Lucy Treloar wins $50,000 Barbara Jefferis award with Wolfe Island
Lucy Treloar is keeping a beady eye on the coronavirus outbreak in South Australia, albeit from a safe distance. That’s because the Melbourne-based novelist is working on her third novel, which will be set in the state’s mid north, and she needs to go on a research trip.
Lucy Treloar says novels that centre the experiences of women are always worth writing.Credit:Eddie Jim
But if she is frustrated by that, she has in the meantime something to celebrate: her second novel, Wolfe Island, has been named winner of the Barbara Jefferis award.
The $50,000 prize is given every other year to ‘‘the best novel written by an Australian author that depicts women and girls in a positive way or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in society”. It was established by the late ABC film critic John Hinde in honour of Jefferis, his novelist wife, who was a founding member and first female president of the Australian Society of Authors. It was first presented in 2008.
The judges said Treloar’s novel was ‘‘of immense contemporary relevance about the redemptive power of female intuition, resistance and resilience’’. Treloar was on a shortlist that also included The White Girl, Tony Birch; Too Much Lip, Melissa Lucashenko; There Was Still Love, Favel Parrett, and this year’s Miles Franklin winner, The Yield by Tara June Winch.
Wolfe Island is the isolated home of Kitty Hawke, protecting her from increasingly violent societal disruption on the US mainland, but also making her retreat vulnerable to environmental damage as the rising waters of the bay threaten to overhelm her home. When her granddaughter turns up, accompanied by asylum seekers, she is impelled to take dramatic action.
Treloar said a prize such as the Barabara Jefferis was important in different ways.
‘‘One of the most important is the point that has to be reasserted: stories that centre women are worth writing. A prize that foregrounds that as a literary good is absolutely worth celebrating.’’
They were harder to get published and possibly harder to get people to read them. Men tended to read books by men, she said.
And she pointed out that arts funding and prizes made work possible. ‘‘We need more.’’
As she was writing Wolfe Island, she was half aware that Kitty had a mythical quality. ‘‘I wanted her to be not just herself but an exemplar of female independence and ferocity.’’
In her review in The Age, Kirsten Krauth described the book as ‘‘a timely and deeply affecting novel that forces us to renegotiate our ideas of exile and freedom, and ask ourselves the same difficult questions that confront Kitty: What would it take to make us flee to the border? And if we’re on an island that’s slowly sinking, where would we go if there’s nowhere left to run?’’
Jason Steger is Books Editor at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald