A. S. Patrić won the AU$60,000 (about US$45,430) Miles Franklin Literary Award, honoring a novel "of the highest literary merit and which must present Australian life in any of its phases," for Black Rock White City.
Speaking for the judging panel, State Library of NSW Mitchell Librarian Richard Neville, said "the novel delivers a powerful and raw account of the migrant experience in Australia, exploring the damages of war, and the possibility of redemptive love, in the context of debilitating emotional and physical dislocation.... it is a novel of compassion and challenge, its driving, urgent narrative envelops the reader in one of the great issues of our time."
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Paul Cleave won the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel for Trust No One, the New Zealand Listener reported. He had previously won the prize in 2015 and 2011. The judging panel praised Trust No One, published here by Atria, as "a stunningly audacious novel that functions as a literary hall of mirrors... it succeeds brilliantly on many different levels."
The inaugural Ngaio Marsh Award for Best First Novel went to Ray Berard for Inside the Black Horse, which the judges called "a lucid and potent portrait of good people and gangsters that is unmistakably Kiwi in flavor and tone... a fine crime story with considerable depth."