A savage, violent howl of a book by one of Mexico’s most exciting writers, Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season explores the deep misogyny and femicide of her country. The murder of the town “witch” is the book’s tragic centre, around which swirls streams of brutal, mesmerising, illuminating prose, each chapter told from the perspective of a different but always unreliable narrator. Shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, Hurricane Season is both a dark celebration of language and a powerful insight into a world of poverty, brutality and gore.

Chaired by Clare Wright

Gifted youngster Lawrence enjoys an idyllic childhood in regional Victoria, where he lives with his widowed mother and young brother at the foot of the Grampians. After taking his first painting class, he dives obsessively into an exhilarating world of light, colour and art, and thrives. But his world is shattered by the arrival of an interloper, and a devastating incident that follows. Sofie Laguna’s extraordinary and compassionate new book, Infinite Splendours, is a luminous and heartbreaking meditation on art, trauma, and innocence lost.

Chaired by Linda Jaivin

In Patrick Allington’s Rise & Shine, an environmental apocalypse has wiped out most of the population. Those that survive are nourished – literally – by the consumption of violent footage from the perpetual war waged between the two city-states of Rise and Shine. In Dennis Glover’s Factory 19, a Walshian figure leads a willing cohort back to the future to an enclave in Tasmania, where they search for happiness in an industrialised past. Both books offer surreal and darkly satirical takes on leadership, humanity and the common good.

Chaired by Geordie Williamson

What inner strength is required when your working day is filled with injury, death and despair? Rachael Mead and Benjamin Gilmour can tell us. In The Application of Pressure, novelist Rachael Mead introduces us to paramedics Tash and Joel as they traverse the streets of Adelaide in their ambulance, saving lives and lost souls. Benjamin Gilmour documents his own experience as a paramedic on the frontline, first at infamous Sydney suicide spot The Gap: A Paramedic’s Summer on the Edge, and then further afield in Paramedico: Around the World by Ambulance.

Chaired by Victoria Purman

Can works of fiction inform us more effectively than non-fiction? Chris Flynn and Laura Elvery’s audacious works illuminate history and offer critiques of today. Chris’s fantastical novel Mammoth is narrated by the fossilised remains of a 13,000 year old wise-cracking mammoth. Each of the twenty short stories in Laura Elvery’s collection Ordinary Matter is inspired by a Nobel Prize-winning female scientist. With their lateral approach to history, these unlikely starting points have resulted in richly rewarding and wildly imaginative outcomes.

Chaired by Danielle Clode

Does Australia have a problem with rent-seekers, well-connected insiders who have their snouts firmly in the public trough, enriching themselves and their mates at the expense of the rest of us? Why is it that the majority of our Rich-Listers accrued their wealth from favourable treatment in heavily regulated industries? The Australia Institute’s Chief Economist Richard Denniss, co-author of Games of Mates (with Paul Frijters), Cameron Murray and Marian Wilkinson (The Carbon Club) examine the cosy club of political insiders and this particularly Australian way to make money.

Chaired by Michael West

When Danielle Clode set out to research In Search of the Woman Who Sailed the World, about the first woman to circumnavigate the earth, she discovered scant details of an impoverished French peasant who embarked on her voyage disguised as a man. Judith Hoare’s The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code is the overdue account of Australian Dr Claire Weekes, whose pioneering work on anxiety and depression still forms the basis of much contemporary treatment. Danielle and Judith reflect on these groundbreaking but overlooked women, and why women are written out of history.

Chaired by Collette Snowden

Updated to include contemporary events of 2020, Andrew Fowler’s account of Julian Assange’s rise and fall is a damning indictment of the lengths to which Western Governments will go to keep their secrets. As Assange languishes in London’s maximum security Belmarsh prison, in The Most Dangerous Man in the World: Julian Assange and Wikileaks’ Fight for Freedom, Andrew documents how a computer hacker with a turbulent childhood became a journalist and America’s Public Enemy No 1, facing up to 175 years in prison for revealing the truth about the business of Government.

Chaired by Rebecca Huntley

Misogyny is the “law enforcement arm of patriarchy” that polices and punishes “bad women” who threaten male dominance, argues philosopher Kate Manne in Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women then outlined the illegitimate sense of entitlement that enables men to grasp power and authority for themselves, and demand emotional and physical care from women. Described as “the Simone de Beauvoir of the 21st Century”, Kate offers a radical new framework through which to understand misogyny.

Chaired by Clare Wright

Described by Noel Pearson as “the most outstanding Aboriginal leader of the contemporary era”, Lowitja O’Donoghue navigated an early life of loss, racism and servitude to become the first Chair of Australia’s best attempt to facilitate self-determination for its Indigenous peoples, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. She was a lead negotiator on the Native Title Act with Paul Keating, who later called her a “leader with an unfailing instinct for enlargement”. Stuart Rintoul’s impressive, authorised biography of this important Australian leader is informed by meticulous research and a strong personal relationship with his subject.

Chaired by Simone Tur