The Age Book of the Year Awards are annual literary awards presented by Melbourne's The Age newspaper. The awards were first presented in 1974. Since 1998 they have been presented as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival. Initially, two awards were given, one for fiction (or imaginative writing), the other for non-fiction work, but in 1993, a poetry award in honour of Dinny O'Hearn was added. The criteria are that the works be "of outstanding literary merit and express Australian identity or character" and published in the year before the awards are made. One of the award-winners is chosen as The Age Book of the Year.

2011 Winners

Fiction

Indelible Ink by Fiona McGregor (Scribe)

Non-Fiction

A Three-Cornered Life: The Historian W. K. Hancock by Jim Davidson (UNSW Press)

Poetry

Starlight: 150 Poems by John Tranter (University of Queensland Press)

McGregor also won the Book of the Year award.

2011 Shortlists

Fiction
• Like Being a Wife by Catherine Harris
• The Mary Smokes Boys by Patrick Holland
• Indelible Ink by Fiona McGregor
• Bright and Distant Shores by Dominic Smith
• Bereft by Chris Womersley

Non-Fiction
• Sydney by Delia Falconer
• A Three-Cornered Life: The Historian W.K. Hancoc by Jim Davidson
• When It Rains by Maggie MacKellar
• When Horse Became Saw by Athony Macris
• The Many Worlds of R H Mathews: In Search of an Australian Anthropologist by Martin Thomas

Poetry
• Sly Mongoose by Ken Bolton
•Supermodernprayerbook by Susan Bradley Smith
• This Floating World by Libby Hart
• Porch Music by Cameron Lowe
• Starlight: 150 Poems by John Tranter

2010 Winners

Fiction
Lovesong by Alex Miller

Non-Fiction
Ten Hail Marys by Kate Howarth

Poetry
Pirate Rain by Jennifer Maiden

Past Winners

* The Age Book of the Year 2009 By Steven Amsterdam Things We Didn't See Coming

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* 2008: American Journeys by Don Watson
* 2007: Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian Democracy by Peter Cochrane
* 2006: Dreamtime Alice by Mandy Sayer
* 2005: Plenty: Digressions on Food by Gay Bilson
* 2002: Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: Paul Keating Prime Minister by Don Watson
* 2000: Craft for a Dry Lake by Kim Mahood
* 1999: Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape by K.S. Inglis
* 1998: The Hunt by John Kinsella
* 1997: Snake Cradle by Roberta Sykes
* 1995: The Future Eaters by Tim Flannery
* 1994: Lyrebird Rising by Jim Davidson
* 1993: Journeyings by Janet McCalman
* 1992: A Fence Around the Cuckoo by Ruth Park
* 1991: Patrick White: A Life by David Marr
* 1990: Blessed City by Gwen Harwood
* 1989: Mariners are Warned: John Lort Stokes and HMA Beagle by Marsden Hordern
* 1988: Big-noting by Robin Gerster
* 1987: The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes
* 1986: George Johnston: A Biography by Gary Kinnane
* 1985: Vietnam: A Reporter's War by Hugh Lunn; Mapping the Paddocks by Chester Eagle
* 1984: HB Higgins: The Rebel and Judge by John Rickard
* 1983: History of Tasmania by Lloyd Robson
* 1982: John Monash: A Biography by Geoffrey Serle
* 1981: A Million Wild Acres by Eric Rolls
* 1978: The Anzacs by Patsy Adam-Smith
* 1976: Capitalism, Socialism and the Environment by Hugh Stretton
* 1974: A History of Australia (Vol. 3) by Manning Clark

The Age Book of the Year - Non -fiction

2009 - Down to the Crossroads: On the Trail of the 2008 Presidential Election

By Guy Rundle

Rundle's Down to the Crossroads grew out of a commission by Crikey.com to follow that 2008 election. He described the book as a series of reflections on what America is. ''It was an enormous moment when a new US came up against older ideas of itself. Barack Obama was a captivating historical force.'

