What is Australia’s best book? Our experts pick their favourites

This weekend, Radio National will count down its Top 100 Australian books poll, in which voters picked their favourite work of any genre. The winner will be crowned on Sunday.

It’s an ambitious enterprise – around 200 years of Australian writing subject to a popular vote. And yet, if such polls get people talking and thinking about literature, what’s not to like?

Ahead of the countdown, we asked a range of authors to nominate their two best Australian books of all time: ideally one fiction or poetry, the other non-fiction. Their picks are varied and surprising.

And our own favourites? I’ve gone for a novel I return to for the pleasure of each sentence, Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus (1980), and Helen Garner’s fierce work of reportage Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004).

My fellow editor Jo Case chose Frank Moorhouse’s deliciously dark, light and complex Dark Palace (2000) and Garner’s propulsive How to End a Story (2025) – perhaps the ultimate divorce memoir, in diary form.

Our colleague James Ley has picked Christina Stead’s classic The Man Who Loved Children (1940) and Judith Wright’s memoir Half a Lifetime (1999).

What would you choose? You can add your picks in the comments section at the end.

Tim Flannery

Patrick White’s The Tree of Man (1955) is simply the most beautiful and true thing I’ve ever read. It tells the story of a continent and its colonisers with such rapturous visions that the reader forgets that sentence structure is lost and all that remains is words, like a floating vision of a long-lost world.

Alan Jock Marshall’s essay Australia Limited was published in 1942 in the Think or be Damned series. This sharp, witty essay describes a limited and parochial Australia that Marshall, a soldier, is about to risk his life to defend, fighting the Japanese behind the lines in New Guinea.

Beautifully observed, with an unflinching eye, it describes an ignorant, self-satisfied Sydney, whose residents repeat ad nauseum that it is the best city in the world. On the eve of embarking, Marshall struggles with the idea of whether this place is worth losing your life for, and whether it can ever become truly great.

Tim Flannery is honorary fellow, The Australian Museum

Robert Manne

The Australian books that have meant most to me are those concerning the Indigenous dispossession. I have chosen Judith Wright’s haunting The Cry for the Dead (1982), where history and family memoir of the 19th-century Queensland pastoral frontier come together seamlessly, and Henry Reynolds’ penetrating and ground-breaking study of Aboriginal resistance, The Other Side of the Frontier (1981).

Robert Manne is emeritus professor of politics, La Trobe University

Sarah Holland-Batt

The Fatal Shore and The Shock of the New might be Robert Hughes’ masterpieces, but I adore his superlative mini-essays on artists from Warhol to Watteau, Degas and Constable.

In Nothing if Not Critical (1990), Hughes illuminates the Old Masters and punctures the art world’s overblown enfants terribles with ferocious intelligence, wit and joyously idiosyncratic taste. His criticism is companionable, startlingly poetic, at times acerbic – and hilariously contemptuous of the art world’s shallowness and capitalistic excesses. No one writes about painting better, or with more feeling.

There are many reasons to love Gwen Harwood, not least for her playfulness and flat-out refusal to genuflect before orthodoxies.

Her poetic pseudonyms and stealthy acrostics designed to embarrass sexist newspaper editors still delight – but reading her Collected Poems 1943–1995 (2003), you’re left with an overwhelming sense of awe at the clarity and richness of her body of work, and the expansive range of her imagination. Her poems move fluently between the cerebral and the quotidian, balancing lyrical and narrative impulses, illuminating ordinary figures and lives in extraordinary lines.

Sarah Holland-Batt is a poet and professor, and head of Creative Writing in UTS’ Faculty of Design & Society.

Debra Adelaide

Drylands (1999), Thea Astley’s final novel, throbs with her perennial themes – social, cultural and ecological degradation – and spits out acerbic wit. Yet its protagonist, Janet, battling the small minds, desiccated imaginations and inflated egos around her, also succeeds in teaching someone to read. No better solace exists for her – or for us.

Evelyn Araluen’s first book of poetry, Dropbear (2021), takes no prisoners in its dissection of settler-colonialism and interrogation of so-called reconciliation. This is a lyrical, funny, disturbing and intelligent reimagining of history, culture, narrative – and of words themselves. I’ve bought multiple copies as gifts for the fierce and moving poem Welcome to Cuntery alone.

