This year’s International Dublin Literary Award has been won by Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa with his 14th novel A General Theory of Oblivion, translated by Daniel Hahn. The €100,000 prize is divided between author and translator, with Agualusa receiving €75,000 and Hahn €25,000.

It tells the story of a traumatised woman Luanda, who retreats from the world and history and remains in an apartment while outside Angola endures civil war and a sequence of horrors. Her isolation is shared with an albino dog Phantom, whose spirit continues to sustain her after he dies.

One of three African books on a shortlist of 10 novels, which also included Ireland’s Anne Enright and the 2006 Nobel Literature laureate Orhan Pamuk, the winning book is bold, beautiful and often poignant, with many stylistic echoes of Colombian Gabriel García Márquez. Yet Agualusa (56) is an original whose international reputation was secured with the success of the English-language edition of The Book of Chameleons, also translated by Hahn. It won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2007.

A General Theory of Oblivion was shortlisted for the rival Man Booker International Prize last year It is an important win. The International Dublin Literary Award, established in 1995 and now funded entirely by Dublin City Council, which has proved a pioneering champion in alerting readers to international fiction in translation, has come under pressure from the revamped Man Booker International Prize for Fiction. In only its second year in its new format, the latter has emerged as a specialist competition for books in translation.

This year’s Dublin award seemed destined for the Vietnamese-born US writer Viet Thanh Nguyen. The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and is already an international bestseller. Pamuk, as the only previous winner, having taken the then International IMPAC award in 2003, was regarded as an outsider with A Strangness in My Mind, translated by Ekin Oklap, a Dickensian love letter to Istanbul. More favoured was the previously shortlisted veteran Mia Couto from Mozambique, who this year featured with Confessions of a Lioness, translated by his regular collaborator, David Brookshaw. It is a strange and compelling work, very beautiful and subversive. Few commentators were prepared to discount either the appeal or threat of Enright’s The Green Road which had received a wide critical reception and is very popular.

A General Theory of Oblivion not only gives the prize a fine winner, it is an important one. It is true that it had also been somewhat ironically shortlisted for the rival prize last year as was another of this year’s Dublin International contenders, Robert Seethaler’s elegiac A Whole Life, a work of rare beauty which has been lovingly translated by Charlotte Collins.

An ongoing criticism of the Dublin prize is the three-year cycle which surrounds its submission due to the egalitarian nature of its selection process which is initially determined by library readers across the world. Many of the titles are already well known even at the time of the publication of the long list.

Agualusa’s triumph is a victory for empathy. The plight of Luanda, or Ludo, reflects that of mankind itself. Wronged early in life, she endures alone; catching birds on the balcony and ultimately burning her beloved books for warmth as she camps out in an empty flat, the furniture long gone in the fire. Her loneliness ends with the arrival of a young boy, a chance thief who befriends her.

That a work of art held off the driving narrative of Nguyen’s swashbuckling Catch-22 of the 21st century is fascinating. Even more so is the fact that of the original 149 titles submitted only 43 were in translation and yet 6 of the final 10 titles were in translation. </s> When Angolan author José Eduardo Agualusa was told he had won one of the world’s richest book prizes, it realised a dream. The author, whose novel A General History of Oblivion has scooped the €100,000 (£88,000) International Dublin literary award – formerly known as the Impac prize – has long desired to build a library in his adopted home on the Island of Mozambique.

“What we really need is a public library, because people don’t have access to books, so if I can do something to help that, it will be great,” Agualusa says. “We have already found a place and I can put my own personal library in there and open it to the people of the island. It’s been a dream for a long time.”

The happy symmetry of channeling money from a prize chosen by librarians around the world into a new library is not lost on the writer. “It is funny … I really appreciate the fact that the prize is chosen by librarians.”

Not that he thought he would be the first choice of those voting in the Dublin-based literary award. “I was really surprised,” he says, on getting the phone call that informed him of his win. “A close friend, Mozambican author Mia Couto, was also on the shortlist, and I really believed he was going to win.”

But it is easy to see why a global audience voted for a novel in which a woman bricks herself into her flat on the eve of Angolan independence, only to emerge 28 years later. Ludovica Fernandes Mano, a Portuguese expatriate, fears for her fate in the newly independent African state, so instead chooses to live in isolation for three decades, only experiencing the outside world through snippets of neighbours’ conversations, a window and a radio that gradually dies, as she distils all she sees into diaries, and later on the walls of her apartment.

