Gail Jones has won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction for her novel The Death of Noah Glass in a year that included some surprising choices and omissions. Judges praised The Death of Noah Glass as ‘a highly accomplished novel about the unknowability of others, even those closest to us, and the consolations of art, by an author of distinctive and fully matured style.’
Jones won out over Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip, which scored the 2019 Miles Franklin and would have been a significant win for an Indigenous fiction. First prize is $80,000 – enough to set up a writer for work on a new project – while shortlisted writers receive $5,000 each.
