In conjunction with its generous sponsor ARA Group, the Historical Novel Society Australasia (HNSA) has announced the nine talented authors, and their outstanding novels, selected in the Longlist for the 2024 ARA Historical Novel Prize – Adult Category. The longlisted entries include:
The Unearthed by Lenny Bartulin (Allen & Unwin)
Women & Children by Tony Birch (University of Queensland Press)
The Beauties by Lauren Chater (Simon & Schuster)
A Better Place by Stephen Daisley (Text Publishing)
Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville (Text Publishing)
The Visitors by Jane Harrison (HarperCollins Publishers)
The Disappearance of Astrid Bricard by Natasha Lester (Hachette Australia)
Edenglassie by Melissa Lukashenko (University of Queensland Press)
To Sing of War by Catherine McKinnon (HarperCollins Publishers)
The ARA Historical Novel Prize Shortlist will be announced on Wednesday 2 October 2024. The winners will be announced on 23 October 2024.
THE JUDGING PANel
The judging panel for the Adult Category includes Tony Maniaty (Chair), Meenakshi Bharat, Sienna Brown, Catherine Chidgey and Michael Williams.
According to Chair, Tony Maniaty: ‘The broad range of titles entered in this year’s prize reflected the vibrancy and solid health of the historical fiction genre in Australia and New Zealand. While a substantial number of entries continued to employ traditional modes of storytelling, the degree to which many writers were emboldened to break the boundaries of conventional historical fiction was apparent, and welcome.
These entries shifted away from a classic focus on historical movements and events into more abstract interpretations of history, giving strong voice to characters often left out of official records, as well as approaching topics often not addressed in this area of literature – inviting us to consider notions of ‘the past’ in new ways. Fashion, art and architecture, and a deep engagement with landscape and settings, were some examples of different and interesting entry points into the genre.
The variety of voices was wide and refreshing, coming from both established and emerging authors, and the quality of writing within our chosen longlist was considered exceptional. Overall, an outstanding crop of historical fiction.’
THE UNEARTHED by LENNY BARTULIN
(Allen & Unwin)
ABOUT LENNY BARTULIN 
The author of five previous novels, Lenny Bartulin’s work has been twice longlisted in the Tasmanian Literary Awards and selected as a Most Anticipated Historical Novel by Oprah Daily in the US. He lives in Hobart with his wife and son.
ABOUT THE UNEARTHED
After decades-old human bones are discovered in the Tasmanian wilderness, Antonia Kovács returns home with questions for her father, a retired police inspector in Queenstown.
Meanwhile, Tom Pilar receives news of an inheritance, from a man he barely remembers, one of his father’s friends from the early days, newly arrived in the island and looking for work.
Set amidst the harsh terrain of the timber and ore industries of the west coast, The Unearthed is a haunting novel about the past and its quiet but tenacious grip on the present. It reveals the tragic connections between the disparate lives of post-war migrants and local workers, and the fallibility of memory, the illusion of truths and the repercussions on real lives.
WOMEN AND CHILDREN by TONY BIRCH
(University of Queensland Press)
ABOUT TONY BIRCH
Tony Birch is the author of four novels, five short fiction collections, and two poetry books. In 2022 his book, Dark As Last Night was awarded the Christina Stead Literary Prize and the Steele Rudd Literary Award. The book was also shortlisted for the 2022 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction. His most recent book is the novel, Women and Children, (UQP 2023).
A powerful, personal novel about women, children and justice, from one of this country’s most loved and clear-eyed storytellers.
ABOUT WOMEN AND CHILDREN
It’s 1965 and Joe Cluny is living in a working-class suburb with his mum, Marion, and sister, Ruby, spending his days trying to avoid trouble with the nuns at the local Catholic primary school. One evening his Aunty Oona appears on the doorstep, distressed and needing somewhere to stay. As his mum and aunty work out what to do, Joe comes to understand the secrets that the women in his family carry, including on their bodies. Yet their pleas for assistance are met with silence and complicity from all sides. Who will help Joe’s family at their time of need?
Women & Children is a novel about the love and courage between two sisters, and a sudden loss of childhood innocence.
THE BEAUTIES by LAUREN CHATER
(Simon & Schuster Australia)
ABOUT LAUREN CHATER
Lauren Chater is the author of the historical novels The Lace Weaver, Gulliver’s Wife, The Winter Dress and The Beauties. In 2018 she was awarded a grant by the Neilma Sidney Literary Fund, and The Winter Dress was longlisted for the 2022 ARA Historical Novel Prize.
ABOUT THE BEAUTIES
An incomparable beauty. A promise to a king. A portrait that can never be completed.
