Alien abductions, menopausal mermaids, a single-sentence novel and a cursed vagina; Australian literature in 2026 is looking marvellously unhinged. Here’s a sneak peek.
Fiction
Big names taking big risks
The Miles Franklin-winner Amanda Lohrey (author of The Labyrinth) moves from inner space to outer space with a novel about a psychiatrist whose patients report cosmic encounters (Capture, Text, April). Best known for her morally searching nonfiction, Chloe Hooper takes a detour with a cold war thriller, Lady Spy (Scribner, November), while the ever-antic Steve Toltz reappears with more existential absurdity (A Rising of the Lights, Penguin, April). Meanwhile, the polymathic Robert Forster – co-founder of the Go-Betweens – has written his first novel: “a rock-and-roll road trip” (Songwriters on the Run, Penguin, May).
Two of Ozlit’s cage-rattlers are back. Michael Winkler’s debut, Grimmish, was the first self-published novel to be shortlisted for the Miles Franklin. Now he brings us Griefdogg: the story of a despairing climate scientist who decides he’d rather be a family pet (Text, March). And Kris Kneen returns to fiction with Rite of Spring, a novel of marriage, madness, middle age and … sea monsters (Transit Lounge, July).
Expect serious metafictional mischief from the reigning Miles Franklin-winner, Siang Lu, whose new novel takes The Odyssey for a joyride (Useless Tse, Scribner, September). And Shaun Micallef is having a great deal of fun with De’Ath Takes a Holiday, a book that sounds like Forrest Gump has been bitten by Dracula – or perhaps the other way around (Ultimo, March).
It promises to be a mighty year for Ozlit. Look for new fiction from: Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Max Easton, Kathryn Heyman, Fiona Kelly McGregor, Suzie Miller, Favel Parrett, Edwina Preston, Mirandi Riwoe and Clare Thomas. There’s even a double helping – fiction and nonfiction – from that wildly inventive scriptomaniac Yumna Kassab (Goodbye, My Love, Ultimo, April; and The Parramatta Dictionary, Giramondo, July).
Eco-lit flourishes
It is a dark irony that our most alive fiction is anchored to extinction: the wilder our grief and awe, the wilder our storytelling. Adam Ouston’s new novel, Mine, follows a climate activist trapped at the bottom of an abandoned goldmine and is told in a single, wheeling 278-page sentence (Transit Lounge, August). Johanna Bell’s The Department of the Vanishing is the literary equivalent of a murder board (Transit Lounge, March). And then there are the apocalyptic eco-fables: immaculate conception in a feminist utopia (The Endling by Keely Jobe, Scribe, March); a virulent rash (Mantle by Romy Ash, Ultimo, April); and the wakeful ruins of an alien civilisation (Bird Deity by John Morrissey, Text, February).
Eva Hornung, Katherine Johnson, Maria Takolander, Inga Simpson and Sarah Walker all have eco-inflected fiction out this year. And Tim Flannery’s A Brief History of Climate Folly (Text, August), co-written by his daughter Emma Flannery, is stranger than fiction. It collects real-world tales of humanity’s attempts to control the weather – like Hitler’s plan to drain the Mediterranean.
The cost of living
From the housing crisis to the care sandwich: an emerging and caustic theme in Ozlit (and beyond) is late capitalism and financial precarity. Fiona Wright captures the mood with Kill Your Boomers (Ultimo, March). Jordan Prosser sends a hungover millennial to Mars in Blue Giant (UQP, August); Ellena Savage follows an anarchist waiter from inner-city Melbourne to a decrepit Greek Island (The Ruiners, Summit, April); Alan Fyfe’s The Cross Thieves (Transit Lounge, March), is set in a riverside squat; and George Kemp traps his cast in a regional McDonald’s as a bushfire closes in (Soft Serve, UQP, February).
There are nonfiction titles on the theme, too: see Lucinda Holdforth’s Going On and On: Why Longevity Threatens the Future (Summit, April), and Matt Lloyd-Cape’s Our Place: How to Fix the Housing Crisis and Build a Better Australia (Black Inc, September).
The art of life
Our literary obsession with art-makers continues. Wayne Marshall sends Henry Lawson into the multiverse in Henry Goes Bush (Pan Macmillan, May) and Emily Lighezzolo’s paint-speckled debut follows a couple who meet in an art class: she’s the model, he’s an artist (Life Drawing, UQP, March). Speaking of paint, Angela O’Keeffe once gave voice to a Jackson Pollock canvas; now her new book Phantom Days brings a paperback novel to life – the more it sees, the more it fears for its owner (UQP, May).