Agualusa is one of the biggest literary stars in the Portuguese-speaking world; A General Theory of Oblivion was also nominated for the 2016 Man Booker International prize and his earlier novel The Book of Chameleons won the Independent foreign fiction prize after its 2007 translation. Mining the turbulent recent past of his home country to write a plot so well imagined that it was rumoured to be based on a true story, Agualusa shows how a small country’s internal conflicts can be exploited by other nations.

Though he resists comparisons with the present-day conflict in Syria, the author admits the novel is prescient. “What is significant for me about the book is that it is about fear of the other, about xenophobia, which is a very topical theme,” the 56-year-old says. “This is important in Angola, but also everywhere else.”

Set in Angola, which was a cold-war frontline as a Soviet and Cuba-backed government fought against US-trained and South Africa-backed insurgents, A General Theory of Oblivion also examines the country’s transformation from a Marxist-Leninist state into one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. It is just the latest novel in which Agualusa uses fiction to better understand his country’s shift from conflict to prosperous peace. “When I wrote my first novel Creole, it was because I wanted to understand Angola and my place within her. You can’t explain the present if you do not understand the past.”

While he says Ludovica’s story was not based upon a real event, a similar, true story did emerge later: “After the book appeared, in Mozambique it came out that a couple had lived almost 30 years in a closed place just like Ludo. It’s crazy, but [my book] has become true by accident.”

The novel was translated by British writer Daniel Hahn, who has worked with Agualusa on five other books. The two will share the prize money, with €25,000 going to Hahn, who says: “My career began with Agualusa.” Over the years, the two have formed a comfortable relationship, one that Hahn says enables him to stay true to the “music, cadence and comedy” of Agualusa’s prose.

“One of the things that has changed is that when we first worked together, I would visit him and we worked very closely, because it is important to reassure the writer that the translator is not a lunatic or idiot and that I know what I am doing,” says Hahn.

As a tribute to the closeness of their relationship, Hahn adds that he plans to use half of his winnings to launch the £2,000 Translators Association first translation prize. The rest of the money? “I’m going to spend it on plumbing in my new home. You have no idea how excited I am that I will have central heating,” he said. </s> The Hugo Award for Best Novel 2017 was given on Friday to Nora K. Jemisin, an American speculative fiction writer for her work “The Obelisk Gate”. The award was presented at the 75th World Science Fiction Convention in Helsinki. The awarded book was the second in the trilogy that started with “The Fifth Season”, which was New York Times Notable Book of 2015 and won Jemisin the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2016, Xinhua reported.

The fantasy novel tells a story about the life on a planet where the inhabitants would undergo a “Fifth Season” of catastrophic climate change every a few centuries. The third book of the trilogy is due to be published later this month. Jemisin was among a dozen winners of other categories of Hugo Awards on Friday. Ada Palmer was awarded the Best New Writer, Seanan McGuire’s “Every Heart a Doorway” was the Best Novella, “The Tomato Thief” by Ursula Vernon was the Best Novelette, and “Seasons of Glass and Iron” by Amal El-Mohtar the Best Short Story.

“The Expanse: Leviathan Wakes”, written by Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, was awarded the Best Dramatic Presentation Short Form. It won over the best seller Game of Thrones, a series that had two books in the six-finalist shortlist. A total of 3,319 voters made their selection from the final ballot, the third-highest number in the history of the award. First presented in 1953, the Hugo Award is considered the highest honour for sci-fi works along with the Nebula Awards. It has been confirmed by the Guinness Book of Records to be the oldest sci-fi award in the world. </s> The acclaimed slavery novel has been rewarded alongside Lynn Nottage’s factory drama Sweat and Matthew Desmond’s nonfiction work Evicted

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Literary blockbuster novel The Underground Railroad, which depicts the journey of a young woman escaping from slavery via a fantastical train system, has won the Pulitzer prize for fiction.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead review – luminous, furious and wildly inventive Read more

Author Colson Whitehead has collected multiple accolades for the bestselling book, including last year’s National Book Award. Moonlight director Barry Jenkins is adapting the story into a limited series for Amazon.

