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ABC News

National

By Hannah Story

Melbourne author Jessica Au wins $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature with Cold Enough for Snow

Jessica Au Melbourne Sophie Cunningham Japan

Melbourne writer Jessica Au has won Australia's richest literary award, the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature, at the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards (VPLAs) for her short but "masterful" novel Cold Enough for Snow.

Described by the VPLA judges as "open[ing] up new horizons for Australian literature", the novel also won the $25,000 prize for fiction on Thursday night, taking Au's total prize money to $125,000.

At only 98 pages long, Cold Enough for Snow is narrated by an unnamed young woman on holiday in Japan with her ageing mother, exposing both the tenderness and the distance in their relationship.

In 2020, the book won the inaugural Novel Prize – a US$10,000 ($14,000) biennial award for an unpublished manuscript open to writers around the world, that includes publication in Australia and New Zealand, the UK and Ireland, and North America. Cold Enough for Snow has since been translated into 18 languages.

"This book holds all the heft of a writer in full command of her craft," the VPLA judges wrote in their report.

In the fiction category, Au's book was up against This Devastating Fever by Sophie Cunningham, An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life by Paul Dalla Rosa, Salonika Burning by Gail Jones, The Signal Line by Brendan Colley, and The Lovers by Yumna Kassab.

Au told ABC Arts she was "shocked" and "excited" to win the fiction prize – especially up against award-winning writers such as Cunningham and Jones.

"It's an incredibly intimidating shortlist, but it was wonderful to be on it in the first place," she says.

In her acceptance speech, at a ceremony at The Edge in Melbourne's Federation Square, Au called her win a "life-changing moment":

"Prizes, they do fade — you're left with ordinary life and ordinary time. And that's just time to think and time to read and time to be. And for me it's time to stare deeply into the eyes of my cat. And maybe if we're lucky, out of that time some writing comes — and that's when you can say all the things that are impossible to say in speeches like this."

Five of the eight winners at the VPLAs were debut writers – including the winner of the non-fiction prize, Turkish Australian writer Eda Gunaydin for Root & Branch: Essays on Inheritance, and poetry winner Gavin Yuan Gao, for his collection At the Altar of Touch.

In her acceptance speech, Gunaydin pointed to the irony of her winning a prize, quoting from her book:

"Most of us don't get pulled out of the mud, no matter how hard we wish or work … Most of us don't get discovered and don't win some prize and we don't get granted exemptions from everyday indignities."

She explained: "I wrote this in order to argue against individualism and against excessive faith in meritocracy and to argue instead that we must keep our focus on altering the everyday conditions of the many.

"We must think of so many of the traumas that we face — abuse, migration, poverty, the ongoing reality of settler-colonialism — first and foremost as material things."

Torres Strait Islander playwright John Harvey won the prize for drama for The Return, a play about the repatriation of Indigenous ancestors that opened at Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre in May 2022.

In his speech, Harvey talked about how "horrific" it was to read the documentation of the use of Indigenous peoples' remains for science.

"Through the process, [through] finding a voice to tell that story of these heinous acts that took place, we're all very connected … In that process of repatriation, little bits of story and information flow from people. It might be a farmer who's just uncovered something on their farm. It could be anyone from anywhere.

"That collective storytelling, that collective knowledge that we all hold, can help return our ancestors home."

Lystra Rose won the prize for Indigenous writing, for her young adult fantasy novel The Upwelling. She used her speech to thank her father, who encouraged her to get an education after being denied one of his own.

"Dad taught me to work hard, that a good education is important. I'm the first in my Indigenous family to finish high school, get a degree at uni, run my own business, write a novel and win an award … When I was born, I was the first person in my family to be counted as human under Australian law," she said.

Time to write

Au was folding laundry when she got the call that she had won the fiction prize.

"So I stopped folding laundry," she laughs.

"My partner was camping at the time so I just had to wait for him to climb a hill and give me a phone call."

