A book that started life as a love letter to the writer’s newborn son has won the 2022 Queensland Literary award for fiction.
Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s The Other Half of You was awarded the $15,000 prize on Thursday. The third book in his series following the life of character Bani Adam, it explores themes of masculinity versus patriarchy, and what it means to be a Muslim Australian male coming of age in western Sydney.
The political analyst and former journalist Quentin Beresford won the $25,000 prize for a work of state significance, for Wounded Country: The Murray-Darling Basin – a contested history.
The judges praised Wounded Country for its clarity and insight in the way it illustrated the entrenched political disregard for nature and science, the rights of First Nations people and their knowledge of country.
“The repeated mismanagement of this critical water resource is a metaphor for the history of colonisation,” the judges said.
“Equally clear is the way forward, caring for water, land, and people.”
Beresford told Guardian Australia he was motivated by his outrage after the mass death of fish in the Darling River in Menindee in 2019.
The denigration of the Murray-Darling Basin, he said, destined through greed and political mendacity to turn Australia’s food bowl to a dust bowl, serves as a microcosm for environmental mismanagement on a global scale.
“It’s a case study of the broader problem: a political unwillingness to create sustainable futures,” he said.
“I’m not suggesting that plenty of Australians aren’t concerned about this. They are, but what we’re fighting is the vested interests. They get their teeth into these industries, stitch up the politics, and the politicians play along and then effectively the whole thing becomes too big to fail.”
‘A moment of change’ as Muslim writers recognised
When Ahmad’s earlier novel The Lebs was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin in 2019, he became the first Muslim writer to ever be nominated for Australia’s most distinguished literary prize – a milestone he described to Guardian Australia as a “sad indictment” on the industry.
His win in the Queensland Literary awards was cause for celebration, he said, because he was one of four Muslim Australian writers to be recognised.
Yumna Kassab was shortlisted in the fiction category for Australiana; Amani Haydar was in the nonfiction category for The Mother Wound; and Sara El Sayed’s Muddy People was a finalist in three categories, including state significance, non-fiction and the $10,000 people’s choice award, which was won by Chelsea Watego for Another Day in the Colony.
“Muslims have been a part of Australian culture and history for hundreds of years, even pre-colonisation,” Ahmad said.
“I don’t want to sound too cynical or progressive-phobic, because I recognise progress has been made and that’s a wonderful thing. But sometimes you feel like it’s taken a really long time to happen.”
The Sydney author said it was particularly gratifying that it was the state of Queensland that was recognising the contribution made by Australian Muslim and Arab writers.
Research from Charles Sturt University has found the ratio of reported anti-Muslim incidents in Queensland in 2018/2019 was 2.5 times higher than the ratio of Muslim people to the rest of the population; in the wake of the Christchurch mosque attack, the state recorded the highest number of vandalism incidents to mosques.
“Muslim Australians have a complicated relationship with the state of Queensland,” he said.
“In the imagination of a lot of Muslim Australians and Arab Australians it’s a xenophobic state that hates us, so to celebrate and recognise so many Arab and Muslim writers … marks a moment of change for the nation and specifically the state of Queensland and its relationship to the Arab and Muslim community.”
Ahmad said he began writing The Other Half of You on his iPhone while cradling his newborn child in Westmead hospital in 2015. The book developed as divisive and momentous events unfolded globally, including the Black Lives Matter movement, Covid-19 and the 2019 Christchurch mosque massacre.
“I wrote it as a love letter to my son who’s mixed race – Arab and Anglo Australian – and who has been raised in a multi-faith and multicultural home. And I really wanted to write it as a letter of coming together, a story of hope and a story of what our future can look like when we do actually come together.”
More than $230,000 was awarded to writers by the Queensland government on Thursday night, with Claire G Coleman winning the non-fiction category for Lies, Damned Lies and Felicity Castagna in the young adult category for Girls in Boys’ Cars.
Kunyi June Anne McInerney won the children’s category for her story and illustrations documenting her own experiences as a survivor of the stolen generations.
