Diana Reid’s Love & Virtue wins book of the year and literary fiction category at Australian Book Industry Association’s annual awards in Sydney

on Jun 10, 2022

The 2022 Australian Book Industry Association (Abia) annual awards were dominated by nations first writers and female authors, with a debut work by one of the country's most promising young writers collecting top honours.

Diana Reid's Love & Virtue was named Abia book of the year and literary fiction book of the year at an event in Sydney. The novel was lauded by the judges as "a darkly comic yet uncompromising look of early adulthood." Zoya Patel commended Love & Virtue in her Guardian Australia review, calling it "a multifaceted page-turner on power, unrequited love, and campus rape culture wrapped in a coming-of-age narrative."

Reid's first novel was written in response to the 2021 Covid-19 shutdown. It has already received the MUD literary prize and been nominated for Indie Book and Booksellers' Choice awards.

"It's been the most crazy trip from this word document on my desktop, which I was sort of embarrassed about," Reid remarked as she accepted her prize on Thursday night.

Love & Virtue was one of the first books published by Ultimo Press, an independent company founded during the Covid lockdown in 2020. "They hadn't released anything yet when they bought my book," Reid stated in her speech. "They were just getting started, and it's been an incredible joy to be such an important part of their path."

Reid told Kate Prendergast last year that the pandemic had thwarted her ambitions to present 1984! The Musical!, the musical she co-wrote and produced, to the Edinburgh Fringe. She had just finished her studies at Sydney University and had no job or money.

"I might not have picked it up if it hadn't been for Covid," she said. "I had no idea it would be published. I was just composing it to pass the time. I believe there is a sense of liberation in not expecting anyone to read it."

The Abias are assessed by over 250 book industry professionals and recognise success in Australian writing, publishing, and bookselling.

Former AFL legend Adam Goodes was awarded a co-winner in the category of Children's Picture Book of the Year for Somebody's Land: Welcome to Our Country, co-written with Ellie Laing and illustrated by David Hardy.

Along with Goodes, Bundjalung writer Evelyn Araluen and her poetry work Dropbear earned the adult book of the year prize from small publishers. Corey Tutt, a former NSW young Australian of the year and Kamilaroi man, won the book of the year category for readers aged 7 to 12 with First Scientists: Deadly Inventions and Innovations from Australia's First Peoples.

Women writers swept key categories, with Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz receiving general fiction book of the year and She's on the Money by financial podcaster Victoria Devine winning general non-fiction book of the year.

Amani Haydar was chosen new writer of the year for her heartbreaking study of her father's murder of her mother, The Mother Wound.

Lynette Noni won the 13+ category for The Prison Healer in children's literature, while Nova Weetman received small publishers' children's book of the year for The Edge of Thirteen.