Now that the news is out, she plans to celebrate over a burger with friends. The prize money will be able to cover that – but Au intends to use it mostly to buy herself time to write. (Australian authors earn an average of $18,200 for their work each year, according to a 2022 Macquarie University study.)

"For most writers, prize money is really just time. So, to be absolutely honest with you, it will be a fancy hamburger and then just like living costs, day-to-day things, food, rent, but really time to write," she says.

It took Au almost 10 years to write Cold Enough for Snow, her second novel; her first, Cargo, was published in 2011, when she was just 25 years old. She is now 36. In the intervening years, she worked for literary journals Meanjin and Aeon, and spent nine months travelling around Europe.

The germ of Cold Enough for Snow came from a short story she wrote in 2012 while living in Sarajevo, about a mother and daughter on holiday in Japan. Several years later she returned to it, having tried unsuccessfully to write a collection of short stories.

Like her narrator, who is also a writer, Au admits to worrying every day whether she would be able to create something of value.

"I think that's a natural part of writing: to question what you do," she says.

"You're always searching to see if what you're writing sounds true and whether it resounds. I don't think I would want to lose that."

The manuscript for Cold Enough for Snow was rejected by two publishers before it won the Novel Prize. Au is grateful for her publishers' willingness to take a risk on it, saying the book's length and "quietness" may have put off less experimental publishers.

Speaking after winning the fiction prize on Thursday night, Au praised the existence of small presses like her publishers — Giramondo in Australia, Fitzcarraldo in the UK, and New Directions in the US.

"I am floored by the work that you do and the fact that you still care for and protect this necessary thing that we call literature.

"Thank you for building these small presses and these places that give chances not just to this small, odd work, but also to many others," she said.

But what Au is most excited about is the novel's next life, in translation – especially in China.

"It means that certain members of my family will be able to read it," she says.

Mothers and daughters

Au is the first to concede that "not a lot happens" in Cold Enough for Snow. Instead, the novel traverses the narrator's memory, including of her university years and an earlier trip to Japan with her partner.

It's an interior book that examines small details — in a painting, or a piece of china — to talk about the way relationships between mothers and daughters change as they age; how stories warp over time or go unsaid; and the migrant experience.

While the mother and her daughter are travelling – eating, sightseeing, looking at art – they don't have the rich conversations the narrator is hoping for. But, Au says, beneath the surface there is a "deeper kind of dialogue" between them.

Au says the mother-daughter relationship is rich fodder for fiction.

"It is so fraught and loaded and it's so complex. It's one of those relationships where I think a lot of tension and contests can exist alongside a sort of deep well of incredible love and duty.

"Part of growing up, which I think everyone goes through, is seeing them [mothers] as a person and seeing them as a thing with history. But because you have this intimate bond with them, emotionally and physically, that realisation comes with a lot of sensitivity and tenderness and hurt — you begin to see what the world has done to them."

The narrator talks about art — hanging fabrics in a museum, an exhibition of impressionist paintings, or works in a large hardback on landscape painters — with her mother, as a way to indirectly speak to their relationship.

"Maybe by talking about some painting or a piece of fabric or something, she would be saying something about the story or about their relationship … I think that if I had said it directly, it would be quite on the nose," Au says.

"There's something nice to suggesting it and letting the reader feel it out for themselves as well. And that's certainly something I like when I read."

The author chose Japan as the holiday destination in the novel to, as the narrator says, "put us on equal footing in some way, to both be made strangers". But as the narrator has visited Japan before, she is able to act as a guide for her Hong Kong-born mother.

"Because it is part of East Asia, it's a place which is not the same but has certain cultural ties and is familiar enough to jog memories between them," says Au.

While the setting is familiar enough to prompt the narrator and her mother to share their memories, it still illuminates the distance or fragmentation between them: "They had grown up in different places and in a way spoke different languages," Au says.

"That mix between knowledge and fragmentation is a real characteristic of growing up in a migrant household and it's not always one or the other. Sometimes it's two at exactly the same time."