Congratulations to all the winners and nominees of the 2021 Australian Book Industry Awards!
The Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) celebrate the achievements of authors and publishers in bringing Australian books to readers.
The Awards are a way to say hooray to the successes in making books and being in the book business.
Winners for the Australian Book Industry Awards are determined through a process of selection, first by the ABIA Academy of more than 200 industry professionals, and then a shortlist and winners are chosen by our Judging Panels.
Here are some featured winners:
Book Of The Year: Phosphorescence
A beautiful, intimate and inspiring investigation into how we can find and nurture within ourselves that essential quality of internal happiness - the 'light within' that Julia Baird calls 'phosphorescence' - which will sustain us even through the darkest times.
Literary Fiction Book Of The Year: A Lonely Girl Is A Dangerous Thing
A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing unflinchingly explores the confusion of having expectations upturned, and the awkwardness and pain of being human in our increasingly dislocated world - and how, in spite of all this, we still try to become the person we want to be. It is a dazzling, original and astounding debut from a young writer with a fierce, intelligent and fearless new voice.
Biography Book Of The Year: The Happiest Man on Earth
Life can be beautiful if you make it beautiful. It is up to you. Eddie Jaku always considered himself a German first, a Jew second. He was proud of his country. Published as Eddie turns 100, this is a powerful, heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful memoir of how happiness can be found even in the darkest of times.
General Fiction Book Of The Year: The Dictionary of Lost Words
Set when the women's suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. It's a delightful, lyrical and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words, and the power of language to shape the world and our experience of it.
Children's Picture Book Of The Year: Our Home, Our Heartbeat
Adapted from Briggs squo; celebrated song 'The Children Came Back', Our Home, Our Heartbeat is a celebration of past and present Indigenous legends, as well as emerging generations, and at its heart honours the oldest continuous culture on earth.
Book Of The Year For Younger Children: The Grandest Bookshop in the World
Pearl and Vally Cole live in a bookshop. And not just any bookshop. In 1893, Cole's Book Arcade in Melbourne is the grandest bookshop in the world, brimming with every curiosity imaginable. Each day brings fresh delights for the siblings: voice-changing sweets, talking parrots, a new story written just for them by their eccentric father.
Illustrated Book Of The Year: In Praise of Veg
The definitive guide to making vegetables the centre of the plate. In this comprehensive and fully illustrated kitchen companion, food writer and presenter Alice Zaslavsky profiles 50 favourite vegetable varieties, offering 150+ recipes reflective of both tradition and modernity, just as all good cooking should be.
Book Of The Year For Older Children: The Left-Handed Booksellers of London
Eighteen-year-old art student Susan Arkshaw arrives in London in search of her father. But before she can question crime boss Frank Thringley he's turned to dust by the prick of a silver hatpin in the hands of the outrageously attractive Merlin. As their search for the grail becomes strangely intertwined with both their quests, they start to wonder... Is Susan's long-lost father a bookseller, or something altogether more mysterious?
