Paradise Earth Release
Gold Medal Winner 2020 IPPY Awards
for Best Regional Fiction
Finalist 2020 International Book Awards
– Literary Fiction
With the timely release of Paradise Earth, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Amy Barker and her publishers at Stormbird Press predicted this year’s bushfire crisis, floods and COVID-19 pandemic with amazing prescience. Set on Tasman Peninsula, approaching the 25th anniversary of the Port Arthur massacre, this long-awaited novel (Barker’s first book in ten years) is the kind of contemporary literature that feels pulled straight from the collective unconscious.
‘The nightmares are as frequent as her regular dreams. Then there are the night terrors…just as there are people who will never experience a tsunami, an earthquake, a bushfire or a massacre—will only see these things in the news. Such is the lottery of life.’
Our deadliest mass shooting—one that changed Australian society irrevocably—is presented not only as a national tragedy but also as, perhaps most poignantly, a personal trial for individuals and communities having to learn to survive after an unprecedented and life-altering event.
As Barker unfolds Paradise Earth, she opens up the innermost workings of the human psyche as each character is forced to come to terms with who they are, and how far they will go for their beliefs. Ruth, a woman in exile from her community, estranged from her family; John, a recreational hunter, teaching his adolescent son to shoot; Marina, a massacre survivor, turned animal rights activist: each is haunted by the legacy of trauma that ripples throughout generations.
Read more about Paradise Earth >
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Ena Noël Award
Omega Park has been announced winner of the 2012 IBBY (International Board on Books for Young People) Ena Noël Award.
The judges were unanimous in choosing Omega Park as winner of the biennial award, established in 1994 by IBBY Australia founding president Ena Noël with the aim of encouraging and assisting young, emerging Australian authors and illustrators of children’s and YA books.
IBBY Australia award announcement >
Ena Noël Award and past winners >
FAW Christina Stead Award
Omega Park has been shortlisted for the FAW Christina Stead Award in the Fellowship of Australian Writers (FAW) National Literary Awards for 2010.
Now in its twenty third year, the Christina Stead Award is for a work of fiction first published in Australia.
Other shortlisted authors in this category were Sonia Hartnett for Butterfly, HM Brown for Red Queen and Adair Robin for Death & the Running Patterer, while David Brooks was Commended for The Umbrella Club and Justine Larbalestier won for her book Liar.
The judges commented, “Originality; skilful writing and plotting; and insight into the human condition were the common threads that linked all the books that made it on to the shortlist… The compulsion to keep reading was strong in each of the shortlisted titles… Un-put-down-ability was a box that each of the shortlisted books ticked.”
Amy Barker 