12 literary prize winners of 2022 to read this summer
It's been another banner year for prize-winning literature and below are 12 excellent and expansive novels that won awards during 2022.
Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au
Winner of the 2022 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction
At just under 100 pages, the premise of the book is deceptively simple: a mother and daughter travel a rain-misted Japan together, revealing gaps in their ability to communicate. Into these gaps, Au writes tenderly of mother-daughter relationships, of the immigrant experience of dislocation and of a profound love and appreciation for the transformative qualities of art. With its exquisite prose and hypnotic pace, Cold Enough for Snow is a cool, measured sip of water – a restorative tonic that refocuses our attention on the small, treasured details of connection and history.
The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
Winner of the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction
After his father dies, Benny Oh finds he can hear objects talking: teapots, marbles and sharpened pencils, babbling in anger or distress. His mother, struggling to support their household alone, starts collecting things to give her comfort. Overwhelmed by the clamour of all the stuff, Benny seeks refuge in the beautiful silence of the public library.
There, the objects speak only in whispers. There, he meets a homeless poet and a mesmerising young performance artist. There, a book reaches out to him. Not just any book: his own book. And a very important conversation begins.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka
Winner of the 2022 Booker Prize
Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida, war photographer, gambler and closet queen, has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira lake and he has no idea who killed him.
At a time where scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts with grudges who cluster round can attest. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to try and contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to a hidden cache of photos that will rock Sri Lanka.
Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree
Winner of the 2022 Booker International Prize
In northern India, an eighty-year-old woman slips into a deep depression at the death of her husband, then resurfaces to gain a new lease on life. Her determination to fly in the face of convention - including striking up a friendship with a hijra person - confuses her bohemian daughter, who is used to thinking of herself as the more ‘modern’ of the two.
To her family’s consternation, Ma insists on travelling to Pakistan, simultaneously confronting the unresolved trauma of her teenage experiences of Partition, and re-evaluating what it means to be a mother, a daughter, a woman, a feminist.
The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty
Winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction
An online obituary writer. A young mother with a secret. A woman waging a solo campaign against rodents. Separated by the thin walls of the Rabbit Hutch, a low-cost housing complex in the run-down Indiana town of Vacca Vale, these individual lives unfold.
But Blandine is different. Ethereally beautiful and formidably intelligent, she shares an apartment with three teenage boys she neither likes nor understands, all of them – like her – products of the state foster system. Until, that is, one sweltering week in July culminates in an act of violence that will change everything, and finally offer her a chance to escape.
Bodies of Light by Jennifer Down
Winner of the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award
A quiet, small-town existence. An unexpected Facebook message, jolting her back to the past. A history she’s reluctant to revisit: dark memories and unspoken trauma, bruised thighs and warning knocks on bedroom walls, unfathomable loss. She became a new person a long time ago. What happens when buried stories are dragged into the light?
This epic novel is a masterwork of tragedy and heartbreak-the story of a life in full. Sublimely wrought in devastating detail.
Corporal Hitler’s Pistol by Tom Keneally
Winner of the 2022 ARA Historical Novel Prize
When an affluent Kempsey matron spots a young Aboriginal boy who bears an uncanny resemblance to her husband, not only does she scream for divorce, attempt to take control of the child’s future and upend her comfortable life, but the whole town seems drawn into chaos. A hero of the First World War has a fit at the cinema and is taken to a psychiatric ward in Sydney, his Irish farmhand is murdered, and a gay piano-playing veteran, quietly a friend to many in town, is implicated.
Set in a town he knows very well, in this novel Tom Keneally tells a compelling story of the interactions and relationships between black and white Australians in early twentieth-century Australia.
Diego Garcia: A Novel by Natasha Soobramanien & Luke Williams
Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2022
Edinburgh, 2014. Two writer friends, Damaris and Oliver Pablo, escape London, the city that killed his brother. They spend their days trying to get to the library, bickering over their tanking bitcoin, failing to write or resist the sadness. Then they meet Diego, a poet. He tells them he is named for his mother’s island in the Chagos Archipelago, which she and her community were forced to leave by British soldiers in 1973.
Damaris and Oliver Pablo become obsessed with this notorious episode and the continuing resistance of the Chagossian people, and want to write in solidarity. But how to share a story that is not theirs to tell? And how to account for a loss not theirs to grieve?
In Moonland by Miles Allinson
Winner of the 2022 Age Fiction Book of the Year
In present-day Melbourne, a man attempts to piece together the mystery of his father’s apparent suicide, as his young family slowly implodes. At the ashram of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, in 1976, a man searching for salvation must confront his capacity for violence and darkness. And in a not-too-distant future, a woman with a life-altering decision to make travels through a climate-ravaged landscape to visit her estranged father.
In Moonland is a portrait of three generations, each grappling with their own mortality.
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
Winner of the 2022 Dylan Thomas Prize
A woman known for her viral social media posts travels the world speaking to her adoring fans, her entire existence overwhelmed by the internet - or what she terms ‘the portal’. Are we in hell? the people of the portal ask themselves. Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?
Suddenly, two texts from her mother pierce the fray: ‘Something has gone wrong,‘ and ‘How soon can you get here?’ As real life and its stakes collide with the increasing absurdity of the portal, the woman confronts a world that seems to contain both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary.
