In the olden days, they won
Speaker 1: everything and they were the only ones who were published.
Speaker 1: I did have somebody say to me, it only looks
Speaker 1: like women are winning everything if you look at the
Speaker 1: last five years, if you look at the last one hundred,
Speaker 1: then it kind of balances out. And I guess that's
Speaker 1: true as well. But the female dominance of the literary
Speaker 1: world is definitely a story of the times.
Speaker 3: Did you look at gender or was this completely blind?
Speaker 1: I read the manuscripts blind and the reason that I
Speaker 1: did that was because I felt that there was a
Speaker 1: chance that I would know some of the entries, and
Speaker 1: I was quite surprised we actually had a First Nations
Speaker 1: writer on the shortlist.
Speaker 2: We had majority female.
Speaker 1: As you know, we had a one male writer out
Speaker 1: of the seven that we shortlisted out.
Speaker 2: Of West Australia who wrote a western.
Speaker 1: He wrote a Western set in West Australia, which I
Speaker 1: really love with cowboys. His influences were like Bob Dylan
Speaker 1: and Cormack McCarthy.
Speaker 2: But the standard.
Speaker 1: Across the board was incredibly high. This was an enormously
Speaker 1: successful prize. Part of the reason was we didn't prevent
Speaker 1: people from entering who had already written a book, so
Speaker 1: we had a lot of people on the shortlist and
Speaker 1: who entered who were established writers. One woman had written
Speaker 1: twenty books before this, some of them self published, some
Speaker 1: of the mainstream published. Catherine Johnson, our winner, has had
Speaker 1: four books published previously.
Speaker 4: Coming up, How to Dodge's Zift through towering piles of
Speaker 4: manuscripts to find the genius while I've got you Caroline's
Speaker 4: books pages in our review section. One of the reasons
Speaker 4: The Weekend Australian is a beautiful analog treat. There are reviews,
Speaker 4: author interviews and stories that will make you want to
Speaker 4: add a stack of books to your Christmas list.
Speaker 3: We'll be back after this break. You had five hundred entries.
Speaker 4: I know, how on earth do you get through five
Speaker 4: hundred Manu.
Speaker 1: So the five hundred entries initially went to Harpercolums, the
Speaker 1: publishing house, and they had teams of people working on
Speaker 1: what would traditionally.
Speaker 2: Be called the flush pile.
Speaker 1: So all the entries that came in were all read
Speaker 1: by someone and they had like a yes or no,
Speaker 1: a maybe column. If you've got a maybe column, somebody
Speaker 1: else came along, and how to read of it to
Speaker 1: see whether it become part.
Speaker 2: Of the s pile.
Speaker 1: We narrowed it down to seven books on the shortlist
Speaker 1: and those were given to a judging panel. I was
Speaker 1: on the judging panel. We also had a literary agent,
Speaker 1: which is really important because literary agents play such an
Speaker 1: important part in ushering new books into existence. We had
Speaker 1: a bookseller, which I thought was really important because she
Speaker 1: knows better than anyone what kinds of things Australians want
Speaker 1: to read. And then we had experts from the publishing
Speaker 1: industry from HarperCollins. We all met in a giant room
Speaker 1: at HarperCollins in Sydney headquarters. We sat there for many
Speaker 1: hours and we really prosecuted the case for all the
Speaker 1: different books on the shortlist, and because they were all
Speaker 1: by that stage brilliant because they'd been culled from a
Speaker 1: pile of five hundred. It was really difficult to decide.
Speaker 1: There were people who were passionately about this book and
Speaker 1: others who were passionately about that book, and.
Speaker 2: So coming to an agreement about the is a real process.
Speaker 4: The way we respond to books is so personal and
Speaker 4: often so emotional.
Speaker 3: It's about what we bring to that experience of reading.
Speaker 3: How do you navigate that?
Speaker 4: When you're a judge in a prize like this, where
Speaker 4: you're trying to be impartial and also trying to think
Speaker 4: about how other readers might enjoy something, do you have
Speaker 4: to try and park your own personal emotional reaction to it.
Speaker 1: It's such a heavy responsibility and you will always have
Speaker 1: people who disagree with you. So, for example, when they
Speaker 1: announced the winner of the book a prize, you always
Speaker 1: hear people say, oh my god, I hated.
Speaker 2: Or I couldn't finish that book, But why did that
Speaker 2: book win? You have to be.
Speaker 1: Prepared to back your winner absolutely, and there's no question
Speaker 1: that everybody that was involved in the judging process loved
Speaker 1: this book.
Speaker 4: So tell me about what it was about Catherine's book
Speaker 4: that made her the winner. Bearing in mind that I
Speaker 4: think a lot of our listeners probably think that they
Speaker 4: have an award winning novel in them.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think Catherine had the edge because she is an
Speaker 1: absolutely beautiful writer. The setting on Mariah Island was gorgeous.
Speaker 1: It had a beautiful Australian sensive place, and you're really
Speaker 1: rooting for men the whole time, you know, for her
Speaker 1: to be able to get the life she.
Speaker 2: Wants for herself.
Speaker 1: And at the same time there's this secondary story, which
Speaker 1: is a mystery which everybody likes to solve. It was accomplished, beautiful,
Speaker 1: complete work.
Speaker 3: Here's Catherine.
Speaker 5: Mercury passage was dark and torn, Bloodstone Beach almost gone
Speaker 5: under the hurl of foam. All along the shoreline. The
Speaker 5: pre dawn light had revealed bullkelp piled snakelike into nests.
Speaker 5: A weedy sea dragon hung from Min's hand, shaggy with
Speaker 5: leaf like appendages, and still colorful. It had been an
Speaker 5: unexpected find, a thing of such rare beauty coughed up
Speaker 5: by the sea. At first, she thought the stricken boat
Speaker 5: was another wave slanting off the small granite outcrop in
Speaker 5: the middle of the channel between Mariah Island and mainland Tasmania,
Speaker 5: but the angles were, and it remained after the waves
Speaker 5: sank away. Without the sun, the palette was all blues
Speaker 5: and grays, a wash of mauve. She zipped her nylon
Speaker 5: jacket to her chin and wrapped her arms around herself,
Speaker 5: waiting for the white caps to pass and the wind
Speaker 5: squalls to.
Speaker 2: Catch their breath.
Speaker 5: Then a flare, the unmistakable pink shock of it rising
Speaker 5: against the storm clouds. Saltaire caught in the back of
Speaker 5: her throat. The flaming light rounded at the top of
Speaker 5: its ark and latched briefly onto the wind before parachuting
Speaker 5: into the water.
Speaker 3: When can we read it?
Speaker 2: I'm hoping.
Speaker 1: I'm hoping you're going to be able to read it
Speaker 1: by the middle of twenty twenty five. One of the
Speaker 1: problems I think with the previous Vogel Prize was it
Speaker 1: was published on the day it.
Speaker 2: Was announced, so there wasn't a lot of time to.
Speaker 1: Do the work necessary to really support the book and
Speaker 1: get book clubs talking about it, get booksellers excited by it,
Speaker 1: get reviewers ready to review it. With this, we're going
Speaker 1: to give it a lot of time because we really
Speaker 1: wanted to success.
Speaker 4: Caroline Overington is the Australian's literary editor, Artists of all kinds,
Speaker 4: and the gifts they give us. That's the vibe of
Speaker 4: review in the Weekend Australian. Check it out anytime at
Speaker 4: the Australian dot com dot au