The prize is awarded to ‘a Victorian author whose body of published work has made an outstanding contribution to Australian literature and to cultural and intellectual life.’

Expressions of interest for the position of HEAT editor should be submitted to applications@giramondopublishing.com by 5pm Monday 23 September 2024.

‘take your left hand / place the palm over your mouth / use lots of force to make sure / no air can come in or out’

Three Giramondo authors have been shortlisted for the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in Poetry: Luke Beesley for In the Photograph, Amy Crutchfield for The Cyprian and Autumn Royal for The Drama Student.

‘I once asked John why he never bought the house in Quincy from Louis. He was clearly very attached to it. His desk was upstairs by the window at the end of the bedroom. On this small table was a checked tablecloth, with just room enough for a couple of A4 sheets, an Indian ink bottle and another book.’

‘Praiseworthy is an astonishing feat of storytelling and sovereign imagination. It is a capacious work in which Alexis Wright takes on the role of creative custodian, singing the songs of unceded lands.’

‘The past two years of my life have been like a magic-realist novel, a blurring of dream and reality, as though I’m under a spell, my entire being an ethereal fiction, whereas the city, streets and friends within are all real.’

‘I feel as I have been talking to John all my adult life. He has been a touchstone to all my thoughts. It still aches whenever I go into a bookshop and realise that there is no new book by John.’

‘The monumentality of Praiseworthy is testament also to the duration of writerly attention and care, to an ethics of a sustained focus on painful injustice. The formal originality and scale of the novel stands as a response to the enormity of need but also to the depth of resources that survive.’ 

Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy and Sanya Rushdi’s Hospital are both finalists to win one of Australia’s most prestigious literary awards, the Miles Franklin.

‘It is my aim that readers, after reading Tintinnabulum, will find the world less fragmented and more interconnected, that language can be felt as an activating mechanism for wonder, joy and revelation.’

‘They were so close we could see the mottling and barring / of their feathers, layers of white and grey highlighted / with brown and charcoal chevrons, strong claws / gripping a branch.’

‘A book-length poem split into seven chapters, rock flight is about many things: settler violence, hyper-surveillance, birds, boycotts and my family. Parts of it are quite literally haunted.’

‘One of the first Chinese-language works about breast cancer, Mourning a Breast was considered groundbreaking for its time, delving into both the physical and psychological responses to the disease, exposing common myths about breast cancer and confronting the shame often associated with it.’

‘Song in the Grass feels to me like a record collection. It’s a handful of favourite albums, a box of lyrics, a soundtrack to living in the Blue Mountains while walking over ‘the long bridge of motherhood’, as the book might say. But it’s also an almanac of environmental care, and a love letter to poetry as an art that is most alive when shared in communities. With other players and listeners – just like music.’

‘If my Grandad had seen the future / he would have said, small acts of care / are worth leaving. He’d have painted / imitation grain on window casing / and planted Crystal Palace lobelia.’