Jessica Au has won the 2023 Prime Minister’s Literary award for fiction for her novel Cold Enough for Snow, taking home the $80,000 prize months after winning $125,000 at the Victorian Premier’s Literary awards.
The Prime Minister’s Literary award is just the latest in a long line of accolades the Melbourne author has won for her second book, a slim, meditative volume little more than 100 pages long about a mother and adult daughter’s visit to Japan.
Cold Enough For Snow was published after it was selected from 1,500 entries to win the 2020 Novel prize, which guarantees publication in the UK, Ireland, US, Australia and New Zealand. When it was released in the US last year, the New York Times compared Au to Albert Camus and it went on to be named one of the best books of the year by the New Yorker.
In February this year, Au won the Victorian prize for literature and the fiction category at the lucrative Victorian Premier’s Literary awards.
The PMLA fiction category judges praised Au’s “sophistication of expression”, saying the book “signals a new direction in Australian literature”.
Au called those comments “incredibly flattering, [though] personally I don’t feel like I have a huge barrier between Australian literature vs literature”.
“I don’t know if my book is doing anything particularly radical if you expand the parameters … I would hope that we do look to other places and other writers,” she added.
Au spent close to a decade working on the novel, but only three months actually writing it. “It was a really long genesis, but I think that helped in a way, having those ideas in [my] head for such a long time,” she said.
“I write really slow too! I guess when … you’ve suddenly reached the time when it all coalesces, it can come quite quickly. But it takes a lot to get to that point.”
The success of the book has afforded Au the material conditions to continue writing: prize money has allowed her to drop down to part-time hours at her day job.
“It has changed my life, to have that kind of financial stability to have creative time,” she said. “We still need a day job … but to even have the luxury of having the hours to do nothing, to think creatively, to read – that’s been great.”
The PMLA winners were announced by arts minister Tony Burke at a ceremony in Canberra on Thursday, with each category winner receiving $80,000, while shortlistees collected $5,000 each.
The nonfiction prize went to My Father and Other Animals by Sam Vincent, the journalist’s account of relocating to his family farm to help his ageing father. “Vincent probes deeply into some of the biggest issues of our time,” the judges wrote, including climate change, contemporary farming practices and Indigenous dispossession. “Most powerful of all is the section that deals with … the Vincent family’s decision to engage with traditional owners and investigate the ancient heritage of the farm.”
Canberra author Shannyn Palmer won the Australian history category for Unmaking Angas Downs: Myth and History on a Central Australian Pastoral Station, which judges described as “a nimble high-wire act of cross-cultural research, interpreation and communication” reckoning with colonisation and law-making through a cattle station.The poetry award went to Beijing-born, Brisbane-based writer Gavin Yuan Gao for their “sinuous and sensual” collection At the Altar of Touch.
Perth artist Sarah Winifred Searle won the young adult award for her coming-of-age graphic novel The Greatest Thing. The children’s prize went to Dharug writer Jasmine Seymour for Open Your Heart to Country, a “profound meditation on the power of Country” told in both English and Dharug languages.
In 2022, the PMLAs were rocked by controversy after Australian Book Review editor Peter Rose criticised the makeup of the judging panel in an editorial, pointing out that eight of the 10 judges across the fiction, poetry, nonfiction and Australian history categories were based in New South Wales, and six of them had “close associations” with the Australian newspaper, including three current or former literary editors and three regular columnists.
A spokesperson for the awards said this year’s panels “have been selected in line with Creative Australia’s commitment to diversity, considering literary practice and professional expertise, gender, differing backgrounds, age and geographic location”.
This year there was no clustering of judges from any single publication. Twelve of the 19 judges were based in NSW or Victoria, with the fiction and poetry panels composed exclusively of judges in Sydney and Melbourne. Other categories, however, looked further afield to Western Australia, South Australia, Queensland and Tasmania.
