The winners of the Indie Book Awards 2024 have been announced this evening. The awards, which are picked by indie booksellers, celebrate the best Australian books from the last year across six categories, including fiction, non-fiction and young adult.
An overall “Book of the Year” is then selected from the six category winners. This year the Indie Book Awards 2024 Book of the Year went to Killing for Country by David Marr.
Killing for Country is a reckoning and recounting of the blood history of Australia’s frontier wars, through the lens of one family’s history. Richly detailed and thoroughly researched, the book tells the story of the politics, power and violence of the colonial world.
Bookseller judge Meera Govil from Eltham Bookshop in Melbourne, said Marr’s book was “brave and bold” and that it “records a story that has rarely been encountered by readers.” Sentiments which were shared by fellow judge Lindy Jones from Abbey’s Bookshop in Sydney, who described it as a “magisterial book that will retain its value for years to come…”
In a statement Marr said winning the Award as “an extraordinary honour” and described indie booksellers as “true friends to writers across the country.” Fiction Category Winner Melissa Lucashenko shared a similar opinion, saying: “I think people that sell books independently are some of the most generous, well-informed, and passionate people in our industry and I can’t thank you enough – for this award and for putting work like mine and authors like me out into the public domain so that we can find readers, and readers can help us find other readers.”
The Winners for the Indie Book Awards 2024 are:
BOOK OF THE YEAR
Killing for Country: A Family Story by David Marr (Black Inc.)
FICTION
Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko (University of Queensland Press)
NON-FICTION
Killing for Country: A Family Story by David Marr (Black Inc.)
DEBUT FICTION
The Visitors by Jane Harrison (Fourth Estate Australia)
ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION
The Bird Art of William T. Cooper by Wendy Cooper (National Library of Australia)
CHILDREN’S
The Impossible Secret of Lillian Velvet by Jaclyn Moriarty (Allen & Unwin Children’s)
YOUNG ADULT
Welcome to Sex by Dr Melissa Kang & Yumi Stynes (Hardie Grant Children’s Publishing)
For more information about the Indie Book Awards, including all of the shortlisted titles visit their website.