Past Winners

2008

American Journeys

by Don Watson

Only in America - the most powerful democracy on earth, home to the best and worst of everything - are the most extreme contradictions possible. In a series of journeys, acclaimed author Don Watson set out to explore the nation that has influenced him more than any other. Travelling by rail gave Watson a unique and seductive means of peering into the United States, a way to experience life with its citizens: long days with the American landscape and American towns and American history unfolding on the outside, while inside a tiny particle of the American people talked among themselves. Watson's experiences are profoundly affecting: he witnesses the terrible aftermath of Hurricane explores the savage history of the Deep South, more

* 2007: Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian Democracy by Peter Cochrane

Colonial Ambition tells the story of the politicians and would-be politicians of Sydney, who were driven by a determination to lift themselves and their new colony to a higher level. They wanted parliamentary liberty, though they could not agree on what that meant, and that contest over meaning, centred in Sydney, was unremitting. The fight for responsible government and democracy is a dialogue between the local and the global, the periphery and the centre (Sydney and London), the city and the bush; between economy and polity, the politics of legislature and the street, and between the public and the private lives of the key players: WC Wentworth, Sir George Gipps, Robert Lowe, Lord Howick (Earl Grey), Henry Parkes, Charles Cowper and Lord John Russell.

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* 2006: Friendly Fire by Jennifer Maiden
* 2005: Plenty: Digressions on Food by Gay Bilson
* 2004: Totem by Luke Davies
* 2003: Of a Boy by Sonya Hartnett
* 2002: Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: Paul Keating Prime by Don Watson

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* 2001: Untold Lives and Later Poems by Rosemary Dobson
* 2000: Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop by Amy Witting
* 1999: Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape by K.S. Inglis
* 1998: Three Dollars by Elliot Perlman
* 1997: Jack Maggs by Peter Carey
* 1996: The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow by Thea Astley
* 1995: The Future Eaters by Tim Flannery
* 1994: The Unusual Life of Tristam Smith by Peter Carey
* 1993: The George's Wife by Elizabeth Jolley
* 1992: Lover's Knots by Marion Halligan
* 1991: Patrick White: A Life by David Marr
* 1990: Blessed City by Gwen Harwood
* 1989: Mariners are Warned: John Lort Stokes and HMA Beagle by Marsden Hordern
* 1986: Sister Ships by Joan London
* 1985: Illywhacker by Peter Carey
* 1984: The Bellarmine Jug by Nicholas Hasluck
* 1983: Mr Scobie's Riddle by Elizabeth Jolley
* 1982: Fly Away Peter by David Malouf
* 1980: Joint winners

A Woman of the Future by David Ireland
Homesickness by Murray Bail

* 1979: 1915 by Roger McDonald
* 1978: The Year of Living Dangerously by Christopher Koch
* 1976: A Late Picking by A. D. Hope
* 1975: A Kindness Cup by Thea Astley
* 1974: The Pure Land by David Foster

Fiction (or Imaginative Writing) Award

The Age Book of the Year 2009 Fiction

Things We Didn't See Coming

By Steven Amsterdam

It's the anxious eve of the millennium. The car is packed to capacity, and as midnight approaches, a family flees the city in a fit of panic, paranoid and conflicting emotions. The ensuing journey spans decades and offers a sharp-eyed perspective on a hardscrabble future as a boy jettisons his family and all other ties in order to survive.

Past Winners

2008 Winner

Breath, By Tim Winton

When paramedic Bruce Pike arrives too late to save a boy found hanged in his bedroom he senses immediately that this lonely death is an accident. Pike knows the difference between suicide and misadventure. He understands only too well the forces that can propel a kid toward oblivion. Not just because he's an ambulanceman but because of the life he's lived, the boy he once was, addicted to extremes, flirting with death, pushing every boundary in the struggle to be extraordinary, barely knowing where or how to stop. So begins a story about the damage you do to yourself when you're young and think you're immortal. In his first novel for seven years, Tim Winton has achieved a new level of mastery. Breath confirms him as one of the world's finest storytellers, whose work is both accessible and profound, relentlessly gripping and deeply moving.

