Best Designed Literary Fiction / Poetry Cover
or Best Designed Literary Fiction Book
Subcategory of Australian Publishers Association Awards APA Book Design Awards
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Latest Winners / Recipients

Year: 2024

Also longlisted: Backwaters by international author Emma Ling Sidnam.
winner y separately published work icon The Furphy Anthology 2023 The Furphy Literary Awards (editor), Richmond : Hardie Grant Books , 2023 27250781 2023 anthology short story

'A glimpse into the lives of others is a tantalising offer, and short stories give us such a window. A slice of someone’s life – whether it be in a factory, on a road trip north, the unquestioned love between two people, a child’s way of seeing or their passion for art – provides us an escape into their world or can serve as a mirror to our own inner lives. Within this anthology, sixteen brilliant writers allow us to imagine places and feelings we may not know but can seem all too familiar, touching our emotions with their imaginative tales.'  (Publication summary)

designed by Design by Committee.

Year: 2023

Also shortlisted: international author Jonathan Bazzi (Fever).
winner y separately published work icon Son of Sin Omar Sakr , South Melbourne : Affirm Press , 2022 23575478 2022 single work novel

'Poet Omar Sakr’s debut novel is a fierce and fantastic force that illuminates the bonds that bind families together as well as what can break them.

'An estranged father. An abused and abusive mother. An army of relatives. A tapestry of violence, woven across generations and geographies, from Turkey to Lebanon to Western Sydney. This is the legacy left to Jamal Smith, a young queer Muslim trying to escape a past in which memory and rumour trace ugly shapes in the dark. When every thread in life constricts instead of connects, how do you find a way to breathe? Torn between faith and fear, gossip and gospel, family and friendship, Jamal must find and test the limits of love.

'In this extraordinary work, Omar Sakr deftly weaves a multifaceted tale brimming with angels and djinn, racist kangaroos and adoring bats, examining with a poet’s eye the destructive impetus of repressed desire and the complexities that make us human.' (Publication summary)

designed by Amy Daoud.

Year: 2022

Also longlisted: international author Alfred Döblin.

Also shortlisted: international author Jessica Gaitán Johannesson.

winner y separately published work icon In Moonland Miles Allinson , Melbourne : Scribe , 2021 21861155 2021 single work novel

'In present-day Melbourne, a man attempts to piece together the mystery of his father's apparent suicide, as his young family slowly implodes. At the ashram of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, in 1976, a man searching for salvation must confront his capacity for violence and darkness. And in a not-too-distant future, a woman with a life-altering decision to make travels through a climate-ravaged landscape to visit her estranged father.

'In Moonland is a portrait of three generations, each grappling with their own mortality. Spanning the wild idealism of the 70s through to the fragile hope of the future, it is a novel about the struggle for transcendence and the reverberating effects of family bonds. This long-awaited second outing from Miles Allinson, the multi-award-winning author of Fever of Animals, will affirm his reputation as one of Australia's most interesting contemporary fiction writers, and urge us to see our own political and environmental reality in a new light.' (Publication summary)

designed by Allison Colpoys.

Year: 2021

winner y separately published work icon A Body of Water : A Year's Notebook Beverley Farmer , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 1990 Z7790 1990 selected work autobiography short story poetry diary designed by Jenny Grigg

Year: 2020

joint winner y separately published work icon Death of a Typographer Nick Gadd , Melbourne : Arcadia , 2019 17393237 2019 single work novel

'MARTIN KERN has a special sensitivity to fonts, a skill that he uses to solve typographical crimes. When a local printer is found dead in his workshop, his body in the shape of an X, Martin and his co-investigator, journalist Lucy Tan, are drawn into a mystery that is stranger than anything they have encountered before. Someone is leaving typographical clues at the scenes of a series of murders.

'All the trails lead back to Pieter van Floogstraten, a Dutch design genius who disappeared without trace in the 1970s, and who has since been engaged in a mystical scheme to create the world’s most perfect font, which is concealed in locations around the globe. But is he really the killer, and how are the crimes connected to his secret font? In solving the mystery, Martin and Lucy may have to expose Martin’s hero as a psychopath.

'The main plot of the novel unfolds in Melbourne, while interleaved chapters set variously in a Tibetan monastery, on the plains of Peru, in London, Naples and Amsterdam, gradually reveal the story of Floogstraten in flashback. Other characters include a noir-style private font investigator, a typographical monk from the Renaissance, a Dutch prog rock group named I Am A Dolphin, and a collective of Italian typo-terrorists.

'This novel takes the reader into the arcane world of typographers and their typefaces, of symbols, swashes and glyphs, where the difference between a serif and sans serif could mean life and death.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

 designed by Stephen Banham 
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