Debra Adelaide is an adjunct associate professor in creative writing at the University of Technology Sydney.

Nicholas Jose

Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006) re-imagines Australian fiction. Wright’s all-too-human characters enact their dreams across a vast tract of earth, water, sky and the “alltimes”. The writing crackles. It’s a big story of Country, where ancestral voices offer wisdom and hope, enfolding the reader in a planetary embrace.

My nonfiction pick is David Malouf’s 12 Edmondstone Street (1985). If we had only this one small book, it would still be important.

Bookended by essays about growing up in wartime Brisbane in a family of a migrant background, Malouf distils his formation as a writer in place – and as an Australian going out into the world in the 20th century. Attentive, luminous, modest, it shows the author at his conversational, reflective best.

Nicholas Jose is emeritus professor in the School of Humanities at Adelaide University and a novelist.

Tom Griffiths

At the end of the 20th century, Australians were learning of the violence of their nation’s past and the significance of Aboriginal Country.

Alex Miller’s novel Journey to the Stone Country (2002) superbly captured that awakening. It seems to hold the beauty and terror of the Australian experience in every sentence. The land itself emerges as the most powerful and mysterious character of all.

A masterpiece of historical writing, Grace Karskens’ The Colony: A History of Early Sydney (2009), reconfigured our understanding of Australia’s colonial origins. It is a subtle and intimate portrait of early Sydney as well as an exhilarating exploration of imperial vision and cultural encounter. The prose has a magical glow, creating a space within which emotions, senses, dreams and hopes might be given proper play as forces of history.

Tom Griffiths is emeritus professor of history at the Australian National University.

Andrew Pippos

One of the unfortunate things about Australian literary culture is how easily great books can be overlooked. If I could assure two books against obscurity, they would be Shannon Burns’s Childhood (2022) and Antigone Kefala’s collection Fiction (2025).

Burns’ memoir is unusually sophisticated in its tonal range. His account of the cruelty people visit on one another makes parts of the story almost unbearably tense. Yet the narration moves into a lighter register when describing his growing attachment to books and what it suggests of his life beyond childhood.

In Fiction, I return to Alexia: A Tale of Two Cultures, Kefala’s children’s novella about a migrant family arriving in a former colony. It’s a fable about how conservative and insecure cultures can threaten a child’s imagination.

Andrew Pippos is a novelist and lecturer in creative writing at the University of Technology Sydney.

Edwina Preston

Helen Garner was brave to write and publish this still highly contentious book, so I am going to be brave enough to champion it. The First Stone (1995) documented, in real time, a feminist changing of the guard, but it is also an important book about class, elitism and privilege in Australia.

It showed me you can be flawed, self-questioning, doubting, angry and intimately subjective in the otherwise “cool” realm of nonfiction. It ignited much – much-needed – debate.

I’m slightly ashamed to admit it was Jonathan Franzen’s promotion of Christina Stead’s Australian classic, The Man Who Loved Children (1940), that led me to it. A masterwork, it’s unlike anything else I’ve read. This novel, centring the pathologically optimistic and paradoxically cruel Sam Pollitt and his family, is steeped in sun but clotted with darkness.

Edwina Preston is a novelist and a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Melbourne.

Yves Rees

First read and then compulsively re-read as a child in the 1990s, Robin Dalton’s pocket rocket of a memoir about interwar Kings Cross, Aunts Up the Cross (1965), propelled me into lifelong obsessions with Australian history and the craft of life writing. Droll, incisive, with sentences sharpened into lethal blades – Dalton’s perfect book is the model for everything I’ve written since.

Step aside Ned Kelly; Iris Webber is Australia’s new folk hero – a queer woman choreographing survival amid the petty crims of Depression-era Sydney. In her bravura historical novel, Iris (2022), Fiona Kelly McGregor performs the uncanny magic of conjuring Iris and her world back into vivid life (a feat repeated in 2026 sequel The Trap). If only we historians could write history so well.

Yves Rees is senior lecturer in history at La Trobe University.

