Nearly four years ago, Charlotte McConaghy embarked on a two-week voyage to one of the most remote places on earth with her toddler and a troubled manuscript.
The stakes were high: the trip to Macquarie Island – a windswept sliver of land halfway between Tasmania and Antarctica, accessible only by a gruelling once-a-year journey – would either make or break her novel.
“I thought, all right, I have to do this. This is my one shot to make this book work. And if this doesn’t make it work, then nothing will,” McConaghy, 37, said.
When she finally arrived, the island felt almost unreal: dark silty shores littered with bleached whale bones, penguins bobbing through the surf, huge elephant seal pups nibbling at her boots, while thousands of seabirds created a deafening wall of sound.
“It was just extraordinary. It’s unlike anywhere that I knew existed any more. This abundance of natural wildlife that hadn’t yet learnt to fear humans. It was like stepping into a dream.”
On Thursday night, her gamble continued to pay off as Wild Dark Shore was named the literary fiction book of the year at the 2026 Australian Book Industry Awards.
McConaghy’s third novel has become one of Australian publishing’s biggest recent success stories, shifting nearly 35,000 copies locally in 2025. It won the Indie Book Awards book of the year title and was named Dymocks’ book of the year, while also landing on The New York Times bestseller list and earning the backing of Reese Witherspoon’s behemoth book club.
Set on the fictional Shearwater Island, where a widowed father and his three children are the last caretakers of a seed bank, Wild Dark Shore follows the family’s isolated existence in the shadow of climate collapse – and the arrival of a mysterious woman who washes ashore after a shipwreck.
Considered the Australian book industry’s night of nights, the awards recognise the full journey behind a successful book – taking into account everything from editing, marketing and design to bookselling. More than 50 judges from publishing, bookstores, media and libraries selected this year’s winners, announced at a ceremony in Sydney.
Children’s literature emerged as one of the biggest success stories of the night, with Once I was a Giant by Zeno Sworder – about a giant tree transformed into a pencil that tells the story of its life – claiming both overall book of the year and children’s picture book of the year for ages zero to six.
Elsewhere, Sally Hepworth nabbed two awards for her sales-topping darkly comic thriller Mad Mabel, which won both general fiction and audiobook categories. Geraldine Brooks won biography of the year for Memorial Days, her memoir about grief after the sudden death of her husband, writer Tony Horwitz, in 2019.
Another of the year’s most talked-about books, The Mushroom Tapes – rapidly assembled after the Erin Patterson mushroom murder case and bringing together three of Australia’s leading non-fiction writers in Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein – claimed the general non-fiction prize.
The new writer award went to Angie Faye Martin for her debut Melaleuca, a crime novel following an Indigenous policewoman returning to the outback town of her childhood.
Poet Evelyn Araluen’s acclaimed second collection The Rot was named the small publisher’s adult book of the year. The win comes after Araluen said she would no longer work with her publisher, University of Queensland Press, following controversy surrounding its decision to pull a children’s book earlier this year.
The international prize went to the novel Heart the Lover by Lily King, a decades-spanning love triangle that became a favourite among online reading communities.
As for McConaghy, the island that helped transform Wild Dark Shore still looms large. The author said she hoped to return one day with her two children – Finn, 4, and Hazel, 2 – when they are older.
Until then, she’s about 30,000 words into her fourth novel, and screen adaptations of her first two are under way. Another research trip will be involved – although this one sounds considerably less arduous – when McConaghy travels to the United Kingdom in July.
“It feels a long time ago now,” she says of her island voyage. “I’m sort of ready to get back into the feet-on-the-ground research stage where I get to go and be in beautiful wild places.”
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Melanie Kembrey is National Books Editor at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via X or email.
