Inaugurated in 2018, the MUD Literary Prize is administered by the MUD Literary Club, a philanthropic organisation that supports emerging Australian writers. The aim of the MUD Literary Prize is to support a debut literary novelist.
'A lyrical and profound debut novel that celebrates the kindness of strangers and those living in pain who recognise that in others.
'He walked not feeling he was connected to the earth, but on the edge of something he couldn't reach. He pushed on through mist and darkness and clutched the blanket tight under his neck with his bony fist. Nothing in the darkness could scare him. He was darkness itself.
'Missing in every sense of the word, a man walks into the landscape and doesn't stop. In all weather and across all kinds of terrain, Ingvar walks until he can go no further, then gets up and does it again the following day, week after week, month after month. For three years he doesn't know why he keeps going, or whether he is walking towards something or away from it.
'Until he comes to a remote tropical valley harbouring secrets and misfits. There a recently widowed woman, Hilda, allows Ingvar to live in a shed on her property. He hasn't spoken for three years and Hilda chats frequently with her dead husband, but somehow they tolerate each other as they both struggle with the haunting impact of their pasts and grief that won't let them go.
'Steeped in mystery and foreboding, Why Do Horses Run? asks crucial questions about love and loss, and what might make a person never want to be found. Simple, profound, transformative and deeply moving, this indelible debut explores the propensity of the natural world to both heal and harm, as well as the ineradicable power of kindness and community.
'Why Do Horses Run? depicts the darkest aspects of life with frankness, humour and lyrical brilliance. It is a novel that will stay with you.' (Publication summary)
'Frances is an artist in her forties living a quiet life in a remote mountain town in NSW, far away from the glittering lights and famous personalities of the Sydney art world she once knew. When an invitation arrives from a former lover to attend his exhibition at a state gallery, Frances is plunged back into the past, where a single irrevocable act changed the course of her story.
'Told across two time periods, Frances's story wrestles with themes of power and privilege, womanhood and motherhood, artistic doubt, the male gaze upon the female body, and the commodification of art. It looks at the fraught relationships between artists and their muses, the sacrifices of a life devoted to art, and asks if it is ever really possible for two ambitious artists to thrive in one relationship.' (Publication summary)
'‘Just let him go.’
'Those are words Ky Tran will forever regret. The words she spoke when her parents called to ask if they should let her younger brother Denny out to celebrate his high school graduation with friends, in a neighbourhood growing more unpredictable by the day. That night, Denny – optimistic, guileless, valedictorian Denny – is brutally murdered inside a busy restaurant in the Sydney suburb of Cabramatta, a refugee enclave facing violent crime, a racist police force, and the worst heroin epidemic in Australian history.
'Returning home to Cabramatta for the funeral, Ky learns that the police are stumped by her brother’s case: several people were present at Denny’s murder, but each bystander claims to have seen nothing.
'Ky sets aside her grief and determines to track down the witnesses herself. Peeling back the layers of the place that shaped her, Ky confronts the complex traumas weighing on those present the night Denny died, and finds that the seeds of violence that led to his death were planted well before that fateful night: by colonialism, by the war in Vietnam, and by the choices they’ve all made to survive.' (Publication summary)
'"Whenever I say I was at university with Eve, people ask me what she was like, sceptical perhaps that she could have always been as whole and self-assured as she now appears. To which I say something like: ‘People are infinitely complex.’ But I say it in such a way—so pregnant with misanthropy—that it’s obvious I hate her."
'Michaela and Eve are two bright, bold women who befriend each other their first year at a residential college at university, where they live in adjacent rooms. They could not be more different; one assured and popular – the other uncertain and eager-to-please. But something happens one night in O-week – a drunken encounter, a foggy memory that will force them to confront the realities of consent and wrestle with the dynamics of power.
'Initially bonded by their wit and sharp eye for the colleges’ mix of material wealth and moral poverty, Michaela and Eve soon discover how fragile friendship is, and how capable of betrayal they both are.
'Written with a strikingly contemporary voice that is both wickedly clever and incisive, issues of consent, class and institutional privilege, and feminism become provocations for enduring philosophical questions we face today.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the ‘Scriptorium’, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word ‘bondmaid’ flutters to the floor. Esme rescues the slip and stashes it in an old wooden case that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world.
'Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women’s experiences often go unrecorded. While she dedicates her life to the Oxford English Dictionary, secretly, she begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.' (Publication summary)