First Nations writers and female authors have dominated the 2022 Australian Book Industry Association’s (Abia) annual awards, with a debut novel by one of the nation’s most promising young writers taking out top honours.
Diana Reid’s Love & Virtue won the Abia book of the year and literary fiction book of the year at a ceremony in Sydney on Thursday night. Judges praised the novel as “a darkly funny yet unflinching glimpse of early adulthood”. In her review for Guardian Australia, Zoya Patel praised Love & Virtue as “a multilayered page-turner on power, unrequited love and campus rape culture, wrapped in a coming-of-age narrative”.
Reid’s first novel was written as a response to the Covid-19 lockdown in 2021. It has already won the MUD literary prize and shortlisted in the Indie Book awards and the Booksellers’ Choice awards.
Accepting her award on Thursday night, Reid said, “It’s been the most crazy journey from this Word document on my desktop which I was kind of embarrassed by.”
Love & Virtue was one of the first books published by independent newcomer Ultimo Press, established during Covid lockdown in 2020. “When they bought my book, they hadn’t published anything yet,” Reid said in her speech. “They were just starting out, and it’s been the most amazing privilege to be such a formative part of their journey.”
In an interview with Kate Prendergast last year, Reid said the pandemic scuppered her plans to take the musical she co-wrote and produced – 1984! The Musical! – to the Edinburgh Fringe. Having just finished her studies at Sydney University, she was without a job or income.
“If it hadn’t been for Covid, I might have never picked it up,” she said. “I genuinely didn’t expect it to be published. I was writing it just for something to do. I think there’s a kind of freedom that comes from not expecting that anyone will ever read it.”
The Abias are judged by more than 250 members of the book industry and recognise success in Australian writing, publishing and bookselling.
Former AFL legend Adam Goodes was named co-winner of the Children’s picture book of the year category, for Somebody’s Land: Welcome to Our Country, co-written with Ellie Laing and illustrated by David Hardy.
Along with Goodes, Bundjalung writer Evelyn Araluen and her poetry collection Dropbear, won the small publishers adult book of the year award. And former NSW young Australian of the year and Kamilaroi man Corey Tutt won the book of the year prize for readers 7-12 with First Scientists: Deadly Inventions and Innovations from Australia’s First Peoples.
Women writers dominated major categories, with Jacqueline Bublitz’s Before You Knew My Name winning general fiction book of the year, while finance podcaster Victoria Devine won general non-fiction book of the year for She’s on the Money.
Amani Haydar was named new writer of the year for The Mother Wound, her harrowing exploration of her mother’s murder by her father.
In children’s books, Lynette Noni won the 13+ category for The Prison Healer, while Nova Weetman won small publishers’ children’s book of the year for The Edge of Thirteen.
