Naag Mountain is an intensely imagined recovery of a little-known cultural inheritance, in which historical figures, folk characters and mythical entities feature in a procession coloured by the metaphors of poetry and the surrealism of dreams. This remarkable debut collection is by Manisha Anjali, an Australian and New Zealand poet of Indo-Fijian background, the descendant of indentured labourers.

Following the threads and detours signalled by research, objects and testimony, Bonny Cassidy’s Monument considers how non-Indigenous Australians might absorb First Nations truth-telling; and what this means for acts of speech, and writing. Should our memories serve the living or the dead, the past or the present? Why do we need new monuments in Australia, and where should we expect to find them?

Joint winner of the 2022 Novel Prize. The heroine of this haunting, spare novel is voraciously alive in the afterlife. She heads west and into mind-boggling adventures, carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest. One of the sharpest and funniest novels of recent years, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is a tale for our dispossessed times.

Joint winner of the 2022 Novel Prize. Structured as a series of interview transcripts with a woman who worked as a gardener for a wealthy businessman and art collector who has mysteriously disappeared, Tell is a work of strange and intoxicating immediacy that explores money, art and industry, the intimacy and distance between social classes, and the complex fluidity of memory.