Judith Beveridge

There have been some impressive books of poetry published this year, but I will single out amphora by joanne burns (Giramondo Publishing, 9/11) for its delight in language and for the way the poems throw a strange and compelling light on many subjects. burns’s mode is joyful, playful, and hilariously iconoclastic.

Michelle Cahill’s Vishvarupa (Five Islands Press) is highly textured, rich, and elegant. The way the imagery and tone negotiate subtle changes of mood and feeling is most persuasive.

Luke Davies, with Interferon Psalms (Allen & Unwin), has extended his already impressive range and delivered a rapturous book about pain, love, mortality, and reverence.

Mark Tredinnick’s Fire Diary (Puncher & Wattmann, 9/11) is a lively, dialogic investigation, not only of landscape and things of nature, but also of ways of seeing and perceiving. A book rich with sure-footed and inventive metaphors.

Carmel Bird

Margaret Atwood’s In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (Virago), a collection of essays, explores complex relationships between mainstream fiction, myth, science fiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy. I always love what Atwood says about writing.

I admired the structure of Fiona Harari’s A Tragedy in Two Acts: Marcus Einfeld and Teresa Brennan (Victory), a non-fiction account of the repercussions of a lie following Justice Einfeld’s fiction that he wasn’t driving his car when it was clocked for speeding. A series of unlikely checks by journalists revealed the truth. The book is exquisitely suspenseful.

In Kehua! (Atlantic: Corvos), Fay Weldon discusses the construction of the novel as she goes along, telling generational narratives and introducing the wandering dead who haunt their descendants. Brilliant, classic Weldon.

Geoffrey Blainey

I commend two of this year’s books which, so far, I have not heard discussed. One is Burke & Wills: The Scientific Legacy of the Victorian Exploring Edition (CSIRO Publishing), a most scholarly book edited by E.B. Joyce and D.A. McCann. It is fascinating; nearly all experts have said that they left no scientific legacy, but this book shows how much the explorers and their team discovered.

The other work is Ted Hopkins’s The Stats Revolution: The Life, Loves and Passion of Football’s Futurist (Slattery Media). Hopkins, the former Carlton player, has revolutionised the keeping of statistics in Aussie Rules, and in some ways he has helped to change the game and especially the way it is discussed on television and radio. He writes with clarity and a sense of fun.

Alison Broinowski

Julian Assange presumably doesn’t think Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography (Text) is the best book of 2011. Hastily and glitchily edited, it ends abruptly after his Swedish adventures and his contretemps with the Guardian; but with surprising erudition and modesty it counterbalances other accounts, sticks needles into the mainstream media dummy, and reveals the rising cost of our national security mindset.

Why Aravind Adiga’s third book, Last Man in Tower (Random House), has been less admired than his first, The White Tiger (Atlantic Books), I don’t know. With his characteristic witty tolerance, he traces the downward moral spiral of middle-class people of various faiths who share an apartment block doomed for ‘redevelopment’. Their vicious treatment of a presumptive messiah in their midst recalls Patrick White, as does Adiga’s ear for demotic speech. It’s funnier than it sounds.

Sophie Cunningham

It has been a good year for Australian books. The ones I have been most taken with are Anna Funder’s All That I Am (Hamish Hamilton, 10/11), and Charlotte Wood’s Animal People (Allen & Unwin, 12/11). All That I Am renders Nazi Germany’s reach across borders during the 1930s. It is gripping, complex, political, and moving. Animal People is simple in its conceit: one hot difficult day in the life of Stephen, who dwells in Sydney’s western suburbs. The novel, closely observed and finely wrought, builds slowly to a powerful conclusion.

Elsewhere, China Miéville’s Embassytown (Del Ray Books) is a novel about linguistics set in the distant future. It made me work harder than most novels do without ever feeling overwrought. It is both compelling and intelligent.

Ian Donaldson

The most inspiring books of the past year, both in their content and in the circumstances of their composition, are, for me, The Memory Chalet (William Heinemann, 3/11) and Ill Fares the Land (Allen Lane, 3/11), both by the late Tony Judt. Struck down by a neuromuscular disorder that left his mind remarkably clear but his body almost totally dysfunctional, Judt found consolation in his ability, night after night, to review and order his memories about the postwar world in which he grew up, and his convictions about the social needs of the world in which he lay dying. Both books are lucid, eloquent, wholly without self-pity, driven by a quiet sense of urgency and composure.

Mark McKenna’s An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark (Miegunyah Press, 12/11) was for me the outstanding biography of the past year; superbly researched, thoughtfully judged, and compulsively readable.

Gillian Dooley

A winner and a runner-up from last year’s Adelaide Festival Award for Best Unpublished Manuscript top my list of the best books of the year. The winner was Amy T. Matthews’s End of the Night Girl (Wakefield Press), a novel of ideas that combines compulsive readability with a profound interrogation of the ethical perils of making fiction from history. The runner-up, Prohibited Zone, by Alastair Sarre(Wakefield Press), is an intelligent thriller set in South Australia, with events at the Woomera Detention Centre propelling the plot.