When Emilia Lennox loses everything after her husband’s lands and title are confiscated, her beauty is her best bargaining chip with the only man who can restore their fortunes: King Charles II himself.
But the king’s favour comes at a price. He will pardon Emilia’s husband only if she agrees to be his mistress. Torn, Emilia comes up with a condition of her own: she will consent, but not until her portrait hangs among the famed Windsor Beauties, a series commissioned by the Duchess of York to showcase the fairest women in the royal retinue.
A BETTER PLACE by STEPHEN DAISLEY
(Text Publishing )
ABOUT STEPHEN DAISLEY
Stephen Daisley was born in 1955 and grew up in the North Island of New Zealand. He has worked on sheep and cattle stations, on oil and gas construction sites and as a truck driver, among many other jobs.
His first novel, Traitor, won the 2011 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction. Coming Rain won the Ockham Prize in 2015. Stephen lives in Western Australia.
ABOUT A BETTER PLACE
The old people in the district would often say that Roy was not quite the same after he come back. There was a brother. A twin brother, Tony. Tony Mitchell, different boy but a good rugby player. Bit of a mental case, they said, but Roy would have none of it. He always stayed close to Tony when they were growing up. They both went off to fight, must have been 1940. Only the one come back, though.
Crete, they thought. We lost Tony over there.
From Stephen Daisley, winner of the Prime Minister’s Award for Traitor and the NZ Ockham Prize for Coming Rain, a new novel about brothers at war. Beautifully written, brutal, tender and visceral, A Better Place is about love in its many forms.
RESTLESS DOLLY MAUNDER by KATE GRENVILLE
(Text Publishing)
ABOUT KATE GRENVILLE
Kate Grenville is one of Australia’s most celebrated writers. Her international bestseller The Secret River was awarded local and overseas prizes, has been adapted for the stage and as an acclaimed television miniseries, and is now a much-loved classic. Grenville’s other novels include Sarah Thornhill, The Lieutenant, Dark Places and the Orange Prize winner The Idea of Perfection. Her recent non-fiction includes One Life: My Mother’s Story, The Case Against Fragrance and Elizabeth Macarthur’s Letters. Her most recent novel is the bestselling A Room Made of Leaves. In 2017 Grenville was awarded the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.
ABOUT RESTLESS DOLLY MAUNDER
Dolly Maunder was born at the end of the nineteenth century, when society’s long-locked doors were starting to creak ajar for women. Growing up in a poor farming family in country New South Wales but clever, energetic and determined, Dolly spent her restless life pushing at those doors.
Most women like her have disappeared from view, remembered only in family photo albums as remote figures in impossible clothes, or maybe for a lemon-pudding recipe handed down through the generations. Restless Dolly Maunder brings one of these women to life as someone we can recognise and whose struggles we can empathise with.
In this compelling new novel, Kate Grenville uses family memories to imagine her way into the life of her grandmother. This is the story of a woman, working her way through a world of limits and obstacles, who was able—if at a cost—to make a life she could call her own. Her battles and triumphs helped to open doors for the women who came after.
THE VISITORS BY JANE HARRISON
(HarperCollins Publishers)
ABOUT JANE HARRISON
Jane Harrison is descended from the Muruwari people and is an award-winning playwright, author and festival director. Her first play, Stolen, was performed across Australia and internationally for seven years, and her second, Rainbow’s End, won the 2012 Drover Award. Her young adult novel Becoming Kirrali Lewis won the 2014 Black & Write! Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and the Victorian Premier’s Awards. The stage play of The Visitors was a smash hit at the Sydney Festival in 2020, and the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of the play will take place in late 2023.
ABOUT THE VISITORS
On a steamy, hot day in January 1788, seven Aboriginal men, representing the nearby clans, gather at Warrane. Several newly arrived ships have been sighted in the great bay to the south, Kamay. The men meet to discuss their response to these visitors. All day, they talk, argue, debate. Where are the visitors from? What do they want? Might they just warra warra wai back to where they came from? Should they be welcomed? Or should they be made to leave? The decision of the men must be unanimous — and will have far-reaching implications for all. Throughout the day, the weather is strange, with mammatus clouds, unbearable heat and a pending thunderstorm … Somewhere, trouble is brewing.
From award-winning author and playwright Jane Harrison, The Visitors is an audacious, earthy, funny, gritty and powerful re-imagining of a crucial moment in Australia’s history – and an unputdownable work of fiction.
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ASTRID BRICARD by NATASHA LESTER
(Hachette Australia)
ABOUT NATASHA LESTER
Natasha Lester is the New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Seamstress, The French Photographer, The Paris Secret and The Riviera House, and a former marketing executive for L’Oreal. Her novels have been translated into many different languages and are published all around the world.