“For a smart melding of realism and allegory that combines the violence of slavery and the drama of escape in a myth that speaks to contemporary America,” read the Pulitzer judges’ note about Whitehead’s win.

The author reacted to the news on Twitter:

colson whitehead (@colsonwhitehead) Giddy-up, motherfucker!

The Pulitzer prizes, considered the most prestigious journalism and arts awards in the country, were announced on Wednesday afternoon at Columbia University in New York.

Playwright Lynn Nottage nabbed her second Pulitzer for the drama Sweat, a Broadway play about factory workers battling job cuts.

Author Matthew Desmond won the nonfiction award for Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, a book about housing inequality and evictions, and Hisham Matar won the biography prize for The Return, his book on his missing father in Libya.

Bestseller When Breath Becomes Air by the late Paul Kalanithi, the autobiography of a dying surgeon, was a runner-up in the biography category.



Tyehimba Jess won the poetry award for his work Olio.

In the journalism awards, New York Daily News and ProPublica jointly nabbed the top award, for public service, for their investigation into the New York police department evicting people, mostly minorities, from their homes.

“We are not in a period of decline in journalism. Rather, we are in the midst of a revolution,” Pulitzer prize administrator Mike Pride said during the award ceremony.

David A Fahrenthold of the Washington Post won the national reporting award for his coverage of the lack of promised donations by the Trump Foundation during the election. He regularly tweeted his news-gathering techniques, a photo of a crammed notepad listing organizations he had called showing the scale of the issue.

California’s East Bay Times nabbed the breaking news Pulitzer for its coverage of the Oakland fire at a warehouse that killed 36 people.

Hilton Als of the New Yorker won the criticism award, Eric Eyre of the Charleston Gazette-Mail took home the investigative award for his reporting on opioids in West Virginia, and the New York Times garnered the international reporting award for its coverage of Vladimir Putin and Russia.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, McClatchy and the Miami Herald won the explanatory reporting award for its work on the Panama Papers. </s> On Friday, The Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Literature Prize, announced an Iranian-born poet and a judge as new members as it seeks to recover from a #MeToo scandal that forced it to postpone this year’s literature Nobel.

Eight of its total 18 members have either resigned or are on hiatus due to a deep rift within the academy on how to manage its long-standing ties to a Frenchman recently convicted of rape.

For the first time in 70 years, it postponed this year’s literature prize by a year while it attempts to sort out its problems.

The election of Jila Mossaed, a Tehran-born poet who writes in Swedish and Persian, and Swedish supreme court judge Eric Runesson, brings the Academy’s active members to a quorum of 12.

Members have traditionally been elected for life, but with several members no longer actively participating, and to ensure the venerable body’s survival, its patron, Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf, changed its statutes to make it possible for members to resign and be replaced.

“The election of two new members is positive. I hope The Swedish Academy will be given the opportunity to continue rebuilding the trust of the institution and that the academy can now continue its important work,” the king said in a statement.

“My words were not appreciated in my old home country, but my new nation is offering me one of the best literary positions because of what I write,” Mossaed, who’s been living in exile Sweden since 1986, told TT news agency. She replaces Swedish author Kerstin Ekman, who ended her involvement with the academy in 1989 over its refusal to condemn a fatwa issued by Iran’s former supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini against author Salman Rushdie over his novel The Satanic Verses.

Meanwhile, Runesson, who also worked as a professor at Lund University, jokingly referred to himself as an “ignorant hellion” compared to his other academy colleagues.

Author and member Peter Englund told TT news agency, “This is about two people with strong integrity, who, with their different backgrounds, knowledge, and competence, complete the academy in a welcome and interesting fashion.” </s> The Swedish Academy voted on Thursday to induct laywer Eric M Runesson and writer Jila Mossaed as new members of the two-century-old cultural institution, which hands out the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Runesson, a business lawyer, got his Bachelor degree at Stockholm University and his Master of Laws at Harvard Law School. He is a docent at the Stockholm School of Economics, an arbitrator for the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes and judge on Sweden's Supreme Court.

Mossead, from Teheran, is an award-winning poet who came to Sweden in 1986. She has published two novels and six poetry collections in Persian and seven poetry collections in Swedish.

