Western Australian Premier's Book Awards - Young Adults Category Winners

This award was inaugurated and from 1998 - 2000 was sponsored by Dymock's Hay Street Mall Store. In 2001, Perth Independent Newspapers sponsored the Award. Since that time the prize money has been made available by the Western Australian Government.

2006

Destroying Avalon - Kate McCaffrey
Fremantle Arts Centre Press
Moving to a new school, Avalon has difficulty in finding friends – and then the real terror starts. The victim of relentless, vicious defamatory messages on the internet, Avalon is too devastated and confused to think how to defend herself until a tragedy brings release. This strong novel is grounded in the realities of secondary school culture, dialogue and relationships, where peer pressure has escalated into a new and dangerous realm. There are important messages in this riveting, fast paced story with high appeal for its target audience of young adult readers. A gripping, thought-provoking story of cyber-bullying, this novel may be a timely warning to parents and teachers of the present and rapidly evolving dangers facing young people today.

2005

A Prayer for Blue Delaney - Kirsty Murray
(Allen & Unwin)
Reluctant ten-year-old year-old Colm McCabe is sent to Australia as part of the misguided migration schemes of the 1950s. His early experiences of life in a bleak Irish orphanage are worsened by the overwork and fear he encounters at notorious Bindoon. Escaping to Fremantle, Colm is rescued by old Billy Dare and his dog and, in the course of their long working journey across much of Australia, Colm encounters a wide variety of incidents, characters, and landscapes. The heat, hardship and boredom of work along the rabbit-proof fence are vividly evoked, as is Colm’s strengthening relationship with Billy. Many events of Australia in the 1950s are cleverly woven through the story with incidents involving Aboriginal struggles, life on a cattle station, Chinese immigrants, a dramatic hunting scene and the coming of television in Melbourne at the time of the Olympic Games. All characters, relationships and events are well realised through the linking theme of loss of family which runs powerfully through the book.

2004

Fireshadow - Anthony Eaton
University of Queensland Press
Judges' Comments
This tale draws the reader into two distinct worlds yet manages to balance and interweave them with ease. In a contemporary setting, Vinnie retreats to the bush near Dwellingup to take stock after a terrible car accident has left him physically and emotionally scarred. He settles in an area of forest where a POW camp had existed during World War Two, the area providing the setting for the second story. Here we are drawn into the lives of the camp inmates, but particularly to the story of Erich, a young German soldier captured in North Africa who finds himself in an alien place trying to come to terms with the dishonour of capture. The West Australian bush is evoked powerfully through beautiful descriptive imagery appealing always to the full sensory experience. This is a work that broaches many subjects, including racism, patriotism, nationalism, loyalty, responsibility and sibling love, all with subtlety and sensitivity. Eaton has aimed high with this work and succeeded admirably in his deft handling of a complex plot and descriptive powers that bring people and place alive.

2003

Nights in the Sun - Colin Bowles
Penguin Books
Judges' Comments
The setting for Colin Bowles' novel is Broome, 1926. The central motif for this rite-of-passage narrative is Sun Pictures, an open-air movie theatre. Its narrator is 14-year-old Sam who is observant, funny, sensitive and credible. The novel describes the racial mix of the town and the accepted social hierarchy reflected in the intricate seating arrangements at the Sun. While his father works the projector, Sam manages the seating of patrons, in the process coming to realise some of his own romantic needs. But Broome at this time can also be a dangerous place. Life-and-death personal and social history is brought to life in an assured and entertaining way that will resonate with the contemporary reader.

2002

Feeling the Heat - Pat Lowe
Penguin Books Australia
Judges' Comments
Award winning Pat Lowe has crafted an assured and accomplished novel. Nineteen-year-old Matthew Scott returns from years of living in Perth, to his boyhood home in the Kimberley in search of his childhood friend, Frances. In this coming-of-age story he not only finds his friend, but also matures psychologically and the Aboriginal wisdom he can draw from serves him well. On arrival in the coastal town, Matthew joins up, somewhat reluctantly, with Jeff Baxter, a character whose marriage has failed and who is grieving for his wife, his young family and his failed dreams. The stories of these two characters run parallel against the harsh and beautiful landscape of the Kimberley region. Station life, small town isolation and nurturing, Aboriginal culture, both traditional and suburban, all come within the purview of this story. The cultural values of Aboriginal and white peoples are cleverly juxtaposed. There is no neat, happy resolution here as not all characters gain what they want. This is real life and we are all the richer for having shared their journey.

2001

Obsession - Julia Lawrinson
Fremantle Arts Centre Press
Judges' Comments
Julia Lawrinson has achieved a rare balance here: honest expressions of a young girl as she negotiates family life (always difficult) and school life (a veritable jungle of jealous passions and barely suppressed violence). The language captures schoolyard lingo and manages to give just the right inflection to the conflicting emotions of the struggling outsider in a school where sexual politics and power struggles get in the way of learning. Humour, pathos, love, achievement and failure combine to make this an immensely readable work that has captured the language of the genre perfectly.

2000

The Darkness - Anthony Eaton
University of Queensland Press
Judges' Comments
A dark, evocative, sometimes threatening seafarer's yarn about a lighthouse in Isolation Bay, WA. The people of the tiny ex-whaling town cling to life at the mercy of the Southern Ocean and the Darkness, the merciless storm that sweeps in every ten years. The novel works through superstition, fear, curse, and small-town gossip to build a narrative that reaches its peak when Rohan, already affected by the loss of both his father and grandfather during earlier visits of the Darkness, confronts the return of the storm in the company of the newly arrived Rachel on East Barrier Island. This strong tale of young adults against the backdrop of the sea and the broken lives of people at an erstwhile whaling outpost withholds the predictable romantic conclusion.

1999

Scooterboy - Glyn Parry
Hodder Headline Australia
Judges' Comments
This open-ended love story is told from the point of view of Sam Lynch, a school dropout who is pumping petrol for her mother's boyfriend in the small community of Happy Valley. Sam is unsure that she even has a future until she meets Zach, the gentle new boy who rides a Vespa and idolises 'The Who', a rock group from the 1960s. In the spare language of the dialogue and Sam's musings, Parry captures the insecurities of teenagers, their worldliness and naivety, the tumult of being in love and the difficulties faced in a world where teenagers often have little support from adults or their peers.

1998

Red Hugh - Deborah Lisson
Lothian Books
Judges' Comments
Based on one of the most celebrated episodes in Irish history, Red Hugh demonstrates once again that Lisson has made the field of historical fiction her own. With impeccable attention to historical research and the nuances of Irish English she has used her educated imagination to brilliant effect to bring this story alive. Captured by the English in 1587, young Hugh Roe O'Donnell was held hostage in Dublin Castle for four years as a guarantee that his powerful father would be unable to forge a united Ulster. The novel follows Hugh's capture, captivity and two escape attempts, the latter being successful albeit at a terrible cost. Dominating this compelling narrative is the character of Hugh, with whom the reader identifies totally as he struggles to survive the awful conditions of imprisonment, and the harrowing physical trials of his escape, sustained by the knowledge that his own people were looking to him for leadership.