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The winners of this year’s Age Book of the Year Awards have been announced, both having been praised for their deeply human stories.
The awards, now in their 45th year, were presented by Age deputy editor Orietta Guerrera at the opening night of the Melbourne Writers Festival on Thursday. The winners each received $10,000 thanks to the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
Moreno Giovannoni won the fiction category for his novel The Immigrants, which draws heavily on the experiences of his late parents, Italian immigrants who came to Australia in the 1950s. Journalist and author Kate Wild’s account of the fatal shooting of Indigenous man Kumanjayi Walker by a white police officer in 2019, The Red House, won the non-fiction award.
Accepting his award at the Athenaeum Theatre, Giovannoni said his novel carried an element of risk.
“You would think that anything that needed to be said about Italians in Australia had been said, but the response to the book has been overwhelmingly positive, more than I could have imagined,” he said. “It has changed many readers’ views about the lives of migrants.”
The fiction judges – author and critic Bram Presser and essayist and critic Beejay Silcox – described The Immigrants as a masterclass in migrant fiction and “the combustible art of telling Australian stories”.
“Just when you think you have its measure, the book pivots in some delightful, unexpected direction. It is a joy,” the judges said. “It is also a work of quiet reckoning. Grounded in the specifics of Giovannoni’s own forebears, The Immigrants branches steadily outward until it is telling something far larger than one family’s story – something universal and necessary.”
Giovannoni agreed in his speech that his story was universal, but his characters are not “cute, cuddly nonnas or nonnos, growing vegetables in the backyard. They are ordinary human beings.”
The non-fiction judges – author, reviewer and mission director of Caritas Australia Michael McGirr and this masthead’s Canberra bureau chief, Michelle Griffin – described Wild’s The Red House as a patient investigation that “has echoes from the past and reverberations into the future”.
Wild’s curiosity and compassion, they said, “is bolstered by the vivid precision with which she describes what she witnesses and learns. The Red House … gives us no sermons, only a compulsively readable story.”
Accepting her award, Walkley Award winner Wild offered thanks and respect to Warlpiri elder Ned Jampijinpa Hargraves, a leading voice for justice in the shooting, and acknowledged Kumanjayi’s maternal grandparents, Joseph and Annie Lane.
She said her years living in the Northern Territory had taught her about connection. “Central to the way The Red House examines connections between black and white Australia is an invitation to look at time differently,” Wild said, referring to the Indigenous concept of the “everywhen”, in which past, present and future are happening at once, affecting each other in every moment.
“For me, the everywhen is the key to understanding the incredible weight some moments carry – where we feel the visceral imprint of unresolved history at work and see possible futures balanced on a knife’s edge,” she said. “Kumanjayi Walker and Zachary Rolfe’s confrontation in a red house in the desert in 2019 was one of those moments. Moments of connection are happening every day. The direction they take relies on what we bring to them.”
Wild also paid respect to the family of five-year-old Kumanjayi Little Baby, whose death in Alice Springs last month, she said, “is felt by everyone in the Northern Territory and beyond”.
“I acknowledge and applaud the police officers and community members who searched shoulder to shoulder with Little Baby’s family for days – hundreds of people bonded together by determination and hope.”
The Melbourne Writers Festival runs from May 7-10. The Age is a festival partner.
