The China Garden by Kristina Olsson (UQP) is the winner of this year's Barbara Jefferis Award.
The award, administered by the Australian Society of Authors (ASA), is for ‘the best novel written by an Australian author that depicts women and girls in a positive way or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in society'.
Judges Susan Martin, Gina Mercer and Elizabeth Webby said that ‘unusually for a story about relinquishment and adoption, this fine novel deals with the impact on the mother and her remaining child, rather than her lost one'.
‘It delicately unfolds the ways in which Angela has made a life as a painter in a small coastal community, and has helped, and been healed by, those around her. The title refers to Angela's garden and its broken pieces of china. This evocative image suggests that beauty can be created from what is broken and apparently irretrievable, but also the danger and sharpness of buried secrets. Kristina Olsson traces different possibilities of mothering, in Angela's mutually enriching friendship with a young man, Kieran, in Kieran's relationship with his grandmother, Cress, and in Cress's tentative friendship with Angela's daughter. Without feeling the need to resolve every absence or mystery, Olsson gently suggests that it is always possible to make new things out of the past, however fractured or painful.'
Valued at $35,000, the Barbara Jefferis Award was established in 2007 by the ASA and made possible by a bequest from the film critic John Hinde, to commemorate his wife.
Last year's winning title was The Spare Room by Helen Garner.
The China Garden has also been shortlisted in this year's Australian Publishers Association Book Design Awards in the ‘best designed literary fiction book' category.
