Congratulations to all the winners of the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards!

The winner of the Fiction Award and the overall Victorian Prize for Literature is is The Animals in that Country by Laura Jean McKay.

Hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, and allergic to bullshit, Jean is not your usual grandma. She’s never been good at getting on with other humans. Instead, she surrounds herself with animals, working as a guide in an outback wildlife park. As disturbing news arrives of a pandemic sweeping the country, Jean realises this is no ordinary flu: its chief symptom is that its victims begin to understand the language of animals – first mammals, then birds and insects, too.

Bold, exhilarating, and wholly original, The Animals in that Country asks what would happen, for better or worse, if we finally understood what animals were saying.

Read our review here

The winner of the Non-fiction Award is Body Count: How Climate Change is Killing Us by Paddy Manning.

Suddenly, when the country caught fire, people realised what the government has not: that climate change is killing us. But climate deaths didn’t start in 2019. Medical officers have been warning of a health emergency as temperatures rise for years, and for at least a decade Australians have been dying from the plagues of climate change – from heat, flood, disease, smoke. And now, pandemic.

In this detailed, considered, compassionate book, Manning paints us the big picture. He revisits headline events which might have faded in our memory and, in each case, he interviews scientists and survivors to learn whether we can better prepare ourselves in the future. Read our review here

The winner of the Poetry Award is Case Notes by David Stavanger.

Utilising his renowned observational humour and playing with the absurdist nature of institutional language, Stavanger interrogates the unreliable narration of diagnosis: in private, in public and in surrealist spaces where it becomes increasingly unclear who is under the microscope. In short character studies, informal experiments and longer sequenced poems this collection unpacks toxic masculinity and fatherhood, online and domestic tensions, the truth of confessional poetry, myths of ‘madness’ inherited by blood, and the canine as both avatar and familiar of the black dog.

The winner of the Writing for Young Adults Award is Metal Fish, Falling Snow by Cath Moore.

Dylan and her adored French mother dream of one day sailing across the ocean to France. Paris, Dylan imagines, is a place where her black skin won’t make her stand out, a place where she might feel she belongs. But when she loses her mother in a freak accident, Dylan finds herself on a very different journey – a road trip across outback Australia in the care of her mother’s grieving boyfriend, Pat. As they travel through remote towns further and further from the water that Dylan longs for, she and Pat form an unlikely bond. One that will be broken when he leaves her with the family she has never known.Read our review here

The winner of the People’s Choice Award is Witness by Louise Milligan.

A masterful and deeply troubling expose, Witness is the culmination of almost five years’ work for award-winning investigative journalist Louise Milligan. Charting the experiences of those who have the courage to come forward and face their abusers in high-profile child abuse and sexual assault cases, Milligan was profoundly shocked by what she found. Witness is a call for change. Milligan exposes the devastating reality of the Australian legal system where truth is never guaranteed and, for victims, justice is often elusive. And even when they get justice, the process is so bruising, they wish they had never tried.

Read our review here

The winner of the Prize for Indigenous Writing is Tell Me Why: The Story of My Life and My Music by Archie Roach.

Not many have lived as many lives as Archie Roach – stolen child, seeker, teenage alcoholic, lover, father, musical and lyrical genius, and leader – but it took him almost a lifetime to find out who he really was. Roach was only two years old when he was forcibly removed from his family. Brought up by a series of foster parents until his early teens, his world imploded when he received a letter that spoke of a life he had no memory of. In this intimate, moving and often shocking memoir, Archie’s story is an extraordinary odyssey through love and heartbreak, family and community, survival and renewal - and the healing power of music.

The winner of the Drama Award is Wonnangatta by Angus Cerini .

Wonnangatta Station, 1918. Two men arrive at a dark and empty farmhouse looking for the manager, their friend Jim Barclay. No one’s heard from him for more than a month. Something’s amiss. Then a grim discovery sets the men off on a journey across the harsh Australian terrain, looking for answers, maybe for revenge.

The winner of the Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript is Anam by André Dao.

The 2021 VPLA judges commented, ‘Anam is a lucid, stylistically confident and unforgettable genre-defying novel that explores memory, intergenerationality and family legacy through an inquisitive and thoughtful narrator. The reader is guided effortlessly through the narrator’s exploration of his grandfather’s imprisonment in Vietnam, his own time in Cambridge, parenthood and life in Melbourne. It is a novel that is equally interested in place and home, and traces the global patterns of colony and empire from past to present.’