How to write an award-winning book

The book isn't even out yet, so people haven't even seen a winner of the Australian Fiction Prize on the shelves.

What happens next year if we.

Get a thousand, We're going to have to recruit, you know, half of Sydney to come in and do the blind reading.

From the Australian. This is the front.

I'm Claire Harvey and today we're curling up with.

A good book.

In fact, it's an award winning book, the inaugural winner of the Australian Fiction Prize for an unpublished manuscript. This story takes us to a hidden corner of Australia, Mariah Island, off Tasmania's East coast, where porcelain beaches and honeycomb cliffs meet the sea. There's a shipwreck, a girl breaking free from the rules, and a journalist on a search for

Carolin, what is the Australian Fiction Prize.

It is the newest and the most exciting litterary prize on the Australian Calendar, the Australian newspaper is the main sponsor, but also the key thing that makes it so beautiful is part of the prize is publication by HarperCollins Australia, the leading Australian publisher.

This prize is for an unpublished manuscript, but you don't have to be a complete outsider to win. The winner being announced this weekend is an accomplished science journalist who's already written four books, but this is the one that captivated the judges attention.

Carolyn, tell me who is it.

It's Catherine Johnson. She comes out of Tasmania. She's fifty three years old, originally born in Brisbane, and she has written a book that is based on Mariah Island, which is off the coast of Tasmania, and it's a wild and extremely special place. The way that she's evoked this island, the description makes you want to go there immediately. Although like a lot of Tasmania, it has of course that

Book there.

That the heart of it is a young woman. She's eighteen years old. Her name is Minn min Now. Min and her father live on Mariah Island, and he has been absurdly protective of her, not allowing her to grow and develop in a way that a young woman should. And so you've got that sense of a young girl coming of age in this wild place as well.

So thrilled.

I'm so thrilled.

Here's Catherine speaking to Caroline after she got the good news.

There's publication at the end of it, and there's an opportunity to hopefully connect with with readers, which is one of the most wonderful things about writing, connecting with readers and hearing what people made of it and what it meant to them.

Tasmania also makes magnificent gin. But how will you be celebrating?

How will I be celebrating. I think I'll gather some people together.

That'll be nice.

I'm just so delighted, I'm so thrilled, and I'm so incredibly grateful because it's the sort of thing that makes all the difference in a writing career.

So I'm just filled brimming with gratitude.

One of the things great publishing houses like HarperCollins do in collaboration with an author is to finesse and fill it book title ideas until they land on one that conjures up the right feeling and catches the eye amid all the other books piled up on the bookshop counter. That means the name might change again, but for now

It's so crucial that we not only tell our stories, but that we also hear our stories, that we read our own stories. If you look at the top ten in Australia, it's almost all foreign. It's American basically and English. But isn't it great to tell our own stories? But also we want the book to sell. We're not in the business of doing our little niche prize. We are in the business of creating a book that many thousands of Australian.

People will read.

Why A Wild Heart?

Women are the backbone of the book trade. They buy something like eighty percent of the books, and that also includes all of the books that are aimed at men, because women buy them as gifts for their husbands, partners, brothers, particularly at Christmas time. Now, one of the things that women are buying and loving at the moment are stories about their own agency, about their own development, about the

And so the idea that.

You can break out of whatever the constraints you had your childhood, your background, your education, and just not shoot the lights out. I think that's the era in which we're living, and that's why wild Heart really spoke to me. A young girl who's growing up on a very barren, wild island, but she has dreams, she has ambitions, she has hope for the future.

Women are writing books too, and they're also winning literary prizes.

Now.

You and I have spoken before about how after many years in which women didn't win a lot of prizes, now women are dominating the long list, the short lists and the winners' lists of the big international literary prizes. That's also been the case here for the Australian fiction Prize. You were one of the judges. Why were women's books dominant this year?

We found the majority of entries were by women, and our short list was majority female as well, and ultimately our winner is female. It's a really interesting development and I actually have an essay that we're about to run in the Australian by a male author who says that male authors actually right now feeling a little bit forgotten, because you're quite right. In the olden days, they won everything and they were the only ones who were published.

