First Nations writers and female authors have dominated the 2022 Australian Book Industry Association’s (Abia) annual awards, with a debut novel by one of the nation’s most promising young writers taking out top honours.
Diana Reid’s Love & Virtue won the Abia book of the year and literary fiction book of the year at a ceremony in Sydney on Thursday night. Judges praised the novel as “a darkly funny yet unflinching glimpse of early adulthood”. In her review for Guardian Australia, Zoya Patel praised Love & Virtue as “a multilayered page-turner on power, unrequited love and campus rape culture, wrapped in a coming-of-age narrative”.
