Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au wins The Novel Prize

Giramondo Publishing, with fellow literary publishers Fitzcarraldo Editions and New Directions, is pleased to announce that Melbourne-based writer Jessica Au has won The Novel Prize for her work Cold Enough for Snow.

We are especially pleased that an Australian author is the inaugural winner of The Novel Prize. Jessica’s novel was selected from an international field of almost 1500 submissions.

The Novel Prize is a biennial award for a book-length work of literary fiction written in English by published and unpublished writers around the world. The prize recognises works which explore and expand the possibilities of the form, and are innovative and imaginative in style. It offers US$10,000 to the winner and simultaneous publication by Giramondo Publishing in Australia and New Zealand, by Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK and Ireland, and by New Directions in North America. 

In Cold Enough for Snow a daughter takes her mother on a visit to Tokyo. They walk the canals at night, escape the typhoon rains, share meals in small restaurants and visit galleries in an itinerary planned by the daughter. All the while, they talk: of the weather, of clothes and objects, of family, migration and memory. But who is really speaking, and what is the real purpose of their journey? Cold Enough for Snow is at once a reckoning and an elegy, one which questions how we can know another’s inner world.

Jessica Au’s first novel, Cargo, was published by Picador in 2011 and was highly commended in the Kathleen Mitchell Award for a writer under 30. She is the former deputy editor of Meanjin, and is currently an associate editor at Aeon.

Cold Enough for Snow, her second novel, will be published early in 2022.