Did you look at gender or was this completely blind?

I read the manuscripts blind and the reason that I did that was because I felt that there was a chance that I would know some of the entries, and I was quite surprised we actually had a First Nations writer on the shortlist.

We had majority female.

As you know, we had a one male writer out of the seven that we shortlisted out.

Of West Australia who wrote a western.

He wrote a Western set in West Australia, which I really love with cowboys. His influences were like Bob Dylan and Cormack McCarthy.

But the standard.

Across the board was incredibly high. This was an enormously successful prize. Part of the reason was we didn't prevent people from entering who had already written a book, so we had a lot of people on the shortlist and who entered who were established writers. One woman had written twenty books before this, some of them self published, some of the mainstream published. Catherine Johnson, our winner, has had four books published previously.

Coming up, How to Dodge's Zift through towering piles of manuscripts to find the genius while I've got you Caroline's books pages in our review section. One of the reasons The Weekend Australian is a beautiful analog treat. There are reviews, author interviews and stories that will make you want to add a stack of books to your Christmas list.

We'll be back after this break. You had five hundred entries.

I know, how on earth do you get through five hundred Manu.

So the five hundred entries initially went to Harpercolums, the publishing house, and they had teams of people working on what would traditionally.

Be called the flush pile.

So all the entries that came in were all read by someone and they had like a yes or no, a maybe column. If you've got a maybe column, somebody else came along, and how to read of it to see whether it become part.

Of the s pile.

We narrowed it down to seven books on the shortlist and those were given to a judging panel. I was on the judging panel. We also had a literary agent, which is really important because literary agents play such an important part in ushering new books into existence. We had a bookseller, which I thought was really important because she knows better than anyone what kinds of things Australians want to read. And then we had experts from the publishing

So coming to an agreement about the is a real process.

The way we respond to books is so personal and often so emotional.

It's about what we bring to that experience of reading. How do you navigate that?

When you're a judge in a prize like this, where you're trying to be impartial and also trying to think about how other readers might enjoy something, do you have to try and park your own personal emotional reaction to it.

It's such a heavy responsibility and you will always have people who disagree with you. So, for example, when they announced the winner of the book a prize, you always hear people say, oh my god, I hated.

Or I couldn't finish that book, But why did that book win? You have to be.

Prepared to back your winner absolutely, and there's no question that everybody that was involved in the judging process loved this book.

So tell me about what it was about Catherine's book that made her the winner. Bearing in mind that I think a lot of our listeners probably think that they have an award winning novel in them.

Yeah.

I think Catherine had the edge because she is an absolutely beautiful writer. The setting on Mariah Island was gorgeous. It had a beautiful Australian sensive place, and you're really rooting for men the whole time, you know, for her to be able to get the life she.

Wants for herself.

And at the same time there's this secondary story, which is a mystery which everybody likes to solve. It was accomplished, beautiful, complete work.

Here's Catherine.

Mercury passage was dark and torn, Bloodstone Beach almost gone under the hurl of foam. All along the shoreline. The pre dawn light had revealed bullkelp piled snakelike into nests. A weedy sea dragon hung from Min's hand, shaggy with leaf like appendages, and still colorful. It had been an unexpected find, a thing of such rare beauty coughed up

Catch their breath.

Then a flare, the unmistakable pink shock of it rising against the storm clouds. Saltaire caught in the back of her throat. The flaming light rounded at the top of its ark and latched briefly onto the wind before parachuting into the water.

When can we read it?

I'm hoping.

I'm hoping you're going to be able to read it by the middle of twenty twenty five. One of the problems I think with the previous Vogel Prize was it was published on the day it.

Was announced, so there wasn't a lot of time to.

Do the work necessary to really support the book and get book clubs talking about it, get booksellers excited by it, get reviewers ready to review it. With this, we're going to give it a lot of time because we really wanted to success.

Caroline Overington is the Australian's literary editor, Artists of all kinds, and the gifts they give us. That's the vibe of review in the Weekend Australian. Check it out anytime at the Australian dot com dot au