Bronwyn Carlson

Living on Stolen Land (2020) is one of my favourite books because Ambelin Kwaymullina speaks with clarity, power and care. She challenges colonial myths while centring Indigenous sovereignty and relationships to Country.

I love how its deceptively simple prose invites deep reflection on responsibility, reminding us that colonialism shapes the present we inhabit.

The Promise (2014) is one of my favourite books because Tony Birch finds extraordinary depth in ordinary lives. His stories hold humour, tenderness and hardship together, without reducing people to their struggles. I love his spare, powerful writing and the compassion he brings to love, loss and moments of human connection.

Bronwyn Carlson is professor, Critical Indigenous Studies, and director of The Centre for Global Indigenous Futures at Macquarie University.

Maggie Nolan

I love how this top 100 Australia books exercise has sent people back to works they read long ago. But I want to make a pitch for a book published last year that deserves more readers – Omar Musa’s Fierceland won the 2026 Miles Franklin Award for its lyricism, its ambition and the urgency of its themes.

Exploring questions of complicity and inheritance, it also gives voice to the forests of Borneo. It expands our sense of what Australian literature can be and what the novel form can do.

I mostly read fiction for pleasure, and not much memoir. But my friend Kristina Olsson’s Boy, Lost (2013) – about her brother Peter, snatched as a child in 1950 – has stayed with me in the decade since I read it and wept.

It is a heartbreaking story of domestic violence, family secrets and stolen children, but also one of love and care that resonates with Australia’s broader history and culture.

Maggie Nolan is director of AustLit and associate professor in digital cultural heritage at the University of Queensland.

Danielle Clode

The best books are not always famous bestsellers, but offer just the right story for who and where you are at the time.

I encountered William Dakin’s Australian Seashores (1952) as a ten-year-old on my very first visit to a bookstore. Dakin’s authoritative and chattily informative guide to the inter-tidal zone illuminated my childhood and inspired my first real efforts to write about Australian nature.

I discovered Kylie Tennant’s The Honey Flow (1956) much later in life. Tennant’s vivid and unconventional storytelling felt like finding one of those “drunken” roads that she described staggering off into the scrub to a place where we might belong.

Danielle Clode is associate professor (adjunct) in creative writing, Flinders University.

Sue Turnbull

Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask (1994) begins with a female private detective challenging her image in a mirror: “how much guts have you got?” A lot, as it turns out. But what really scintillated was not Porter’s poetic appropriation of the hardboiled crime novel, so much as her vivid, visceral way with words.

Helen O’Neill’s Florence Broadhurst: Her Secret and Extraordinary Life (2011) is beautifully bound in cloth and extensively illustrated with Broadhurst’s designs for her fabulous silk-screen wallpaper. It’s an enthralling biography about a mysterious woman, culminating in her even more mysterious murder. Born on a remote cattle station in Queensland, Broadhurst’s most elaborate creation was clearly herself.

Sue Turnbull is honorary professor of communication and media studies, University of Wollongong.

Frank Bongiorno

Henry Handel Richardson’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is really three novels, Australia Felix (1917), The Way Home (1925), and Ultima Thule (1929) and in keeping with the times, it becomes more modernist in its style and “feel” as we approach the end.

Based loosely on the story of HHR’s parents and having some of the qualities of a colonial family saga, it is the story of Richard Mahony’s mixed but declining fortunes – in Australia and Britain – his protracted mental decline, and the strong, resourceful and practical Mary, his wife.

Peter Kirkpatrick’s The Sea Coast of Bohemia: Literary Life in Sydney’s Roaring Twenties (1992) is my favourite Australian history book since I first read it almost 30 years ago.

I love it for its unsurpassed (in Australian historical writing) evocation of time and place and its memorable cast of characters, from the well-known (the Lindsay clan of artists and writers), to the forgotten, or nearly forgotten, inhabitants of bohemian Sydney such as the sculptor Guy Lynch and his drowned brother Joe – the latter immortalised in Kenneth Slessor’s poem Five Bells; one-armed poet Geoffrey Cumine; “Queen of Bohemia” Dulcie Deamer; and the brilliant, wild, beautiful and tragic Anne Brennan. It was republished once, but almost 20 years ago.

