Waverley Library Award 2018 longlist announced

31 August 2018 Books+Publishing

The longlist for the 2018 Waverley Library Award for Literature, known as ‘the Nib’, has been announced.

The longlisted titles are:

Relatively Famous (Roger Averill, Transit Lounge)
The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman’s Extraordinary Life in Death, Decay and Disaster (Sarah Krasnostein, Text)
The Dead Still Cry Out (Helen Lewis, Text)
Korea: Where the American Century Began (Michael Pembroke, Hardie Grant)
A Life Underwater (Charlie Veron, Viking)
Eggshell Skull (Bri Lee, A&U)
A Scandal in Bohemia (Gideon Haigh, Hamish Hamilton)
The Book of Dirt (Bram Presser, Text)
Call of the Reed Warbler (Charles Massy, UQP)
The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders (Stuart Kells, Text)
The Maddest Place on Earth (Jill Giese, Australian Scholarly Publishing)
Mirror Sydney (Vanessa Berry, Giramondo)
The Suitcase Baby (Tanya Bretherton, Hachette)
The Wasp and the Orchid (Danielle Clode, Picador)
Girls at the Piano (Virginia Lloyd, A&U)
Small Wrongs: How we really say sorry in love, life and law (Kate Rossmanith, Hardie Grant)
Australian Gypsies: Their secret history (Mandy Sayer, NewSouth)
The Enigmatic Mr Deakin (Judith Brett, Text)
Charlatan (Catherine Jinks, Vintage)
The Master Gardener (Andrew Lemon, Hardie Grant).

A shortlist will be announced on 17 September, ahead of the winners’ announcement on 22 November at an event hosted by author Richard Glover.

The winner will receive a cash prize of $20,000, while the authors of the shortlisted books will each receive the Alex Buzo Shortlist Prize of $1000.

The Waverley Library Award was established in 2002 to recognise the role of research in fiction and nonfiction.

Last year’s award was presented to Kate Cole-Adams for her book Anaesthesia: The Gift of Oblivion and the Mystery of Consciousness (Text).

For more information about the award, visit the Waverley Library website.