Updated ,first published
Almost four years ago, Charlotte McConaghy embarked on a two-week journey to one of the world’s most remote places with her young son and a troubled manuscript.
The risk was high: the journey to Macquarie Island – a windswept stretch of land between Tasmania and Antarctica, accessible only by an arduous journey once a year – would make or break his novel.
“I thought, OK, I have to do this. This is my one shot to make this book work. And if this doesn’t work, then nothing will,” McConaghy, 37, said.
When he finally arrived, the island felt almost unreal: black mud beaches strewn with bleached whale bones, penguins frolicking in the waves, giant elephant seal pups tugging at their boots, while thousands of seabirds created a deafening wall of sound.
“It was a very strange thing. It was unlike any place I knew existed anymore. This abundance of native wildlife that had not yet learned to fear humans. It was like entering a dream.”
On Thursday night, his gamble continued to pay off Wild Dark Coast was named non-fiction book of the year at the 2026 Australian Book Industry Awards.
McConaghy’s third novel has become one of Australia’s biggest recent publishing success stories, shifting an estimated 35,000 copies domestically in 2025. It won the Indie Book Awards and was named Dymocks book of the year, while also landing. New York Times bestseller list and get 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 Coast follows the existence of a lonely family in the shadow of a climate collapse – and the arrival of a mysterious woman who washes up on the beach after a shipwreck.
Considered the night of the night for the Australian book industry, the awards recognize the complete journey of a successful book – considering 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, and I was once a Giant and Zeno Sworder – about a giant tree turned into a pencil that tells the story of its life – claimed overall book of the year and children’s picture book of the year for zero to six years.
Elsewhere, Sally Hepworth scooped two awards for her sensational comic sales. Crazy Mabelwhich won the overall fiction and audiobook categories. Geraldine Brooks won profile of the year Memorial days, her memoir about grief after the sudden death of her husband, writer Tony Horwitz, in 2019.
Another most talked about book this year, Mushroom Tapes – assembled in haste after the Erin Patterson mushroom murder trial and bringing together three of Australia’s leading non-fiction writers in Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein – claimed the overall non-fiction prize.
The new author award went to Angie Faye Martin for debut Melaleucaa crime novel following an Indigenous policeman returning to the rural town of his childhood.
The second collection of the poet Evelyn Araluen Decay it was named the small publisher’s adult book of the year. The win comes after Araluen said he would no longer work with his publisher, University of Queensland Press, following controversy over his decision to pull out a children’s book earlier this year.
The international award went to the novel Dear Heart and Lily King, a decades-long love triangle that was beloved by online reading communities.
As for McConaghy, the island that helped change Wild Dark Coast it’s still great. The author said she hoped to return one day with her two children – Finn, 4, and Hazel, 2 – when they were older.
Until then, he is about 30,000 words into his fourth novel, and screen adaptations of his first two are underway. Another research trip will be involved – although this one seems very unlikely – when McConaghy travels to England in July.
“It feels so long ago now,” he says of his trip to the island. “I’m ready to go back to the field research stage where I’m going to be in the beautiful wild places.”
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Melanie Cambrey is National Books Editor at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect through X or email address.