Frank Bongiorno is director of the Vice-Chancellor’s Centre of Public Ideas and Donald Horne professor of history and public ideas, University of Canberra.

Emma Shortis

Don Watson’s ability to understand and translate both the United States and Australia – and the often overwhelming differences between them – is genuinely unparalleled, either here or anywhere else. The Shortest History of the United States of America (2025) is a masterpiece that builds on decades of work as one of Australia’s best writers.

Isobelle Carmody began writing the Obernewtyn Chronicles when she was 14. I first read Obernewtyn (1993) at a similar age and was forever shaped by both the idea that a teenage girl from Australia could do something so remarkable and the book’s premise: that artificial intelligence could spiral out of human control and bring on nuclear apocalypse.

Emma Shortis is adjunct senior fellow, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT.

Lynda Ng

Shanghai Dancing (2003), a fictional autobiography that explores the nature of inheritance, is a gemstone unique in Australian literature. With poetic prose and photographs, Brian Castro captures a Hong Kong and Shanghai that are lost to us now. He reminds us Australian stories don’t necessarily start or finish within our geographical borders.

Patrick Nunn works in the field of geomythology, which often uses traditional folklore to corroborate scientific discoveries. This is something that can work both ways. In The Edge of Memory: Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition and the Post-Glacial World (2018), he collates Aboriginal stories of “coastal drowning” from around Australia, then uses geological markers to show that these memories of an era when the sea level was much lower must date back at least 7,000 years.

Lynda Ng is lecturer in world literature (including Australian literature) at The University of Melbourne.

Kevin Brophy

Following on from Tom Shapcott’s seminal Australian Poetry Now (1970) and Kate Jennings’ feminist anthology, Mother I’m Rooted (1975), Off the Record (1975), compiled and introduced by performance poet Pi O, celebrated a continuing revolution in Australian poetry.

Performances packed with energy and diversity are all there, complete with a vinyl record tucked into the back cover. And there are lasting gems from Anna Couani, Jas H. Duke, Ania Walwicz and Eric Beach among the 53 poets included.

Henry Reynolds’ A History of Tasmania (2012) is a short history of a penal colony ruled by communal terror for half a century, a black war that ended in treachery, an emerging settler society and struggles between those who would exploit every natural resource for profit and those who saw an island worth nurturing.

Reynolds’ history of this small island compresses the wider history of Australia into vivid and sometimes shameful episodes. If history is important, this book is essential reading

Kevin Brophy is emeritus professor of creative writing, The University of Melbourne.

Peter C. Doherty

Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2014) probes love life, and death for a fictional surgeon who survives the Burma–Thailand Railway. The Long Road struck a chord with me as my uncle Charlie Byford lived the railroad experience as a prisoner of war but was ultimately lost at sea.

Wizards of Oz: How Oliphant and Florey helped win the war and shaped the modern world (2022) by Brett Mason tells the story of two Australian heroes of World War II, medical scientist Howard Florey and physicist Mark Oliphant. Florey’s efforts ensured penicillin’s availability on D-Day, while Oliphant raised awareness of the possibility of a German nuclear bomb and developed the cavity magnetron that enabled airborne radar.

Peter C. Doherty is laureate professor emeritus, The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity.

Jen Webb

Anne Summers’ Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonisation of Women in Australia (1975) illuminated a mode of social organisation with which I was already familiar, having grown up in South Africa, and lived in other settler communities. Her whip-smart, provocative and narrative-rich account of the history of colonial Australian women, and by extension, women more generally, hit a nerve that, for me, still tingles.

Marion Halligan’s Spider Cup (1990), is the story of Elinor and her efforts to reconstruct herself in a French village after the end of a marriage. Often sensual, sometimes outright funny, always insightful, it offers a fresh and appealing perspective on betrayal, revenge fantasies, and how women can sidestep societal expectations.

Jen Webb is distinguished professor emerita of creative practice, University of Canberra.

Intifar Chowdhury

Unapologetic and seemingly effortless, Evelyn Araluen’s The Rot (2025) struck a chord. It finds, amid the rot of late capitalism, an Indigenous presence that refuses to disappear and insists on justice.

