Publishing Prize
— 2024 —
The Shortlist
Alicia Marie Carter
Minotaur Toes
PS Cottier and NG Hartland
The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin
Susan Saliba
There is Something that Waits Inside Us
Sonya Voumard
Tremor
The Winners
Sonya Voumard
Tremor
PS Cottier and NG Hartland
The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin
The judging panel was Kevin Brophy, Rebecca Burton, Julian Davies, Rashida Murphy and Kim Swivel.
Nonfiction, Memoir
Paperback book with dust jacket
20/40 Publishing Prize
Winning Book 2024 – Fiction
Tremor compellingly weaves of the author’s personal experience with our broader societal context where people with disabilities, often far more challenging than her own, try to adapt to the implicit expectations and judgements that surround them. With empathy and flair, Voumard helps us understand that behind the convenient illusion of normality, individual lives chart atypical, often difficult, but ultimately inspiring paths.
Review Comments
"A highly engaging, short-form memoir... Although Tremor is deeply personal, it’s also very outward looking. Voumard uses her journalist’s fine observation skills to make connections and pepper her story with broader, time relevant, societal events... Voumard’s good humour, dignity and empathy for others never waver, which results in a moving and thought-provoking memoir."
— Compulsive Reader
About the Author
Sonya Voumard is a nonfiction writer and former political journalist with The Age. She has written three other books, including The Media and the Massacre (2016), which was listed for a Nita B Kibble Literary Award and longlisted for a Stella Prize. Her essays and stories have been published in Griffith Review, Meanjin, Island and Neighbourhood. She has a Doctorate of Creative Arts from UTS where she taught nonfiction writing for nine years.
More 20/40 Winners
The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin,
PS Cottier and NG Hartland
Fiction
Paperback book with dust jacket
20/40 Publishing Prize
Winning Book 2024 – Fiction
The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin welcomes us to a world where absurdity and reality are increasingly indistinguishable and where questions of identity dominate public discourse. The book spirits us off on a playful journey into the lives of a group of individuals whose physical attributes appear to matter more than who they may be. This comedic exploration of the role of the ordinary person in the exercise of power offers a striking reminder that, whoever we are, we are captured by the systems that govern us.
Review Comments
“This may be the best book I’ve read this year. The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin is so unusually brilliant, so unique in structure, so ludicrous, hilarious and ominous at once, that it’s hard to believe it’s a work of 21st-century Australian storytelling. To call it a riot, a wild ride, is to sell this thoughtful and muscular bit of fiction short. What we have here is a terrific story, executed beautifully and imaginatively...”
— The Australian
About the Authors
PS Cottier has written eight books of poetry, a collection of stories and a nonfiction pamphlet about the wild-life near Parliament House. Her collection Utterly was shortlisted for the ACT Book of the Year. She has worked as a university tutor, a union organiser, a lawyer and a tea-lady.
NG Hartland’s short stories have been published in Australia, the United States, and South Korea. ‘How to get to be a three-thousand-year-old mining AI’ was included in Robotic Ambitions: Tales of Mechanical Sentience. He has worked in criminology, social policy, and as a ministerial adviser.
More 20/40 Winners
Tremor, Sonya Voumard
Nonfiction, Memoir
Paperback book with dust jacket
20/40 Publishing Prize
Winning Book 2024 – Fiction
Tremor compellingly weaves of the author’s personal experience with our broader societal context where people with disabilities, often far more challenging than her own, try to adapt to the implicit expectations and judgements that surround them. With empathy and flair, Voumard helps us understand that behind the convenient illusion of normality, individual lives chart atypical, often difficult, but ultimately inspiring paths.
Review Comments
"A highly engaging, short-form memoir... Although Tremor is deeply personal, it’s also very outward looking. Voumard uses her journalist’s fine observation skills to make connections and pepper her story with broader, time relevant, societal events... Voumard’s good humour, dignity and empathy for others never waver, which results in a moving and thought-provoking memoir."
— Compulsive Reader
About the Author
Sonya Voumard is a nonfiction writer and former political journalist with The Age. She has written three other books, including The Media and the Massacre (2016), which was listed for a Nita B Kibble Literary Award and longlisted for a Stella Prize. Her essays and stories have been published in Griffith Review, Meanjin, Island and Neighbourhood. She has a Doctorate of Creative Arts from UTS where she taught nonfiction writing for nine years.
More 20/40 Winners
Fiction
Paperback book with dust jacket
20/40 Publishing Prize
Winning Book 2024 – Fiction
The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin welcomes us to a world where absurdity and reality are increasingly indistinguishable and where questions of identity dominate public discourse. The book spirits us off on a playful journey into the lives of a group of individuals whose physical attributes appear to matter more than who they may be. This comedic exploration of the role of the ordinary person in the exercise of power offers a striking reminder that, whoever we are, we are captured by the systems that govern us.
Review Comments
“This may be the best book I’ve read this year. The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin is so unusually brilliant, so unique in structure, so ludicrous, hilarious and ominous at once, that it’s hard to believe it’s a work of 21st-century Australian storytelling. To call it a riot, a wild ride, is to sell this thoughtful and muscular bit of fiction short. What we have here is a terrific story, executed beautifully and imaginatively...”
— The Australian
About the Authors
PS Cottier has written eight books of poetry, a collection of stories and a nonfiction pamphlet about the wild-life near Parliament House. Her collection Utterly was shortlisted for the ACT Book of the Year. She has worked as a university tutor, a union organiser, a lawyer and a tea-lady.
NG Hartland’s short stories have been published in Australia, the United States, and South Korea. ‘How to get to be a three-thousand-year-old mining AI’ was included in Robotic Ambitions: Tales of Mechanical Sentience. He has worked in criminology, social policy, and as a ministerial adviser.
More 20/40 Winners
— FICTION WINNER —
Killing Tully Herbert, Philip Canon
Comments from the Judging Panel
Why this book is different
Beth Border, the narrator of this vividly realised short novel, shares with the reader her fixation with an imaginary friend, Anastasia. ‘Together’, they try to navigate Beth’s place in a world undermined by her deeply complex sense of responsibility for the death of a boy, Tully Herbert.
Why we liked it
The quality of the writing in Killing Tully Herbert is as perceptive as it is alert and ironic. Its liveliness and empathy swept us into the specifically fraught and shifting psychology of an adolescent girl, while achieving the fine double act of feeling timeless and universal.
— NONFICTION WINNER —
Becoming Mrs Smith, Robyn Ferrell
Comments from the Judging Panel
Why this book is different
In a university psychology seminar, the narrator of Becoming Mrs Smith, is reminded, with some surprise, of an imaginary friend from her childhood—a stout and intrusive middle-aged woman. And so, the reader is off on an intriguing and amusing escapade about the shifting nature of identity.
Why we liked it
Writing where imagination intersects with notions of reality, biography and intellectual endeavour can be riskily ambitious, so we were delighted to meet this wonderfully playful, comedic, inventive and insightful book. It reaches far more widely and deeply than the compact number of its pages.
Interview with the Winning Authors
Julian Davies, publisher and editor at Finlay Lloyd and member of the Judging panel, interviews Vomard, Cottier and Hartland about their works.