2024 Walkley Book Award
Andrew Fowler has won the 2024 Walkley Book Award for Nuked: The Submarine Fiasco that Sank Australia’s Sovereignty (MUP).
Walkley judges said: ‘Andrew Fowler’s razor-sharp analysis uses extensive research and interviews to explore the government’s diplomatic betrayals, alliances and failures, and reveals a complete lack of transparency in major decisions involving gigantic sums of taxpayer money. An eye-opening masterclass in political deceit and the potential consequences.’
Nuked has been reviewed by QRC. Click here to read the review in full.
2024 Australian Book of the Year
Chris Masters has won the 2024 Australian Political Book of the Year Award for the book Flawed Hero: Truth, Lies and War Crimes (A&U).
Prize judges said Flawed Hero ‘addresses some of the troubling questions of the ethics of war which echo through many of the world’s current conflicts’ and that Masters ‘takes us onto the frontline of Australia’s longest war and into the darker chapters of our involvement in Afghanistan’.
Flawed Hero has been reviewed by QRC. Click here to read the review in full.
2024 Booker Prize
In the UK, Samantha Harvey has won the 2024 Booker Prize, worth £50,000 (A$97,635), for Orbital (Vintage).
Orbital takes place over a single day in the life of six astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station. ‘Compact yet beautifully expansive, Orbital invites us to observe Earth’s splendour, whilst reflecting on the individual and collective value of every human life,’ said the prize organisers.
Chair of the judges Edmund de Waal said the judging panel’s ‘unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition’, describing the novel as ‘a book about a wounded world’.