When Helen Garner was announced as the winner of the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction in London on Tuesday night, the 82-year-old Australian author was 16,000km away in Melbourne, watching the ceremony on a live stream at home on what was for her Wednesday morning. When the big moment came, she heard “the winner is …” and then the feed froze. “We were going, ‘Oh God!’ Running around. We didn’t know what to do. The timing was like something in a comedy.” Congratulations immediately rushed in, which is how she knew she’d won the £50,000 (A$100,000) prize for How to End a Story, an 800-page collection of her astoundingly frank diaries, kept between 1978 and 1998.
Garner is still grappling with her win when we speak a few hours later. “I’m a stunned mullet,” she says, sitting in her study, wrapped in a lilac shawl and with glasses on a cord around her neck. “I didn’t think I had a chance.” She has absolutely no idea what she said in her thank you speech: “I think I’m in shock.”
