won the $50,000 ARA Historical Novel prize for his fifth book, The Burning Island. Other books on the shortlist were Anita Heiss’ Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray (River of Dreams), and Our Shadows, by Gail Jones.
The inaugural $30,000 prize for children’s or young adults’ historical fiction went to We are Wolves by Katrina Nannestad. Also on the shortlist were Amelia Mellor’s The Grandest Bookshop in the World, and The Mummy Smugglers of Crumblin Castle, by Pamela Rushby. The shortlisted authors each received $5000.
The prize, which defines historical fiction as being set mainly 50 years before publication, was set up last year by Edward Federman, managing director of the ARA Group, which also sponsors the Sydney Writers’ Festival and the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. Miranda Riwoe was the first winner, for Stone Sky Gold Mountain.
The Burning Island is set in 1830 and is the second part of a trilogy of novels that explore events over a 50-year period in and around the Furneaux Islands in Bass Strait and south-east Australia.
Serong, who worked as a lawyer before turning to fulltime novel writing after his first book, Quota, was accepted for publication in 2013, says the history and fiction in his books should be indistinguishable.
“I think the great challenge is to tell the story in such a way that the history informs it closely, but doesn’t get in the way,” he said. “I had this mental image when I started Preservation (the first in the trilogy, set in 1797), which was that history stood as pillars, and you were stringing fairy lights between the pillars and what you couldn’t do was mess with the pillars, because then you were misleading people. I think there’s an unspoken pact that you will use your imagination to create character and empathy and emotion, but you won’t actually bend the known history. What you hope is that people will read the story and wonder what really did happen and go off on their own little journey. “