2007: Every Move You Make by David Malouf

Bookish boys and taciturn men, strong women and wayward sons, fathers and daughters, lovers and husbands, a composer and his muse, a builder-architect and his legacy - here are their stories, whole lives brought vividly into focus and so powerfully rooted in the landscape that you can almost feel the heat and the dust. His canvas is the vast Australian continent from the mysterious, glittering Valley of Lagoons behind the Great Divide in Far North Queensland, to bohemian Balmain and the Centre at Uluru, but always there are enticing glimpses of a world beyond, and the stories are tender, subtle, unsettlingly intimate. A young man going off to war tries to make sense of his place in the world he is leaving; a composer's life plays itself out as a complex domestic cantata; an accident on a hunting trip speaks volumes, which its inarticulate victim never could; and, in the funniest, most surprising story of all, a down-to-earth woman stubbornly tries to keep her feet on the ground at Ayers Rock. Malouf's men and women are together but curiously alone, looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on, in life, puzzling over the space they'll leave behind when the waters close over them...This is a heartbreakingly beautiful, richly satisfying collection by a master storyteller, one of the great writers of our time.

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* 2006: Dead Europe by Christos Tsiolkas
* 2005: Sixty Lights by Gail Jones
* 2004: The White Earth by Andrew McGahan
* 2003: Of a Boy by Sonya Hartnett
* 2002: Gilgamesh by Joan London
* 2000: Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop Shop by Amy Witting
* 1998: Three Dollars by Elliot Perlman
* 1997: Jack Maggs by Peter Carey
* 1996: The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow by Thea Astley
* 1995: Billy Sunday by Rod Jones
* 1994: The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith by Peter Carey
* 1993: The George's Wife by Elizabeth Jolley
* 1992: Lover's Knots by Marion Halligan
* 1991: Double Wolf by Brian Castro
* 1990: Longleg by Glenda Adams
* 1989: My Father's Moon by Elizabeth Jolley
* 1988: Forty Seventeen by Frank Moorhouse
* 1987: Stories from the Warm Zone by Jessica Anderson
* 1986: Sister Ships by Joan London
* 1985: Illywhacker by Peter Carey
* 1984: The Bellarmine Jug by Nicholas Hasluck
* 1983: Mr Scobie's Riddle by Elizabeth Jolley
* 1982: Fly Away Peter by David Malouf
* 1981: Turtle Beach by Blanche d'Alpuget
* 1980: Joint winners

A Woman of the Future by David Ireland
Homesickness by Murray Bail

* 1979: 1915 by Roger McDonald
* 1978: The Year of Living Dangerously by Christopher Koch
* 1976: A Late Picking by A. D. Hope
* 1975: A Kindness Cup by Thea Astley
* 1974: The Pure Land by David Foster

Dinny O'Hearn Poetry Prize

2009

Better Than God

By Peter Porter

"Better Than God" sees the eighty-year-old Porter working with a lyric engine tuned to perfection, and a mind that shows every sign of speeding up: Porter can make a song of what another writer might take an essay to cover. Whether working in the forms of epigram or narrative, or writing of memory, mortality, Renaissance intrigue or the surreal distortions of old age - Porter's faith in poetry as a road to the truth shines through. There are few other writers for whom contemporary events throw such long shadows or for whom the past is so present, and in "Better Than God" one has the sense of the poet attaining an increasingly commanding height. Porter remains one of the few poets we can open anywhere, and know that we will always be both enlightened and entertained.

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* 2008: Not Finding Wittgenstein by J. S. Harry

The complete collection of J.S. Harry's poems centred on Peter Henry Lepus, a British-born rabbit like his namesake in Beatrix Potter's books, but of a more curious and philosophical cast of mind than his better-known counterpart.
* 2007: The Goldfinches of Baghdad by Robert Adamson
* 2006: Friendly Fire by Jennifer Maiden
* 2004: Totem by Luke Davies
* 2003: Mangroves by Laurie Duggan
* 2002: After Images by Robert Gray
* 2001: Untold Lives and Later Poems by Rosemary Dobson
* 1999: The Impossible, and other Poems by R. A. Simpson
* 1997: Joint winners

Dragons in their Pleasant Places by Peter Porter
The Wild Reply by Emma Lew

* 1995: Selected poems 1956-1994 by Chris Wallace-Crabbe
* 1994: The Monkey's Mask by Dorothy Porter
* 1993: At the Florida by John Tranter

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