André Dao's novel Anam has taken out the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction, and is amongst six winners of Australia's richest book prize.
The awards were announced at the National Library of Australia in Canberra Thursday night, with the winner of each category receiving $80,000.
“Congratulations to this year’s winners for showcasing the diversity of Australian voices and sharing our unique stories with the world," said Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
Dao spent more than a decade composing a narrative that spans generations of conflict and displacement, and plays with the line between fact and fiction.
"It's amazing, it feels surreal... recognition of a book that tries to take some risks," Dao told AAP.
Billed as a novel about home and belonging for a country of migrants, it was only when Dao gave up on the idea of writing an Australian book and guessing what an Australian audience might want, that he was able to actually finish Anam.
"There were definitely points where I gave up and decided this was a book that maybe wasn't going to find an audience, wasn't going to be published," he said.
While ideas about Australianness almost stopped Anam from being written, notions of national identity are at the heart of another winning book, Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country by Ryan Cropp.
The first-ever biography of one of the nation's most influential intellectuals has won the prize for Australian history.
Horne coined the phrase "The Lucky Country" with the title of his first book in 1964, to mean that Australia was a lucky country run by second-rate people - a nation that subsisted with a derivative culture.
"Donald spent his whole life trying to shake Australia into a sense that we should be doing our own thinking here, we should be embracing intellectual life," said Cropp.
But over the decades the much-used phrase has acquired many meanings, and Cropp - who even found a Greek restaurant in western Sydney called Souvlucky Country - said it's almost become a cliché to say the phrase is often misunderstood.
"There's a reason why people deliberately misinterpret the phrase, right? They do feel lucky to be Australian," he said.
Cropp, who now works as a journalist, spent many months in the State Library of NSW trawling through about 200 boxes of Donald Horne's papers and letters, and the drafts of his more than 30 books.
While Horne didn't exactly have a Hemingway-esque life of adventure, that's part of the point, said Cropp.
"We celebrate racehorses and cricketers and things like that, but we don't celebrate the thinkers who do intellectual work," he said.
Speaking of which, the poetry prize went to Amy Crutchfield for The Cyprian published by Giramondo Press, a reappraisal of Greek god Aphrodite from a contemporary point of view.
Will Kostakis was the winner of the Young Adult writing gong for We Could be Something, and the non-fiction prize went to Daniel Browning for Close to the Subject: Selected Works.
The Children's Literature prize went to Tamarra: A Story of Termites on Gurindji Country by Violet Wadrill; Topsy Dodd Ngarnjal; Leah Leaman; Cecelia Edwards; Cassandra Algy; Felicity Meakins; Briony Barr and Gregory Crocetti.
Creative Australia received 533 entries for the 2024 awards, with the winners chosen by an independent panel of judges and each shortlisted entry receiving $5000.
