After naming 30 wide-ranging titles for this year’s shortlist, the 2021 Prime Minister’s Literary Award winners across all six genre categories have been announced at the Sydney Opera House.
The winners will share a total prize pool of $600,000 – $80,000 for each winner and $5,000 each for shortlisted entries.
The Labyrinth (Text Publishing) by Tasmanian writer and 2021 Miles Franklin Award winner Amanda Lohrey took out the Fiction award with ‘a story of a woman with a beloved son all but lost to her in jail.’ The judges’ commented: ‘It is a novel in high realist mode that also has romance elements, if only in the way it encompasses a tragicomic mood and a certain formal audacity that brings to mind the moodiness and restless shifts of late Shakespeare.’
