The winners of this year’s Age Book of the Year Awards have been praised for writing books that stay with readers long after their final pages.
The awards were presented by The Age editor Patrick Elligett at the opening night of the Melbourne Writers Festival on Thursday night, and the winners each received $10,000, thanks to the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
Rodney Hall’s Vortex won the awards’ fiction category. Queensland-based Hall, who is 89, was unable to accept the award in person, but said in a pre-recorded video that the experimental Vortex, “was a risk from the beginning”.
Rodney Hall’s 14th novel Vortex has won The Age Book of The Year prize.
Hall, who has twice won the prestigious Miles Franklin Award, said his 14th novel, which is set in Brisbane in 1954 and depicts an alternative history of the 20th century, took shape in 2021 when he found 18 pages of a novel he had abandoned in 1971.
“At long last I could see what I had been aiming for when I was a young man. Fifteen of the eighteen pages went straight into the project.”
The fiction judges, author and critic Bram Presser, and The Age and Sydney Morning Herald’s Canberra Bureau Chief Michelle Griffin, described Vortex as a late-career marvel “that sticks with you … often surprisingly funny and sad all at once.”
Lech Blaine’s memoir Australian Gospel won The Age Book of the Year non-fiction award.Credit: Wayne Taylor
“At a time when many will feel caught up in the vortex of global events, this novel feels both particular to its time and place and yet universal.”
The novel has been widely acclaimed as Hall’s best, but the author says he “doesn’t distract himself” with comparisons of his novels. “I just try to keep each book fresh for the reader.”