The pair will join the Academy on its annual meeting on December 20th.

They replace Lotta Lotass, who left the institution in 2015 and Kerstin Ekman who quit in 1989 after fellow members refused to issue a statement condemning the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.

Until recently, membership has been considered a lifetime honour. However, following a series of mass resignations earlier this year, the statutes were changed to allow members to leave and be replaced.

Another six chairs are currently empty, with some members having left permanently and some taking a hiatus after the Academy failed to agree on how to handle rape allegations against Jean Claude Arnault – an influential figure on Stockhom's cultural scene with close links to several Academy members.
• Frenchman at centre of Swedish Academy scandal sentenced for rape
• Let's talk about the Swedish Academy's rapid descent into farce

In ruins and without a quorum to make key decisions, the Academy postponed this year's Nobel Literature Prize, a first in 70 years, saying it would instead hand out two Nobel Prizes next year.

However, the head of the Nobel Foundation warned in an interview that if the Academy does not take radical steps to rectify the scandal, responsibility for the prize may be handed to another organization. </s> The Obelisk is headline winner in a year marked by diminished presence of conservative Sad Puppy lobby and strong showing from women

A year after NK Jemisin became the first black person to win the Hugo award for best novel, the African American author has landed the prestigious science fiction prize for the second year running.

Jemisin was announced as the winner of the best novel Hugo at Worldcon in Helsinki on Friday. She took the prize, which is voted for by fans, for The Obelisk Gate, the follow-up to her Hugo award-winning novel The Fifth Season. The series is set in a world that is constantly threatened by seismic activity, and where the mutants who can control the environment are oppressed by humans. The New York Times called Jemisin’s writing in the series “intricate and extraordinary”.

Hugos administrator Nicholas Whyte said that 3,319 people voted in this year’s award, the third-highest vote total ever and the highest participation in the Hugos for a Worldcon outside the US or UK. “There’s been a very high level of genuine engagement and thoughtful participation,” said Whyte. “People can read into that what they like.”

The last two years of the Hugos have been plagued by block-voting campaigns from conservative lobbies calling themselves the Sad Puppies, and the more politically extreme Rabid Puppies. The two factions were out to combat a perceived tendency to reward books described by one disgruntled writer as “niche, academic, overtly to the left in ideology and flavour and ultimately lacking what might best be called visceral, gut-level, swashbuckling fun”. In 2015, this led to “no award” beating the Puppies’ slate of nominees in an unprecedented five categories, in order to avoid giving prizes to the group’s nominations. In 2016, candidates put forward by the so-called Puppies also dominated the ballots, but only two “no awards” were given.

This year, there was not a single “no award” given. On a roster of predominantly female winners, Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway took the best novella gong, Ursula Vernon’s The Tomato Thief won best novelette, and Amal El-Mohtar’s Seasons of Glass and Iron won best short story. Revered fantasy author Ursula K Le Guin took the best related work Hugo for Words Are My Matter, a collection of her writing about life and books spanning the last 16 years, while Lois McMaster Bujold won a new award for best series, for her long-running Vorkosigan Saga. The John W Campbell award for best new writer was taken by Ada Palmer.

“This is the first time that the same author has won two years running since Lois McMaster Bujold in 1991 and 1992, a quarter of a century ago; and of course Bujold’s continuing appeal was confirmed by the Vorkosigan saga winning the new best series category,” said Whyte of Jemisin’s win. “This is a super set of results ... which demonstrate that SF is thriving and diverse.”

When Jemisin won the Hugo last year, she said that when she set out to write The Fifth Season, she had thought that no one would want to read it, and then when it was nominated for a Hugo, she had wondered who might vote for it.

She wrote on her website: “I wondered how many of my fellow SFF fans, in a year headlined by reactionary pushback against the presence and performance of people like me in the genre, would choose to vote for the story of a fortysomething big-boned dreadlocked woman of colour waging an epic struggle against the forces of oppression.”

“But I forgot: only a small number of ideologues have attempted to game the Hugo awards. That small number can easily be overwhelmed, their regressive clamour stilled, if the rest of SFF fandom simply stands up to be counted. Stands up to say that yes, they do want literary innovation, and realistic representation. Stands up to say that yes, they do just want to read good stories – but what makes a story good is skill, and audacity and the ability to consider the future clearly rather than through the foggy lenses of nostalgia and privilege.”