It celebrates girlhood: the inheritance of grief, the memory of what was done to mothers, and the power of still standing – exhausted but gritty. I read it twice, once just for the lyrical euphony.

Paul Kelly’s The Twilight of Exceptionalism (2026) is bleakly timely, arriving as the Liberal Party’s future looks increasingly grim: a shrinking voter base, a damaged economic brand and no obvious path forward. Kelly asks how it came to this, tracing bad budgets, leadership spills, climate wars and a country now more interested in economic resilience in the times of crisis.

Intifar Chowdhury is lecturer in government at the Jeff Bleich Centre for Democracy and Disruptive Technologies, Flinders University.

Euan Ritchie

Told through the eyes, heart and fists of Peekay – a young, English-speaking boy in apartheid South Africa – Bryce Courtenay’s The Power of One (1989) was transformational for me.

As a teenage reader, I was captivated, outraged, saddened, empowered and changed, forever. This book taught me about the horrors of racism and prejudice – a timely, cautionary tale – but also triumph, when mentors foster self-belief, courage and determination to fight for what’s right.

Now in its fourth edition, Strahan’s Mammals of Australia (2023) comprehensively celebrates Australia’s diverse and remarkable mammal fauna. The locations and lives of more than 400 species are described in detail, accompanied by stunning photos. Native Australian mammals are a major focus of my life’s work, so this choice was an easy one, but flipping through the pages of this tome will transfix all.

Euan Ritchie is professor in wildlife ecology and conservation at Deakin University.

Graham Akhurst

I read Carpentaria (2006) while being treated for cancer. It was the first Indigenous literary novel I’d encountered, and it changed what I thought fiction could do. Alexis Wright writes with Indigenous sovereignty at the very core, and her vision of the Gulf Country deeply shaped my own debut novel, Borderland (2023).

I’ve been a fan of Richard Flanagan since reading Gould’s Book of Fish (2001) as an undergraduate at the University of Queensland, and Question 7 (2023) is his most daring book. Braiding memoir, history and essay, it traces a chain from H.G. Wells to the bomb that freed his father from slave labour in Japan.

Graham Akhurst is senior lecturer, Australian Indigenous studies and creative writing, at University of Technology Sydney (UTS).

Nick Haslam

Laurie Duggan’s epic “documentary poem” The Ash Range (1987) is a deep and intimate history of Victoria’s Gippsland region, from before European settlement to Black Friday. A collage of voices shot through with loss and ephemerality, it is an unparalleled evocation of place. Fittingly, my copy went up in smoke in this year’s fires.

Is there a more Australian pleasure than hearing a magpie’s song, or a more uniquely Australian terror than being swooped? In Australian Magpie: Biology and Behaviour of an Unusual Songbird (2019), distinguished scientist Gisela Kaplan paints an affectionate portrait of this iconic bird, from its brain to its complex social life to its incomparable warble.

Nick Haslam is professor of psychology, University of Melbourne.

John Long

Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet (1991) is replete with powerful, entertaining storytelling right from the get go. Set during the mid-1940s to 1960s, it’s a tale of two suburban Perth families, the Pickles and the Lambs, and their unexpected trials of life. Emotionally engaging, quirky, complex and bitterly humorous, with a touch of magical reality – there’s no finer novel I’ve ever read.

Raparapa Kularr Martuwarra: Stories from the Fitzroy River Drovers (1989), tells the soulful, personal stories of nine Indigenous stockmen who powered the rise of cattle stations in the Kimberley from the 1930s through the 1980s.

Jock Shandley recalls early days, the brutal killing of his people “shot down like dogs”, so they worked very hard, often woken at 3am, finishing 8pm or 9pm, all week (“no Sundays here”). It delivers the cold shock of gripping, well-told truths.

Authored by Eric Lawford, Shandley, Jimmy Bird, Ivan Watson, Peter Clancy, John Watson, Lochy Green, Harry Watson and Barney Barnes, it’s edited by Paul Marshall and published by Magabala Books.

John Long is emeritus strategic professor in palaeontology at Flinders University.

Liz Evans

What does “Australian writing” mean? What does it mean to be a writer in Australia? These are two distinct things, and this has determined my choices.