And the line between life and art blurs in Debra Adelaide’s autofiction, When I Am Sixty-Four (UQP, April). Based on her real-life friendship with the Puberty Blues’ co-author Gabrielle Carey, this bruised and generous novel traces what remains – and what shifts – when a life, and a creative bond, comes to an end. Australian art-makers star in nonfiction too, with new biographies of the Hobart-born actor Errol Flynn (by Patricia A O’Brien, Allen & Unwin, April), the cultural critic Robert Hughes (by Thornton McCamish, Black Inc, November), and the poet AD Hope (by Susan Lever, Black Inc, April).
Crime, romance and fantasy
The body count continues to rise in Aussie crime fiction, and the usual suspects are back: Ashley Kalagian Blunt, Candice Fox, Amanda Hampson, JP Pomare, and Michael Robotham – who delivers his first homegrown noir (Tell Me Something True, Hachette, September). Meanwhile, the investigative journalist Louise Milligan’s second novel is out in March (Shellybanks, Allen and Unwin).
And we have talent aplenty across the genre spectrum: from meet-cutes (The Paradise Pact by Anita Heiss, Simon and Schuster, March), to riotous family megadramas (The Sisterhood Rules by Kathy Lette, Bloomsbury, February) and shapeshifting princesses (Songbird of the Sorrows by Braidee Otto, Penguin, February). Look out for the Perth author Cameron Sullivan’s debut fantasy novel, The Red Winter (Pan Macmillan, March), which is set for a global release this year – a retelling of the myth of the Beast of Gévaudan.
Non-fiction
Rhetoric and reckonings
The former Guardian reporter Amy Remeikis has two books out this year and their titles tell a story on their own: Where It All Went Wrong (Scribner, February) and Screw Nice (Hachette, July). The first revisits the Howard years; the second takes aim at the politics of civility and the weaponisation of politeness. Bob Hawke and Anthony Albanese – and their leadership – also come under scrutiny in high-profile essay collections (Gold Standard? Revisiting the Hawke Government and The First Albanese Government, both out with NewSouth). And Kate Grenville continues her project of colonial reckoning in Currabubula (Black Inc, October), a tale that begins with a bundle of mysterious letters.
Stan Grant makes the case for attentive silence in When Words Fail Us (NewSouth, May), while the techno-commentator Toby Walsh considers the force reshaping everything else in God AI (Black Inc, September). And fresh from her victory against the ABC, Antoinette Lattouf celebrates rule-breakers and history-makers in Women Who Win (Penguin, April).
Australian true crime also keeps power in its sights. In Duty to Warn (Hachette, January), Charlotte Grieve traces the fallout of her reporting on the disgraced orthopaedic surgeon Munjed Al Muderis. In The Vanishing of Vivienne Cameron (Simon and Schuster, January), Vikki Petraitis revisits a disappearance that has haunted Australia for decades and examines the biases that warped the investigation.
Wellness and witchery
The title of the year award goes to Lally Katz for her memoir My Cursed Vagina (Allen and Unwin, February), which begins with a diagnosis she received from a shopping mall psychic. Judith Lucy samples every tincture and cure – “from ayahuasca to zen” – as she grapples with the wellness industrial complex in Well Well Well (Scribner, November), while Kaz Cooke explores the ghostly and the gullible in her history of clairvoyants, mediums and magicians’ assistants (Spooky Ladies Being Special, Scribner, October).
In Good Witch Hunting (Summit, July), the Guardian columnist Lucianne Tonti argues that the twisted logic of witch hunting still haunts the present. And, in her essay collection The Ruin of Magic (Black Inc, April), Kate Holden looks for forms of real enchantment, from the dark pull of nostalgia to the sustaining light of other storytellers.
Care and community
But if there is a heartbeat to the coming year, it’s the care that binds us together. Blak Love (UQP, October), edited by Daniel Browning and Cheryl Leavy, brings together First Nations writers to examine love in all its tones and textures. Written in the aftermath of his wife’s sudden death, Bob Carr’s memoir Bring Back Yesterday (Allen and Unwin, March) draws on five decades of devotion.
And then there is Raya Goldtwig’s The World Belongs to the Children (Affirm, March). The daughter of Jewish shopkeepers, Goldtwig fled violent persecution twice: first from Warsaw and then from Stalingrad. This book – a life-affirming marvel – is her debut. She is 89; we need her story more than ever.
