Woman and Children by Tony Birch
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.
Judges' comments
Tony Birch understands the role untold stories and silences play in how we tell our histories: both national and personal. Women & Children is a deeply tender novel that tackles complex subjects like trauma and violence with grace and a deceptively simple prose. Eleven-year-old Joe Cluny and his family come alive on the page and Birch’s depiction of 1960s inner city Melbourne combines the historian’s eye for detail with the ache of lived experience. His approach to Joe’s grandmother Ada’s own secret history captures a chapter in Australia’s past with the power and delicacy that defines the best of historical fiction.