When she’s not writing, she loves collecting vintage fashion, practising the art of fashion illustration and reading about history. Natasha is a sought-after public speaker and lives with her husband and three children in Perth, Western Australia.
ABOUT THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ASTRID BRICARD
Paris, 1917: Parentless sixteen-year-old Mizza Bricard makes a vow: to be remembered on her own terms. This promise drives her through couture houses until, finally, a fashion legend is created – one that will endure for generations.
New York, 1970: Designer Astrid Bricard arrives in Chelsea ready to change the fashion world. And she does – but cast in the role of muse to her lover. Just as Astrid’s star is finally poised to ascend in its own right, she vanishes, leaving behind only a white silk gown.
EDENGLASSIE by Melissa Lucashenko
(University of Queensland Press)
ABOUT MELISSA LUCASHENKO
Melissa Lucashenko is a Goorie (Aboriginal) author of Bundjalung and European heritage. Her first novel was published in 1997 and since then her work has received acclaim in many literary awards. Killing Darcy won the Royal Blind Society Award and was shortlisted for an Aurealis award. Her sixth novel, Too Much Lip, won the 2019 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Queensland Premier’s Award for a work of State Significance. It was also shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Stella Prize, two Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, two Queensland Literary Awards and two NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Melissa is a Walkley Award winner for her non-fiction, and a founding member of human rights organisation Sisters Inside. She writes about ordinary Australians and the extraordinary lives they lead. Her latest book is Edenglassie.
ABOUT EDENGLASSIE
In this epic novel set in Brisbane when First Nations people still outnumber the colonists, award-winning Goorie author Melissa Lucashenko tells two extraordinary stories set five generations apart.
When Mulanyin meets the beautiful Nita in Edenglassie, their saltwater people still outnumber the British. As colonial unrest peaks, Mulanyin dreams of taking his bride home to Yugambeh Country, but his plans for independence collide with white justice.
Two centuries later, fiery activist Winona meets Dr Johnny. Together they care for obstinate centenarian Granny Eddie, and sparks fly, but not always in the right direction. What nobody knows is how far the legacies of the past will reach into their modern lives.
In this brilliant epic, Melissa Lucashenko torches Queensland’s colonial myths, while reimagining an Australian future.
TO SING OF WAR by CATHERINE McKINNON
(HarperCollins Publishers)
ABOUT CATHERINE MCKINNON
Catherine McKinnon lives in the Southern Highlands with her husband, painter and sculptor Gary Christian. She teaches creative writing at the University of Wollongong. Her novel Storyland (Fourth Estate, 2017) was shortlisted for five literary awards including, in 2018, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Barbara Jefferis Award and the Voss Literary Prize. Merrigong Theatre has commissioned an adaption of the novel, to be co-written by Catherine and Aunty Barb Nicholson.
ABOUT TO SING OF WAR
DECEMBER 1944 In New Guinea, a young Australian nurse, Lotte Wyld, chances upon her first love, Virgil Nicholson, a soldier in the Allies’ hard-fought jungle campaign. At Los Alamos in the United States, idealistic physicists Miriam Carver and Fred Johnson join Robert Oppenheimer and a team of brilliant scientists in a collective dream to build a weapon that will stop all war, while Kitty Oppenheimer wrestles with restrictions on her freedom. And on the sacred island of Miyajima in Japan, Hiroko Narushima is doing her best to protect her family.
Each of these people yearns to belong, yet each fiercely protects their independence. Secrets, misunderstandings and fears burden them; shame shapes them; hope and imagination lift them up. They are caught in a moment of history, both enthralled and appalled by actions they must undertake.
A beautiful, rich and intricately woven novel, To Sing of War asks how one person can make a difference in a world that is wondrous, thrilling and endangered. It insists on our interconnectedness, hums with the energy of the world and is a blazingly powerful and deeply moving account of friendship, love and war.
ABOUT ARA GROUP
ARA Group provides a comprehensive range of building services and products to major customers throughout Australia and New Zealand and – through its workplace giving program, The ARA Endowment Fund – plays a proud and positive role in the community.
The ARA Endowment Fund currently donates 100 per cent of the interest earned annually to The Go Foundation, The Indigenous Literacy Foundation and The David Lynch Foundation.
ARA Group has also sponsored the Historical Novel Society Australasia’s biennial conferences since 2017, is Principal Partner of Sydney Writers’ Festival, the Melbourne Writers Festival, the Monkey Baa Theatre, the National Institute of Dramatic Art, Crown Sponsor of the Taronga Zoo and Significant Partner of the Story Factory.
