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MIN READ
The Australian Society of Authors (ASA) is delighted to announce the shortlist for the 2026 Barbara Jefferis Award:
The ASA is grateful to this year’s judging panel, which was chaired by Jaclyn Crupi, who was joined by Tara June Winch and Lucy Treloar (herself a previous co-winner of the 2024 Barbara Jefferis Award).
The judges said “As a judging panel we found the quality and calibre of the submitted books for the Barbara Jefferis Award to be incredibly high. We were buoyed by the evident literary quality of the books entered. While we each were looking for different literary qualities in the work, we were unanimous on these six books deserving to be shortlisted. We are delighted to be shining a light on these six outstanding works of fiction. The ambition and scope of these six books impressed us and demanded our full attention.”
ASA CEO, Lucy Hayward says, “Our heartfelt congratulations to the shortlisted authors. We’re delighted to administer the Barbara Jefferis Award every two years and to have the opportunity to honour exceptional talent in contemporary Australian writing. The shortlisted books are a showcase of how the voices and stories of women and girls can be elevated through stylistic and formal invention.”
The winner of the 2026 Barbara Jefferis Award will be announced at a ceremony in Sydney on Tuesday 10 November 2026.
Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser (Text Publishing)
Theory & Practice starts in the Swiss Alps in 1957 only to be interrupted and the reader informed, ‘At that point, the novel I was writing stalled.’ This authorial rupture sees de Kretser deploy hybrid forms to construct this intellectually rigorous novel of ideas. Now set in 1986 in St Kilda, the narrator and protagonist, a young graduate student researching Virginia Woolf, grapples with the startling gaps she finds between the theory she studies and the practice and cost of life and youth.
Much has been said of de Kretser’s prose and here we see a writer at the height of her literary power, crafting sentences and paragraphs that feel alive with carefully considered cadence, syntax and literary style. It’s rare to see youth captured on the page in this way also. Colonialism and its many evils lie at the heart of this book and de Kretser’s light touch makes it all the more affecting and effective. This is a book to be savoured, to be read and re-read. It is a major literary achievement.
Rapture by Emily Maguire (Allen & Unwin)
Rapture is a sensual, feminist and gritty imagining of the secret life (or more accurately double life) of Pope Joan. In it, Maguire, known for her contemporary fiction exploring patriarchy, family violence and identity, turns to historical fiction for the first time.
Maguire conjures how Agnes, a motherless daughter of an English priest, bright and brilliant but forbidden from scholarly pursuits, can climb the rigid confines of the 9th-century Church to its highest point, that of Pope. Agnes must hide her gender and suppress her desires if she’s to make it – the dangers of a woman ascending to this position are evident. With just one man knowing her secret, he is ultimately both her protector and the source of her potential downfall. Agnes’s hunger to be truly seen and have her sensual life expressed is a strong force that she feels in opposition to her piety. Maguire’s meticulous research informs the narrative but sits lightly on the page. Her precise and focused writing is deeply immersive and masterful. Rapture explores what can happen when desire, faith, gender and ambition collide.
The Sun Was Electric Light by Rachel Morton (University of Queensland Press)
It’s hard to believe that The Sun Was Electric Light is Rachel Morton’s debut novel. When narrator Ruth, despairing at the emptiness of her life after five years in New York, returns to Guatemala where she lived some years before, she is in search of meaning, authenticity and a life that is real. She settles in Panajachel where she works as a nanny, then teacher, and is drawn by turns to the glamour of expat Carmen and her friends, and to the more grounded Emilie.
As Carmen’s life fractures, so does Ruth’s, and her dream of inhabiting a true life rather than a fantasy dissolves. The skill with which Morton charts Ruth’s vacillating emotions is piercingly moving, almost alchemical, such is her mastery of voice. Ruth’s gradual recovery of personal agency and her building of a life of true feelings and genuine connections is described through spare, almost incantatory prose.
