The winners of the 1987 National Book Council Awards for Australian Literature, judged by Margaret Whitlam, John Bryson and D. J. O’Hearn, are Alan Wearne’s The Nightmarkets and Robert Drewe’s Fortune. Here is the Judges’ Report.

It is customary to begin Judges’ Reports by discussing the difficulty with which the judges reached their final decision. In the case of the 1987 National Book Council Awards for Australian Literature these difficulties are best illustrated by the fact that the judges’ final decisions could not be described as unanimous. While the final choices were made without heat or acrimony, it is quite true that the judges experienced the gravest difficulty in achieving their shortlist of six from the 84 titles submitted.

Even then four books, each of which was worthy of a place on the shortlist, were highly commended by the judges. These were Chester Eagle’s Play Together Dark Blue Twenty (McPhee Gribble), Rod Jones’ Julia Paradise (McPhee Gribble), Patrick O’Farrell’s The Irish in Australia (NSW University Press) and Fay Zwicky’s The Lyre in the Pawnshop (University of WA Press).

There were other books reluctantly eliminated for various reasons from the judges’ final consideration for the shortlist. It would be invidious to name them. Some comments on highly commended books were: