‘Many family stories’: Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet takes out ABC radio poll of top 100 Australian books

Cloudstreet, Tim Winton’s sprawling Australian family epic, has been voted Australia’s favourite book in a poll run by ABC Radio National.

The broadcaster announced over the weekend the results of a nationwide poll to determine a list of readers’ top 100 Australian books.

Markus Zusak’s 2005 novel The Book Thief took second place, while Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe came in third.

First published in 1991, Cloudstreet follows two working-class Australian families, the Lambs and the Pickles, over their 20 years living together in an old rambling house called Cloudstreet, in postwar Perth.

The story – Winton’s fifth novel and ninth book – won a swathe of awards upon publication, including the Miles Franklin in 1992, and has been a staple of Australian English literature classes for decades. It’s sold hundreds of thousands of copies in Australia alone.

Cloudstreet has topped previous polls on Australian books, including one by the Australian Society of Authors surveying writers on their favourites in 2003, and a subsequent poll run by the ABC the same year, surveying the public. Winton’s novel appeared in a 2019 BBC list of “100 novels that shaped our world”.

The final top 100 in this year’s ABC Radio National poll included adult fiction, nonfiction, young adult fiction, children’s picture books, history and cookbooks.

The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book made it into the top 50 (at No 22), while Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion came in at number 56. RecipeTin Eats: Dinner by Nagi Maehashi made the cut at 96.

Authors Helen Garner, Melissa Lucashenko, Geraldine Brooks, Anna Funder, Peter Carey and Hannah Kent all had multiple books in Sunday’s top 100. Books by children’s authors Alison Lester, Paul Jennings, Mem Fox, Jeannie Baker and Ruth Park appeared in the final 100.

The earliest published work was For the Term of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke from 1874 (No 80). The most recent were Sally Hepworth’s Mad Mabel and Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore, both published in 2025.

Kate Evans, the host of ABC Radio National’s literary show The Bookshelf, said the list included “audacious literary fiction to historical accounts of who we’ve been and how we might understand all that complicated past, to joyful children’s books, Indigenous stories of both pain and humour, and many, many family stories”.

“This list defies any glib conclusions about how we read – and surely that’s the point,” Evans said.