The winners of the 45th Age Book of the Year awards have been announced!
The Age Book of the Year Awards celebrate outstanding Australian works of fiction and nonfiction, awarding each winning author $10,000, thanks to the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. Discover this year's winning books …
The 2026 Fiction Book of the Year
The Immigrants
Moreno Giovannoni
In the Victorian town of Mitrefò, tobacco is grown, an Italian cinema and cafe open, and people travel back and forth from Italy. A boy fishes, wanders the countryside and watches a community form, with its joys, scandals and shared understandings. Interspersed are the 'grotesques' – indelible and terrible events that sit alongside the better future they all seek.
In The Immigrants, Moreno Giovannoni depicts a family as they build a new life in a strange land. Through love and exile, industry and tragedy, their unspoken dreams and fears unfold in this astonishing and moving book.
The fiction judges – author and critic Bram Presser and essayist and critic Beejay Silcox – said of the winner: '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.'
The 2026 Nonfiction Book of the Year
The Red House
Kate Wild
A young Aboriginal man and a white police officer face each other in a house in the desert. The violence that passes between them carries the pain and anger of generations of unfinished business.
In The Red House, Walkley Award-winning journalist Kate Wild exposes the potent power of race in Australia.
This is not simply a book about the fatal shooting of Kumanjayi Walker and the murder trial of Constable Zachary Rolfe; it is an exploration of the inseparable connections between this country's past, present and future, and the chance to change that story.
The nonfiction judges – the Age and Sydney Morning Herald’s Canberra bureau chief Michelle Griffin and reviewer and Caritas Australia mission director Michael McGirr – praised 'the vivid precision with which [Wild] describes what she witnesses and learns. The Red House … gives us no sermons, only a compulsively readable story.'
The Age Book of the Year awards were announced at the opening gala for the Melbourne Writers festival – read more about the event and the author's comments here, and explore the other great books from this year's shortlist here.