The Hugos have been running since the 1950s and have been won by authors including Isaac Asimov, Robert A Heinlein and Neil Gaiman.

Hugo winners 2017

Best novel

The Obelisk Gate by NK Jemisin (Orbit Books)



Best novella

Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com publishing)



Best novelette

The Tomato Thief by Ursula Vernon (Apex Magazine, January 2016)



Best short story

Seasons of Glass and Iron, by Amal El-Mohtar (The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, Saga Press)



Best related work

Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016 by Ursula K Le Guin (Small Beer)



Best graphic story

Monstress, Volume 1: Awakening, written by Marjorie Liu, illustrated by Sana Takeda (Image)



Best dramatic presentation (long form)

Arrival, screenplay by Eric Heisserer based on a short story by Ted Chiang, directed by Denis Villeneuve



Best dramatic presentation (short form)

The Expanse: Leviathan Wakes, written by Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, directed by Terry McDonough (SyFy)



Best series

The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)



John W Campbell award for best new writer

Ada Palmer </s> Literary blockbuster novel The Underground Railroad, which depicts the journey of a young woman escaping from slavery via a fantastical train system, has won the Pulitzer prize for fiction.

Author Colson Whitehead has collected multiple accolades for the bestselling book, including last year’s National Book Award. Moonlight director Barry Jenkins is adapting the story into a limited series for Amazon.

“For a smart melding of realism and allegory that combines the violence of slavery and the drama of escape in a myth that speaks to contemporary America,” read the Pulitzer judges’ note about Whitehead’s win.

The author reacted to the news on Twitter:

The Pulitzer prizes, considered the most prestigious journalism and arts awards in the country, were announced on Wednesday afternoon at Columbia University in New York.

Playwright Lynn Nottage nabbed her second Pulitzer for the drama Sweat, a Broadway play about factory workers battling job cuts.

Author Matthew Desmond won the nonfiction award for Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, a book about housing inequality and evictions, and Hisham Matar won the biography prize for The Return, his book on his missing father in Libya.

Bestseller When Breath Becomes Air by the late Paul Kalanithi, the autobiography of a dying surgeon, was a runner-up in the biography category.



Tyehimba Jess won the poetry award for his work Olio.

In the journalism awards, New York Daily News and ProPublica jointly nabbed the top award, for public service, for their investigation into the New York police department evicting people, mostly minorities, from their homes.

“We are not in a period of decline in journalism. Rather, we are in the midst of a revolution,” Pulitzer prize administrator Mike Pride said during the award ceremony.

David A Fahrenthold of the Washington Post won the national reporting award for his coverage of the lack of promised donations by the Trump Foundation during the election. He regularly tweeted his news-gathering techniques, a photo of a crammed notepad listing organizations he had called showing the scale of the issue.

California’s East Bay Times nabbed the breaking news Pulitzer for its coverage of the Oakland fire at a warehouse that killed 36 people.

Hilton Als of the New Yorker won the criticism award, Eric Eyre of the Charleston Gazette-Mail took home the investigative award for his reporting on opioids in West Virginia, and the New York Times garnered the international reporting award for its coverage of Vladimir Putin and Russia.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, McClatchy and the Miami Herald won the explanatory reporting award for its work on the Panama Papers. </s> The winner of Australia’s richest literary prize did not attend the ceremony.

His absence was not by choice.

Behrouz Boochani, whose debut book won both the $25,000 non-fiction prize at the Victorian premier’s literary awards and the $100,000 Victorian prize for literature on Thursday night, is not allowed into Australia.

The Kurdish Iranian writer is an asylum seeker who has been kept in purgatory on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea for almost six years, first behind the wire of the Australian offshore detention centre, and then in alternative accommodation on the island.

Now his book No Friend But the Mountains – composed one text message at a time from within the detention centre – has been recognised by a government from the same country that denied him access and locked him up.

It is, he said, “a paradoxical feeling”.

“I really don’t know what to say,” he told Guardian Australia in a conversation before the main award was announced, when he only knew of the non-fiction prize. “I certainly did not write this book just to win an award.

