Andrada is shortlisted for her ‘gripping poetic melodrama’ KONTRA and Başkan for Two Hundred Million Musketeers, a book that ‘greets despair with the full force of wonder and reciprocity’.

‘you begin to suspect you are already stone / each day a weight that does not shift with rest / with time alone or a fistful of supplements’

Andrada is a finalist for her third collection KONTRA, which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and was longlisted for the Stella Prize. Butcher-McGunnigle is recognised for her book of prose poems Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama.

‘It was my idea that a dictionary could tell the story of a person (me) in connection with a place (Parramatta) with enough flexibility to take in detours, digressions, musings and general quirkiness. I knew at the outset that the entries would be placed under titles and it would be fragmentary in spirit.’

‘Imagine this dictionary is a house and a writer can keep adding to it, extension after extension, so that it is a project ongoing and endless.’

‘Its form evolved naturally as a nodal essay with each cell connected, piecing together the long-lost flesh of the unspoken words between a mother and daughter. In this way, I hoped that the book could demonstrate the material nature of language – the physical realities that speech and silence can create – while remaining attentive to its slipperiness and suppleness.’

‘At some point, it began to dawn on me that all these poems had fatigue in their bones. My fatigue, from the genetic condition I have, and the chronic illness I’ve been recently diagnosed with, is a fundamental constraint not only on my energy, but my creativity and being. Yet part of this exhaustion, this feeling not-quite-right, is also shared, is political and existential.’

‘As its three rom-com quoting central characters travel from incarceration to exile to a place beyond punishment, Audition explores carceral politics and the psychology of violence, and what healing from the harm of those systems might require in a world where embodiment and identity have lost all familiar forms.’

Set in a Sydney of recent times, and following on from The Magpie Wing and Paradise Estate, Max Easton’s third novel Now, Autonomy is about the ways history repeats itself, even if the lyrics don’t always rhyme. Find here a playlist made by Easton, comprising some tracks he was listening to while writing the book, and others that feature in its pages.

‘Başkan’s lines explode like fireworks – the collection holds the absurd rhythms, spontaneous expressions and joyous exclamations of the lived world. Two Hundred Million Musketeers is a radiant debut, outstanding in originality, experimentation and resonance.’

‘One afternoon in one of the years when I used to stay at home to mind my son and my daughter and to do the housework while my wife was away at her job, my son was caught in a thunderstorm…’ Read the opening story of Collected Short Fiction by Gerald Murnane, a volume published by Giramondo in 2018.

The acclaimed Australian author has been appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia for distinguished service to literature as an author and novelist, and to tertiary education.

‘There’s a cross-generational solidarity to Now, Autonomy, an ode to people who have tried and are trying to make good of a place like Sydney, especially for those who can’t meet the cost of living. It was an exercise in writing to the now from the depths of various archives, and in trying to provide something to a reader who sees little of interest in the glossy displays of the local book shop.’ 

‘Queers are so often looking to create family with one another, and succeeding and failing in beautiful and agonising ways (myself included). I’m hungry to see more stories that explore the queer platonic connections: the ones that are sometimes capable of breaking one’s heart even more profoundly.’

‘Cannon is an incontestable reminder that – in the hands of a masterful artist and storyteller – the very best graphic novels can do what prose alone cannot,’ write the judges. ‘And Cannon is absolutely one of the best.’

‘I have known Lee for a long time; ten years ago, she was our very first interview subject for Liminal. So much has changed since; in author’s note, she writes about Cannon as a kind of ‘second-coming-of-age’, and it very much feels like I – and so many of us – have grown and become, both artistically and politically, alongside her work.’