The shortlists for this year's Age Book of the Year awards were announced over the weekend. The winners will be announced prior to the keynote speech by Bernhard Schlink at the opening night of the Melbourne Writers Festival on August 21.

Fiction

• Look Who's Morphing by Tom Cho
• Butterfly by Sonya Hartnett
• Things We Didn't See Coming by Steven Amsterdam
• Cooee by Vivienne Kelly
• Ransom by David Malouf

Non-Fiction

• The Red Highway by Nicholas Rothwell
• The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper
• Down To The Crossroads: On The Trail Of The 2008 US Presidential Election by Guy Rundle
• Gough Whitlam: A Moment In History by Jenny Hocking
• Darwin's Armada: How Four Voyagers to Australasia Won the Battle for Evolution and Changed the World by Iain McCalman

Poetry

• Fire Season by Kate Middleton
• The Golden Bird by Robert Adamson
• Better Than God by Peter Porter
• Divine Comedy: Journeys Through A Regional Geography by John Kinsella
• True Thoughts by Pam Brown