“My main aim has always been for the people in Australia and around the world to understand deeply how this system has tortured innocent people on Manus and Nauru in a systematic way for almost six years. I hope this award will bring more attention to our situation, and create change, and end this barbaric policy.”

Boochani speaks via text messages, because his internet connection keeps cutting out.

For an asylum seeker kept in offshore detention to win such a major prize “brings enormous shame to the Australian government”, he said.

Accepting the award on Boochani’s behalf was his translator, Omid Tofighian, who worked with interpreter Moones Mansoubi to translate Boochani’s Farsi text to English.

“You can’t underestimate the impact that [this win] will have on Australian politics and Australian refugee politics – not only in Australia [but for] displaced and exiled people all over the world,” Tofighian said.

“This is one of the most vicious forms of neocolonial oppression that is taking over the world at the moment – and to address this book in this way and to recognise it and draw attention to the narrative it is presenting will have repercussions for many generations to come.”

The awards are split into seven categories, which are judged by a panel. In 2017 and 2018, women won each category, and they dominated the winners’ list again this year, with Elise Valmorbida winning the fiction prize with The Madonna of the Mountains; Kendall Feaver winning the drama prize for her play The Almighty Sometimes; Kate Lilley winning the poetry prize for Tilt; Victoria Hannan winning the $15,000 unpublished manuscript prize for Kokomo; and Bri Lee winning the people’s choice award for her memoir Eggshell Skull.

After last year’s Nib prize, it is the second people’s choice award for the debut, a memoir that tracks Lee’s journey from being a judge’s associate to seeking justice through the courts for childhood sexual assault.

She now receives “hundreds” of emails and messages from other sexual abuse survivors.

“I respond to everyone,” she said. “Overall I get enough messages of such hope and optimism, and people just actually make life-changing decisions after reading this book, so even though I also get a lot of upsetting messages it all comes good. All I can hope for as a writer is to reach people in some way.”

Lee said the unexpected commercial success of the book had given her “the most wonderful gift of freedom to write what I want next”.

She is currently working on a series of essays.

The young adult prize was won by Amelin and Ezekiel Kwaymullina, for Catching Teller Crow.

Western Australian author Kim Scott, a dual Miles Franklin award winner, won the prize for Indigenous writing for his novel Taboo, which deals with a modern community coming to terms with the historical and cultural legacy of a massacre on Noongar country in south-west WA.

It is based on an experience in his own country at Ravensthorpe, halfway between Albany and Esperance.

“My ancestral country is regarded as taboo by many Aboriginal people because of the killing that happened there in the late 19th century,” he said. “I didn’t even know about it until I was an adult, that nasty edge to our history … the emotional infrastructure of the times didn’t enable or perhaps allow it.”

Scott said the novel was for “a lot of us who have been damaged by colonisation, and I would imagine that’s non-Aboriginal people as well ... healing and strengthening our relationship to pre-colonial heritage.

“It’s all about foundations and being grounded ... and finding a way for an emotional and spiritual infrastructure. Stories are really important for that but so are things like the Uluru statement. They help us figure out a way to deal with this stuff.”

Winner: The Madonna of the Mountains by Elise Valmorbida

Shortlist: Flames by Robbie Arnott; Ironbark by Jay Carmichael; The Fireflies of Autumn: And Other Tales of San Ginese by Moreno Giovannoni; The Death of Noah Glass by Gail Jones; Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko

Winner: No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison by Behrouz Boochani

Shortlist: Staying: A Memoir by Jessie Cole; The Arsonist: A Mind on Fire by Chloe Hooper; Eggshell Skull by Bri Lee; Miss Ex-Yugoslavia by Sofija Stefanovic; Axiomatic by Maria Tumarkin

Winner: The Almighty Sometimes by Kendall Feaver

Shortlist: Going Down by Michele Lee; Barbara and the Camp Dogs by Ursula Yovich and Alana Valentine

Shortlist: Amelia Westlake by Erin Gough; Between Us by Clare Atkins

Shortlist: Common People by Tony Birch; Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko; Blakwork by Alison Whittaker
Author José Eduardo Agualusa wins the International Dublin Literary Award for his novel A General Theory of Oblivion.