Carpentaria (2006) by Alexis Wright is my fiction pick because I will never forget the way it made me feel when I first started to read it, all those years ago. Profoundly political, humorous and poetic, it shimmers with the power of story and shatters the Western literary canon with a brilliant defiance. True Australian writing at its best.

For nonfiction, I have yet to read a more thought-provoking Australian book than Chelsea Watego’s Another Day in the Colony (2021). A necessarily confronting collection of essays about the ongoing experience of racism and colonisation for First Nations people throughout Australia, this is a dynamic, enlightening and vital anthology that thankfully pulls no punches and should be mandatory reading for all Australian citizens.

Liz Evans is an author, journalist and adjunct researcher in English and writing at University of Tasmania.

Alexander Howard

In Gerald Murnane’s The Plains (1982), a budding filmmaker arrives in Australia’s interior and secures a wealthy landowner’s patronage. Decades pass. His film on the plains and their inhabitants remains unmade. Murnane turns this stalled encounter into a singular exploration of perception: an inquiry into how we see and what we imagine lies beyond the line of sight.

Few novels have rendered the Australian landscape so inexhaustibly strange, or the act of looking so absorbing.

In A Spy in the Archives: A Memoir of Cold War Russia (2013), Sheila Fitzpatrick discovers how easily historical research can be mistaken for espionage in Cold War Moscow. At times, her account reads like a John le Carré novel. Her dry wit and scrutiny of her younger self make for a compelling memoir of intellectual formation. Her book also reveals how geopolitical tensions enter into everyday life, while casting a questioning eye on Australia’s place in the world.

Alexander Howard is senior lecturer in English & Writing and deputy head of the School of Art, Communication and English (Education) at University of Sydney.

Joshua Black

Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby (2013) lit a fire in my brain when I first read it. This novel, which follows the story of gritty protagonist Jo Green, is romance, tragedy and cultural commentary in one. All of modern Australia’s cultural inheritance – Indigenous languages, the European canon and contemporary pop culture – collide in a story that sharpens the general reader’s appreciation for the long tendrils of colonisation.

Stuart Macintyre’s A Concise History of Australia, (first published in 1999) is a crowning intellectual achievement because it brings together so many distinct ways of understanding modern Australia – who and what it is, where it has come from and where, on balance, it might be heading. General histories can be fraught; this one welcomes readers into the polity with warmth and wit.

Joshua Black is a lecturer in Australian political studies within the Vice-Chancellor’s Centre of Public Ideas at the University of Canberra.

Joanna Mendelssohn

I think my mother gave me my battered copy of Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians (1894) when I was eight. Struggling through it was hard, but rewarding. It told me parents could be bad-tempered and rigid, but still try to do their best, that adolescent girls can be stupid, and that grief can lead to a sudden reckoning. Whenever I re-read it, I still cry when Judy dies, saving the life of her baby brother the General.

I bought Drusilla Modjeska’s Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925–1945 (1981) because I was binge reading Eleanor Dark, and wanted to find out more. It introduced me to many writers I came to admire, especially Kylie Tennant, Miles Franklin, Dymphna Cusack and Nettie Palmer. Most importantly, it opened my eyes to how ideas can flourish in times of hardship – and how they can be crushed.

Joanna Mendelssohn is honorary senior fellow, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne.

Darryl Jones

Very few books have changed my perspective on the Australian landscape. And by “perspective”, I mean both visual and philosophical. Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate On Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (2011) does both. What appears, at first, to be simply a detailed exploration of early colonial landscape paintings becomes a comprehensive exercise in “reorientation”. Of seeing for the first time that Indigenous burning has shaped every valley and plain throughout the country.

Claire Thomas’ novel On Not Climbing Mountains (2026) breaks all the rules, brilliantly. It threatens to overwhelm with detail but instead makes the reader yearn for more. It should be morose, petulant, overweening, pretentious but succeeds in being personal, imaginative, illuminating and, surprisingly, deeply moving. This is an author’s author, in every unexpected scene and phrase. As the protagonist says ecstatically: “All these words, how I love them.”

Darryl Jones is professor emeritus, School of Environment and Science, Griffith University.