Congratulations to Fiona McFarlane who has added another accolade to her muliple prize-winning novel Highway 13 by winning the 2025 Voss Literary Prize!
Established in 2014, the Voss Literary Prize is dedicated to the memory of historian Vivian Robert Le Vaux Voss, and honours the best novel from the previous year, as judged by the Australian University Heads of English, the peak body for the study of English at Australian Universities.
Highway 13
Fiona McFarlane
Here is the judge's report:
'The Backpacker Murders have haunted Australians since 1992, when the first bodies were discovered in the Belanglo State Forest, just off the Hume Highway, south-west of Sydney. These were exceedingly gruesome serial killings: the final number of victims remains unknown. The case generated extensive media coverage, podcasts and at least one book, a psychological thriller profiling the murderer, the police investigation and the trial. Highway 13 is not a retelling of these crimes.
Instead, McFarlane asks after those who might have been caught up in a similar series of dreadful events: the victims, their families, their friends, and those not directly involved. The epigraph to Highway 13, from Richard II, signals her intentions: ‘Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows’. The twelve stories that comprise this complex novel reveal the glancing impacts, sometimes life-changing, sometimes perceived only by the reader, on the lives of those who, perhaps unknowingly, pass through the ripples generated by such disappearances and murders.
… While the reader is tempted to comb through every detail in order to build a comprehensive narrative, the structure of Highway 13 suggests that full comprehension is not possible. It’s also a technique that maintains tension while revealing how all our lives are connected across time and space … McFarlane ensures we care about each of her keenly observed protagonists, sketched with respect, compassion and, sometimes, wry humour.
Fiona McFarlane neither sensationalises the killer nor mythologizes his crimes but instead awakens her readers to the possibilities of evil and wickedness hiding in the most innocent of everyday relationships and transactions. Highway 13 is a wonderfully original, vivid and lyrical contribution to that most literary of preoccupations, the dangers that lurk in the Australian landscape and threaten the unsuspecting.'
The judges selected the winner from the following shortlisted titles:
Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser
Vortex by Rodney Hall
One Another by Gail Jones
Ghost Cities by Siang Lu
Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane
Read more about the Voss Literary Prize here.
