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 1: What happens next year if we get a thousand, we're
Speaker 1: going to have to recruit, you know, half of Sydney
Speaker 1: to come in and do the blind reading.
Speaker 2: From the Australian.
Speaker 3: This is the front.
Speaker 2: I'm Claire Harvey and today we're curling up with a
Speaker 2: good book. In fact, it's an award winning book, the
Speaker 2: inaugural winner of the Australian Fiction Prize for an unpublished manuscript.
Speaker 2: This story takes us to a hidden corner of Australia,
Speaker 2: Mariah Island, off Tasmania's East coast, where porcelain beaches and
Speaker 2: honeycomb cliffs meet the sea. There's a shipwreck, a girl
Speaker 2: breaking free from the rules, and a journalist on a
Speaker 2: search for the truth. Today, our litery editor Caroline Overington
Speaker 2: joins us to step into this magical world and to
Speaker 2: find out what does it take to write and knock
Speaker 2: your socks 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Speaker 2: This prize is for an unpublished manuscript, but you don't
Speaker 2: have to be a complete outsider to win. The winner
Speaker 2: being announced this weekend is an accomplished science journalist who's
Speaker 2: already written four books, but this is the one that
Speaker 2: captivated the judges attention. 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 Risbone, 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 book there that the heart of it is
Speaker 1: a young woman. She's eighteen years old. Her name is
Speaker 1: Minn min Now. Min and her father live on Mariah Island,
Speaker 1: and he has been absurdly protective of her, not allowing
Speaker 1: her to grow and develop in a way that a
Speaker 1: young woman should. And so you've got that sense of
Speaker 1: a young girl coming of age in this wild place
Speaker 1: as well.
Speaker 4: So thrilled. I'm so thrilled.
Speaker 2: Here's Catherine speaking to Caroline after she got the good news.
Speaker 4: There's publication at the end of it, and there's an
Speaker 4: opportunity to hopefully connect with with readers, which is one
Speaker 4: of the most wonderful things about writing, connecting with readers
Speaker 4: and hearing what people made of it and what it
Speaker 4: meant to them.
Speaker 1: Tasmania also makes magnificent gin. But how will you be celebrating?
Speaker 4: How will I be celebrating. I think I'll gather some
Speaker 4: people together. That'll be nice. I'm just so delighted, I'm
Speaker 4: so thrilled, and I'm so incredibly grateful because it's the
Speaker 4: sort of thing that makes all the difference in a
Speaker 4: writing career. So I'm just filled brimming with gratitude.
Speaker 2: One of the things great publishing houses like HarperCollins do
Speaker 2: in collaboration with an author is to finesse and fill
Speaker 2: it book title ideas until they land on one that
Speaker 2: cojures up the right feeling and catches the eye amid
Speaker 2: all the other books piled up on the bookshop counter.
Speaker 2: That means the name might change again, but for now
Speaker 2: this manuscript is tentatively titled A Wild Heart. With this prize,
Speaker 2: Caroline and all the judges want this book to be
Speaker 2: not just a literary achievement, but a wildly popular book
Speaker 2: 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 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. And so the idea that you
Speaker 1: can break out of whatever the constraints you had your childhood,
Speaker 1: your background, your education, and just not shoot the lights out.
Speaker 1: I think that's the era in which we're living, and
Speaker 1: that's why wild Heart really spoke to me. A young
Speaker 1: girl who's growing up on a very barren, wild island,
Speaker 1: but she has dreams, she has ambitions, she has hope
Speaker 1: for the future.
Speaker 2: Women are writing books too, and they're also winning literary prizes. Now.
Speaker 2: You and I have spoken before about how after many
Speaker 2: years in which women didn't win a lot of prizes,
Speaker 2: now women are dominating the long listen the short lists
Speaker 2: and the winners' lists of the big international literary prizes.
Speaker 2: That's also been the case here for the Australian fiction Prize.
Speaker 2: You were one of the judges. Why were women's books
Speaker 2: 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 2: 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. We had majority female. As you know,
Speaker 1: we had a one male writer out of the seven
Speaker 1: that we shortlisted out 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. But the standard across the board was
Speaker 1: incredibly high. This was an enormously successful prize. Part of
Speaker 1: the reason was we didn't prevent people from entering who
Speaker 1: had already written a book, so we had a lot
Speaker 1: of people on the shortlist and who entered who were
Speaker 1: established writers. One woman had written twenty books before this,
Speaker 1: some of themself published, some of the mainstream published. Catherine Johnson,
Speaker 1: our winner, has had four books published previously.
Speaker 3: Coming up.
Speaker 2: How did Dodgers zift through towering piles of manuscripts to
Speaker 2: find the genius? Well, I've got to you Caroline's books
Speaker 2: pages in our review section. One of the reasons The
Speaker 2: Weekend Australian is a beautiful analog treat.
