Congratulations are in order: not one, but two Text authors have been recoignised in the 2026 Prime Minister's Literary Awards shortlists!
Fearless Beatrice Faust by Judith Brett has been shortlisted in the Australian History category, and The Edge of Everything by Miranda Luby has been shortlisted in the Young Adult Literature category.
The judges had wonderful things to say about both titles.
On Fearless Beatrice Faust:
Judith Brett’s biography of Beatrice Faust is a scrupulously researched and illuminating account of a provocative, creative feminist intellectual and activist. Working from diaries, family papers, correspondence and notebooks, Brett reconstructs Faust’s life with fine detail, intellectual sympathy and rich insight. One of the book’s great strengths is the way it integrates Faust’s private life with her public commitments, tracing the importance she attached to bodily experience and connecting this to her activism on abortion, sex and drug addiction.
Brett places Faust’s ideas within Australian and transnational contexts, paying rewarding attention to the research and debate that shaped her thinking. She refuses to smooth away Faust’s contradictions, engaging thoughtfully with her controversial views and blind spots while still producing a compelling and deeply human portrait of someone who never swam with the tide. With an engaging narrative and enviable distillation, Fearless Beatrice Faust chronicles a life at the forefront of public debate and draws attention to the labour of social transformation: thinking, writing, arguing, organising and agitating. It is a book of sharp focus, compassionate insight and intellectual rigour.
On The Edge of Everything:
The ripple of tragedy within a family is at the core of this novel, as with a number of other entries. What sets Miranda Luby’s beautiful story of grief and connection apart is her deft handling of Lucy’s inner world. The novel explores the existentialism that arrives after loss with truth and heart, tracing the emotional consequences for a young heroine who is grieving a beloved older brother while also navigating first love and a last year at school.
Luby acknowledges the complexities that come when grief arrives at the same time as adulthood, in a world where joy and pain can be simultaneously exquisite. Her writing is tender, warm and emotionally observant, attentive to the way ordinary moments become charged after loss. The Edge of Everything is a compassionate reflection on an inevitably tumultuous time of life, and a quietly affecting portrait of how a young person learns to live with absence while still moving toward love, connection and possibility.
You can view the full shortlists and read more on the Prime Minister's Literary Awards website.
Congratulations to Judith and Miranda form everyone at Text!