The Sun Was Electric Light is a deeply felt, thoughtful and utterly satisfying novel that speaks to the resilience and perseverance necessary at life’s turning points. It’s a fierce reminder that such moments are not always loud or dramatic but come after reflection and quiet focus, and require courage, determination and self-belief. The book speaks strongly of the existential malaise and despair rising from global conflict and lack of security, especially for women. Its message of female empowerment and agency is quiet but resounding.
Rachel Morton’s debut novel, The Sun Was Electric Light – a beautiful, elusive work of existential depth and complexity – left us marvelling at its subtle power and quiet message of hope.
Out of the Woods by Gretchen Shirm (Transit Lounge)
Gretchen Shirm’s Out of the Woods follows Jess, a middle-aged legal secretary working for a judge on a war crimes trial in The Hague, and witness to the questioning of war criminals. The novel is a powerful meditation on trauma, and throughout Shirm’s gaze is unflinching, the book’s sombre beauty settling into the reader as the knowledge of others’ suffering settles into Jess.
How do people live with the knowledge of trauma, Shirm asks, and can we measure it against our own? Out of the Woods reveals a woman with the strength to gaze into the darkness of war crimes and the darkness of her own childhood and yet live with hope. A disquieting observation is the strand of sympathy for the war criminal being questioned that the narrator detects in herself.
Alongside the redemptive love of family lies Jess’s awareness that peace, security and comfort are always provisional. The resilience and courage she shows in moving forward is profoundly moving in a powerful and timeless story of women as survivors – Jess, her friend Merjem, countless mothers – bearing witness.
Translations by Jumaana Abdu (Penguin Random House Australia)
Translations is an extraordinarily fluent debut novel that grapples with prophets and wives, beliefs, ownership and meaning through language and religion and land, and love – familial, spiritual and romantic. We follow fleeing ex-wife Aliyah and those that orbit her, including young daughter, Sakina, childhood friend, Hana, nursing colleague, Kamilaroi woman, Billie, and the pious Shep, a Palestinian hired to help work the land on which these characters gather. The land and the hands that have passed through the soil are poignant symbols of the layers of stories here. This is both an ambitious novel and the devoted love letter of a lifelong reader and student. The quality of dialogue is one of the great highlights in its ability to hold the story buoyant so that it is never weighed by the mellifluous use of language or deep exploration of subject.
Abdu is able to choreograph scenes with seeming ease, wielding language with a revering hand. Even passages on faith and belief feel evocative and never didactic. There are countless instances of prose that read like sermon and verse, in this truly intelligent, poetic novel that has all the hallmarks of great talent. Translations is an accomplished work by a new writer with tremendous potential.
A Piece of Red Cloth by Leonie Norrington, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Djawa Burarrwanga and Djawundil Maymuru (Allen & Unwin)
This is a very special book, a promise to the late Yolŋu storyteller Clare Bush by Leonie Norrington and brought to life with Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Djawa Burarrwanga and Djawundil Maymuru. The collaboration reads generous and sacred.
A Piece of Red Cloth traverses the waters and the winds to tell the tale of a theft that rippled across language and bloodlines, and is alive in Country and its people today. The story is presented here in an historical fiction novel set in coastal Arnhem during the arrack soaked trepang trades of the 1600s, written alive in engaging and compelling prose. When Batjani’s granddaughter Garritji is stolen by the Makassar trepang fisherman all the world transpires to rescue her. The rich details colour the pages through cultural hunting, gathering, digging, and sharing story, belief, tradition, sweat, and love. Characters commune vividly in this time of war and peace through deep and artful dialogue, and the reader feels constantly and consistently brought along this epic journey.
The history the Yolŋu and the Makassar is not a well-known one. The symbolic exploration of theft throughout the book is particularly poignant, foreshadowing a colonial future, by other foreigners. A Piece of Red Cloth is a cinematic, sweeping history that is beautifully rendered.