Speaker 3: There are reviews, author.
Speaker 2: Interviews and stories that will make you want to add
Speaker 2: a stack of books to your Christmas list.
Speaker 3: We'll be back after this break. You had five hundred entries.
Speaker 2: I know, how on earth do you get.
Speaker 3: Through five hundred menu.
Speaker 1: So the five hundred entries initially went to HarperCollins, the
Speaker 1: publishing house, and they had teams of people working on
Speaker 1: what would traditionally be called the flash pile. So all
Speaker 1: the entries that came in were all read by someone
Speaker 1: and they had like a yes or no, a maybe column.
Speaker 1: If you've got a maybe column, somebody else came along
Speaker 1: and had to read of it to see whether it
Speaker 1: become part of the s pile. We narrowed it down
Speaker 1: to seven books on the shortlist and those were given
Speaker 1: to a judging panel. I was on the judging panel.
Speaker 1: We also had a literary agent, which is really important
Speaker 1: because literary agents play such an important part in ushering
Speaker 1: new books into existence. We had a bookseller, which I
Speaker 1: thought was really important because she knows better than anyone
Speaker 1: what kinds of things Australians want to read. And then
Speaker 1: we had experts from the publishing industry from HarperCollins. We
Speaker 1: all met in a giant room at HarperCollins in Sydney headquarters.
Speaker 1: We sat there for many hours and we really prosecuted
Speaker 1: the case for all the different books on the shortlist,
Speaker 1: and because they were all by that stage brilliant because
Speaker 1: they'd been culled from a pile of five hundred. It
Speaker 1: was really difficult to decide. There were people who were
Speaker 1: passionately about this book and others who were passionately about
Speaker 1: that book, and so coming to an agreement about the
Speaker 1: is a real process.
Speaker 2: The way we respond to books is so personal and
Speaker 2: often so emotional. It's about what we bring to that
Speaker 2: experience of reading. How do you navigate that? When you're
Speaker 2: a judge in a prize like this, where you're trying
Speaker 2: to be impartial and also trying to think about how
Speaker 2: other readers might enjoy something, do you you have to
Speaker 2: 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 that book
Speaker 1: or I couldn't finish that book, But why did that
Speaker 1: book win? You have to be prepared to back your
Speaker 1: winner absolutely, and there's no question that everybody that was
Speaker 1: involved in the judging process loved this book.
Speaker 2: So tell me about what it was about Catherine's book
Speaker 2: that made her the winner. Bearing in mind that I
Speaker 2: think a lot of our listeners probably think that they
Speaker 2: have an award winning novel in them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think Catherine had the edge because she is
Speaker 1: an 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 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 2: Here's Catherine.
Speaker 4: Mercury passage was dark and torn, Bloodstone Beach almost gone
Speaker 4: under the hurl of foam. All along the shoreline. The
Speaker 4: pre dawn light had revealed bull kelp piled snakelike into nests.
Speaker 4: A weedy sea dragon hung from Min's hand, shaggy with
Speaker 4: leaf like appendages, and still colorful. It had been an
Speaker 4: unexpected find, a thing of such rare beauty, coughta by
Speaker 4: the sea. At first, she thought the stricken boat was
Speaker 4: another wave slanting off the small granite outcrop in the
Speaker 4: middle of the channel between Mariah Island and Mainland. Tasmania,
Speaker 4: but the angles were and it remained after the waves
Speaker 4: sank away. Without the sun, the palette was all blues
Speaker 4: and grays, a wash of mauve. She zipped her nylon
Speaker 4: jacket to her chin and wrapped her arms around herself,
Speaker 4: waiting for the white caps to pass and the wind
Speaker 4: squalls to catch their breath. Then a flare, the unmistakable
Speaker 4: pink shock of it rising against the storm clouds, saltair
Speaker 4: caught in the back of her throat. The flaming light
Speaker 4: rounded at the top of its ark and latched briefly
Speaker 4: onto the wind before parachuting into the water.
Speaker 3: When can we read it?
Speaker 1: I'm hoping. I'm hoping you're going to be able to
Speaker 1: read it by the middle of twenty twenty five. One
Speaker 1: of the problems I think with the previous Vogel Prize
Speaker 1: was it was published on the day it was announced,
Speaker 1: so there wasn't a lot of time to do the
Speaker 1: work necessary to really support the book and get book
Speaker 1: clubs talking about it, get booksellers excited by it, get
Speaker 1: reviewers ready to review it. With this, we're going to
Speaker 1: give it a lot of time because we really want
Speaker 1: it to success.
Speaker 2: Caroline Overington is The Australian's literary editor. Artists of all
Speaker 2: kinds and the gifts they give us. That's the vibe
Speaker 2: of review in the Weekend Australian. Check it out anytime
Speaker 2: at the Australian dot com dot au