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When Melbourne writer André Dao sat down to pen his grandfather's remarkable life story, he wasn't sure what form the story would take. Would it be a memoir, a romance, a spy novel or historical fiction?
The finished result — Anam, a hybrid work of autofiction that took Dao 12 years to complete — is all of the above.
"This is a book that sits between different genres and encompasses a lot, and I feel like it took certain creative risks in writing it," Dao tells ABC Arts.
That risk has paid off, with Anam winning the 2024 Prime Minister's Literary Award for fiction (it was also shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award).
In their comments, the judges said: "Anam is an intimate examination of the migrant experience and its vulnerabilities, where the idea of one's country remains suffused with uncertainty and ambiguity. Dao extends the novel form, breaking rules, forming new ones."
Kate Evans from ABC RN's The Bookshelf calls Anam "intelligent, political, moving and agile". (Supplied: Penguin Australia)
Kate Evans, host of ABC RN's The Bookshelf, says it's a book that transcends boundaries.
"Anam showcases just what writing can do: grappling with memory, storytelling, family and history through a hybrid form of fiction, essay and analysis."
Presented by Arts Minister Tony Burke at a ceremony at the National Library in Canberra, the Prime Minister's Literary Awards are administered by Creative Australia and feature six categories, with each winner receiving a tax-free prize of $80,000.
Other winners in 2024 include Daniel Browning, for his non-fiction collection Close to the Subject: Selected Works; Will Kostakis, for his YA novel We Could be Something; Amy Crutchfield for her poetry collection The Cyprian; and Ryan Cropp, who won the Australian history award for Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country.
The co-authors of Tamarra: A Story of Termites on Gurindji Country — Violet Wadrill, Topsy Dodd Ngarnjal, Leah Leaman, Cecelia Edwards, Cassandra Algy, Felicity Meakins, Briony Barr, Gregory Crocetti — shared the children's literature award.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese praised all the writers.
"Congratulations to this year's winners for showcasing the diversity of Australian voices and sharing our unique stories with the world."
Minister Tony Burke said: "[The winners of the] Prime Minister's Literary Awards (pictured) show there is a place for every story, and a story for every place." (Supplied)
A tale of diaspora
"Anam's first page is a lovely, sinuous series of sentences offered between parentheses," critic and writer Declan Fry says in his review of the book for ABC Arts.
"It's about marriage, war, time and separation. It's about the ways in which Anam melds memoir, essay and fiction. It's glorious, and so is everything that follows."
Anam is a fictionalised family history that draws on the life of Dao's grandfather, a Catholic intellectual who spent 10 years as a political prisoner in Ho Chi Minh's notorious Chí Hoà prison in the 1980s.
The fragmented narrative flows across time and place, from present-day Cambridge — where the unnamed narrator lives with his wife and daughter while studying — to French Indochina in the early 20th century, with plenty of historical and philosophical asides along the way.
It's also a story of diaspora. Dao's family fled Vietnam to France and Australia at the end of the war, with his parents eventually reuniting in Melbourne, where Dao was born in 1988.
Dao says readers often tell him about the parallels between his family's fate and their families' experiences in other conflicts, from the Irish Civil War to the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
"One thing that I found pleasantly surprising was the way people have connected to the book through their own histories, their own families, and particularly through other experiences of colonialism and migration."
The novel — which won the Victorian Premier's Unpublished Manuscript Award in 2021 — is due to be published in the US in 2025, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon.
Reflecting on his win, Dao says it's been an incredible year for Australian fiction.
"There have been some really fantastic novels published this year … that push what Australian fiction can do both in terms of form as well as content," he says, citing works such as Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright and Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko (also shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award for fiction).
"I see Anam in line with these new directions in Australian fiction, and winning feels like a recognition of that."
A whisper in the ear
Close to the Subject — winner of the $80,000 Prime Minister's Literary Award for non-fiction — is a collection of Bundjalung and Kullilli journalist and writer Daniel Browning's poetry, memoir, art criticism and radio journalism, spanning two decades.
"Browning demonstrates clear talent as an observer of cultural and political life," the judges said. (Supplied: Magabala Books)
In a review for ABC Arts, critic Cher Tan describes Close to the Subject as a "tapestry of sovereign resistance".
She writes: "Browning's collection of non-fiction writing is a compelling record of First Nations agitprop, an assembly of artists and activists who have long fought the status quo in unconventional and perceptive ways."
Browning, who is also the presenter of ABC RN's The Art Show, worked closely with Magabala Books' Rachel Bin Salleh and Arlie Alizzi on the book, and credits the Broome-based publishing house with giving a much-needed platform to Indigenous voices.
"They're a family and, without them, so much Blak writing wouldn't get published," he says.
The publication of Close to the Subject, which also won the 2024 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Indigenous Writing, comes at a moment when arts criticism in Australia is in decline.
"There's a disinvestment and a disengagement in what critics have written and what role they play. I try to just be a person who asks about the value of something objectively," Browning says.
"In a crowded world, you want to know; you want somebody to help you sift the good from the bad or the marginal from the mediocre.
"I'm just one voice and I know there are more voices that are emerging, particularly in the Blak space, which is encouraging."
Now ABC's Editor of Indigenous Radio, Browning began his career at the national broadcaster in 1994. (Supplied: Magabala Books)
Browning's next literary endeavour is a historical work exploring the life of little-known Aboriginal activist Anthony Martin Fernando, the subject of Fernando's Ghost in Close to the Subject.
He plans to work on the project when he travels to the UK in October to take up the two-month Cambridge Australia First Nations Writer-in-Residence fellowship.
Browning, accustomed to working behind a microphone, welcomes the opportunity to engage with a literary audience.
"There's a beauty and a simplicity in the printed word and … you can reach people in a different way," he says.
"Reading is like being gently prodded or nudged or having something whispered in one's ear. That's how I think of writing; as being a much slower process, less immediate, and perhaps more meaningful in the end."