Final shortlist for 2025 Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award announced

Five books have been shortlisted for the prestigious $50,000 Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award in 2025, with the winner set to be announced in September.

The annual Award is open to any book first published in Australia that deals with some aspect of Australian life, and over 200 were first whittled down to a longlist of ten, before today’s announcement of the final five books standing.

The five authors, in alphabetical order are, Garry Disher, Jane Godwin, Gail Jones, Leah Kaminsky and Khin Myint.

Their shortlisted books are very different, although three are novels: Disher’s Sanctuary, a thriller; Godwin’s Look Me in the Eye, for younger readers; and Jones’s One Another.

Kaminsky’s Disorders of the Blood is a collection of poetry, while Myint’s Fragile Creatures is a memoir.

Recent winners include Melissa Lucashenko for her novel Edenglassie, Sarah Holland-Batt for her poetry collection The Jaguar, and the first volume of Sally Young’s scholarly trilogy on the Australian newspaper industry, Paper Emperors.

The author of the winning book for 2025 will receive $50,000 in prize money and be presented with the silver H.T. Priestley Memorial Medal at a ceremony to be held in Townsville next month.

The prize is funded by the largest-ever bequest given to an Australian regional university, by Margaret and Colin Roderick. The Award is managed by the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies at James Cook University (JCU).

Colin Roderick was founding professor of English at JCU. The generosity of his wife, Margaret, who collaborated in his literary scholarship and reviewing, enabled a significant increase in prize money for the award last year, and into the future.

2025 Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award Shortlist: 

• Garry Disher, Sanctuary, Text Publishing
  Disher’s Sanctuary is a crime novel. The entwined plotlines bring together women on the run and the men who are hunting them down: police, fellow criminals, ex-partners. Readers can keep track thanks to Disher’s beautiful balance of energy and description, while
  someone keen to get tips for evading detection will find the book especially useful!
• Jane Godwin, Look Me in the Eye, Hachette Australia
  The idea of surveillance is likewise central to Godwin’s Look Me in the Eye. We meet three teenage girls whose parents have very different approaches to trust. Set in Melbourne – the cityscape is almost a character – the book explores the effects of Covid-19 and lockdown on the lives and attitudes of younger people, asking not just in whom do we trust, but how?
• Gail Jones, One Another, Text Publishing
  One Another is a kind of coming-of-age story and a biography combined. Fragments of the student protagonist Helen’s lost account of the writer Joseph Conrad’s life are beautifully interspersed with the story of PhD candidate Helen’s disrupted trajectory.  The novel focuses on love, life choices and their impacts, and on how to understand a life.
• Leah Kaminsky, Disorders of the Blood, Puncher & Wattmann Kaminsky’s compact, elegant collection Disorders of the Blood is similarly elegiac at times. Apart from poetry, Kaminsky is also a medical doctor. These are not always cheerful poems – although there are moments of humour, and as with Myint’s book, there is wisdom and insight on almost every page.
• Khin Myint, Fragile Creatures: A Memoir, Black Inc.
  Fragile Creatures: A Memoir focuses, like Godwin’s book, on the dynamics of family relationships. It entwines two stories, that of the author that of his sister, who for a time, gained celebrity for a controversial diagnosis and treatment. The book is haunted by the question of whether her illness is mental or physical: ‘If it was physical, she got compassion, exemptions and affordable treatments. But if her condition was mental, she was a hysteric’.