Wild souls and irreverent humour enliven these timely award-winning books

Two award-winning Australian books are hitting shelves at a moment when contemporary literature is grappling with modern anxieties in distinctly different ways. Katherine Johnson's novel Every Wild Soul, which won the Australian Fiction Prize, follows two women navigating Tasmania's Maria Island—one a teenager challenging her sheltered upbringing alongside environmental conservation work, the other a returning journalist processing personal losses while reporting on rewilding efforts worldwide. A trained biologist herself, Johnson writes with precision about ecological complexity, but the novel ultimately carries unexpected optimism about humanity's capacity to heal the natural world. Chris Ames' debut short-story collection, I Made This Just For You, winner of the Victorian Premier's Literary Award, takes a sharply different tack: a satirical, absurdist exploration of twenty-first-century life, where characters confront everything from plastic-surgery obsession to uploading dead relatives into language models. According to The Conversation, both books arrived as Australian ecofiction is blossoming and quirky short-story collections are having a cultural moment—suggesting readers are hungry for both hopeful environmental narratives and darkly comic reflections on surviving in uncertain times.

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