2026 Reading Challenge: September Award Winners

You've heard of the Booker Prize, the Miles Franklin, the Stella… but there are so many book awards! Awards for every genre of writing from political commentary to children's books, from books picked by expert panels to books picked by readers or booksellers, and awards for every style of reading.

This month's reading challenge is all about the winners - the ones who blew the judges away amongst the huge piles of books they had to choose from. While you can choose an award winner from any year, here are some recommendations from the past year of award-winners to help get you started.

Alternatively, keep an eye out for the announcement of the winners of the following awards being announced in September: The Hugo Awards to be announced on Tuesday 1st September (AWST); The Prime Minister's Literary Awards to be announced on Thursday 10th September; The Western Australian Premier's Book Awards to be announced on Friday 11th September, The Ned Kelly Awards to be announced sometime in September.

Cannon by Lee Lai

Graphic Novel, Winner of the 2026 Stella Prize

We arrive to wreckage:   a restaurant smashed to rubble, with tables and chairs upended riotously.  Under the swampy nighttime cover of a Montreal heatwave, we meet our protagonist, Cannon, dripping in beads of regret sweat.  She was supposed to be closing the restaurant for the night, but instead, she destroyed it. The horror-scape left in her wake is not unlike the films Cannon and her best friend, Trish, watch together. Cooking dinner and digging into deep cuts of Australian horror movies on their scheduled weekly hangs has become the glue in their relationship.  In high school, they were each other's lifeline - two queer second-generation Chinese nerds trapped in the suburbs. 

Now, on the uncool side of their twenties, the essentialness of one another feels harder to pin down.  Yet when our stoic and unbendingly well-behaved Cannon finds herself very uncharacteristically surrounded by smashed plates, it is Trish who shows up to pull her out.

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

Fiction, Winner of the 2026 Women's Prize for Fiction

Sybil Van Antwerp has always used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings, around half past ten, she sits down to write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often yet never sends the letter.

Sybil expects her world to go on as it always has—a mother, grandmother, wife, divorcee, distinguished lawyer, she has lived a very full life. But when letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life, she realises that the letter she has been writing over the years needs to be read and that she cannot move forward until she finds it in her heart to offer forgiveness.

Always Home, Always Homesick by Hannah Kent

Memoir, Winner of the 2026 Indie Book Awards for Non-Fiction

"In my brief breath of life, might I find a way to fit light to paper?"

In a land of ethereal beauty, within a culture soaked in myth, a young woman discovers the story that will change her life. In 2003, seventeen-year-old Australian exchange student Hannah Kent arrives at Keflavík Airport in the middle of the Icelandic winter. That night she sleeps off her jet lag and bewilderment in the National Archives of Iceland, unaware that, years later, she will return to the same building to write Burial Rites, the haunting story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last woman executed in Iceland.

The novel will go on to launch the author's stellar literary career and capture the hearts of readers across the globe. Always Home, Always Homesick is Hannah Kent's exquisite love letter to a land that has forged a nation of storytellers, her ode to the transcendent power of creativity, and her invitation to us all to join her in the realms of mystery, spirit and wonder.

Fierceland by Omar Musa

Fiction, Winner of the 2026 Miles Franklin Literary Award

After many years abroad, Roz and Harun return to Malaysian Borneo for the funeral of their father Yusuf - and to reckon with their inheritance. A renowned palm-oil baron during Malaysia's economic rise, Yusuf built the family's immense wealth by destroying huge tracts of rainforest. What his children know is that he was also responsible for the violent disappearance of a man who stood in his way.

Harun has become a successful tech entrepreneur in Los Angeles, Roz is an artist struggling to stay afloat in Sydney. Now they want to return something their father stole from the forests of their homeland. In their quest for redemption they grapple with the legacy of power and corruption, dreamers and exiles, thugs and zealots. Most dangerous of all, they are haunted - by the ghosts of colonialism, the ghosts of family, the ghosts of language, and the ghosts of the forest itself.

Mean Streak by Rick Morton

Politics & Current Affairs, Winner of the 2025 Australian Political Book of the Year Award, the 2025 Walkley Award, and the 2025 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Non-Fiction

Robodebt was the automated debt recovery system, in which close to half a million Australian welfare recipients were illegally pursued over false debts. It was described by the Royal Commission's report as a "massive failure of public administration" caused by "venality, incompetence and cowardice". Essentially, Australia was gaslit by its own government. From ministers to public servants - they backed something that was illegal, just to shake down innocent people for money, then they lied about it for four and a half years.

In the tradition of Chloe Hooper (The Tall Man) and Helen Garner (This House of Grief and Joe Cinque's Consolation), Rick Morton tells a powerful and emotionally compelling story of one of the most shocking, large-scale failures of the Australian government, a historic and appalling political tragedy, which clearly displayed the wide-reaching and systematic contempt that a government had for its most vulnerable citizens.

The saga of robodebt tells us deeply disturbing things about the country we are, the people we are, the bureaucrats we have (both good and bad) and the government that was. This is a powerfully moving, deeply compelling cautionary tale of morality in public life gone badly awry.

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

Fantasy, Winner of the 2025 Hugo Award

A peculiar crime. A brilliant investigator. A mystery of epic proportions. In an opulent mansion at the borders of the Empire, an Imperial officer lies dead - killed when a tree spontaneously erupted from his body. Even here, where contagions abound and the blood of the Leviathans works strange magical changes, it's a death at once terrifying and impossible. Called in to solve the crime is Ana Dolabra, an investigator whose reputation for brilliance is matched only by her eccentricity. At her side is her new assistant, Dinios Kol, an engraver, magically altered to possess a perfect memory. Soon, the mystery leads to a scheme that threatens the safety of the Empire itself. For Ana, all this makes for a deliciously thorny puzzle - at last, something to truly hold her attention. And Din? He'll just have to hold on for the ride.

Dusk by Robbie Arnott

Historical Fiction, Winner of the 2025 Historical Novel Prize for Fiction and 2025 BookPeople Fiction Book of the Year

In the distant highlands, a puma named Dusk is killing shepherds. Down in the lowlands, twins Iris and Floyd are out of work, money and friends. When they hear that a bounty has been placed on Dusk, they reluctantly decide to join the hunt. As they journey up into this wild, haunted country, they discover there's far more to the land and people of the highlands than they imagined. And as they close in on their prey, they're forced to reckon with conflicts both ancient and deeply personal.

The Creeper by Margaret Hickey

Crime Thriller, Winner of the 2025 Ned Kelly Award for Best Fiction

Victim ... or killer? For the last decade, the small mountain town of Edenville in Victoria's high country has been haunted by the horrific murders of five hikers up on Jagged Ridge. Also found dead near the scene was Bill 'Creeper' Durant, a bushland loner, expert deer-hunter, and a man with a known reputation for stalking campers.

Conclusion- murder-suicide. Case closed. But as the ten-year anniversary of the massacre draws near, Detective Constable Sally White - the only officer at Edenville's modest police station - finds herself drawn into the dark world of the notorious Durant family. Lex Durant, in particular, has started to publicly protest his brother's innocence and accuse the police of persecution. As Sally combs the investigation to prove him wrong, it becomes all too clear that each murdered hiker had skeletons in their closet - and possible enemies in their past . . .