Spoiled for choice, I’ll plump for two more novels that contain echoes of earlier worlds but that are absolutely themselves: Elisabeth Holdsworth’s Those Who Come After (Picador, 4/11), a family story of decay and resilience reaching back to the Netherlands during World War II, and Gail Jones’s magnificent Five Bells (Vintage, 2/11), written in homage to Slessor’s poem, but creating something quite new in the process.

Andrea Goldsmith

This year I discovered the American novelist Ethan Canin. His America America (Bloomsbury, 2008) is a big novel of 1970s America that ventures into politics, patronage, family, ambition. Unputdownable. For Kings and Planets (Random, 2010, rereleased) is an insightful novel of an Ohio youth who comes to New York’s Columbia University and finds himself in thrall to a sophisticated contemporary.

The modern historian Tony Judt, author of the magisterial Postwar (2005), died last year, aged sixty-two. In Ill Fares the Land, he explores materialism and self-interest, what we have lost and what to do about it, in an approach that is deft and uncompromising yet never hectoring. His posthumous book, The Memory Chalet, is a remarkable memoir from a dying man; it’s a life rendered in short, neon-lit episodes.

Kristin Henry’s new volume of poetry, Atheist in the Foxhole (Apricot Tree Press) is a cracker. The poems are lucid, wry, sad, surprising, illuminating; they pull back the curtains on the ordinary – a heat wave, on being left-handed, dancing in the kitchen – and reveal it to be extraordinary.

Kerryn Goldsworthy

The publication of Frank Moorhouse’s Cold Light is one of the literary events of the year, completing the ‘Edith trilogy’ with the further adventures of the much-loved and much-admired heroine Edith Campbell Berry, a sweeping portrait of postwar Australia, and some wonderful writing about Canberra.

The exceptional talents of Wayne Macauley are demonstrated in his novel The Cook (Text, 10/11), a black satire on late capitalism, foodie excesses, and reality television. Its brilliantly conceived and sustained narrator–hero is as crazy as a bag of ferrets, a simile I have stolen from Nigerian New Yorker and professional historian Teju Cole’s début novel, Open City (Random House), a wonderfully original meditation on urban life with a philosophical and frankly intellectual narrator.

P.M. Newton’s The Old School (Penguin) is a début crime novel by a former police detective – the P. stands for Pamela – whose detailed and insightful characterisation anchors a story told with subtlety, fluency, humour, and insider knowledge.

Rodney Hall

For me the year’s highlights have been two reissued Australian books: Shirley Hazzard’s People in Glass Houses (Picador) and Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children (Miegunyah Modern Library, 10/11). The eight short stories in People in Glass Houses amount to an exposure of the bureaucratic dinosaur that is the United Nations. Shirley Hazzard, having worked for the organisation, knows it from the inside. What she tells is devastating. With typically restrained style and measured wit she lays out each scenario with penetrating insight. Beneath her anger lies grief at the failures of a visionary concept.

As for The Man Who Loved Children,what praise could possibly do justice to this cataract of language? It is among the half dozen greatest novels ever written by an Australian. Sam and Henny Pollitt leap off the page, bursting with electric energy in their ceaseless and appalling war – all seen through the eyes of Louie, their vulnerable, desperate, understanding eldest daughter; Henny, with her tirades, her passionate prejudices, and the world of grotesques in which she lives; and Sam, bag-full of scientific facts and health advice, with his equally appalling groundedness. Pollitts, large and small, swarm and seethe with the energy of one of the great families in literature and demand of the reader an invigorating imaginative workout. All credit to Melbourne University Press, through the Miegunyah imprint, for bringing three Stead novels back into print. I’m daring to hope that they may soon reissue her other great masterpiece, House of All Nations.

Paul Hetherington

In recent years, New and Selected Poems have proliferated in Australia. One of the best is Jennifer Harrison’s Colombine: New and Selected Poems (Black Pepper, 2/11), which I have been reading with great pleasure. It demonstrates a fine capacity for registering sensuous life while taking the reader on a variety of compelling intellectual and imaginative journeys.

The poems in Claire Potter’s Swallow (Five Islands Press) demonstrate a fastidious and nuanced attention to language, and engage subtly with experience. This is poetry as a kind of meditative questing.

Alex Miller’s novel Autumn Laing (Allen & Unwin, 10/11) is a tour de force, presenting a complex, humane view of personal and family intimacy and the sometimes harrowing resonances and implications of memory.

Francesca Rendle-Short’s Bite Your Tongue (Spinifex), a thoroughly engaging and original combination of fiction and personal memoir, takes the reader into the world of an Australian morals campaigner and book burner in the 1960s and 1970s. It is also a tender, unflinching, and sometimes quixotic family story.

Gail Jones

Two début volumes from young writers have made a big impression on me. Fiona Wright’s Knuckled (Giramondo) is a feisty, stringent, clever book of poems, wry in its observations and precociously wise. Ranging from Colombo to Western Sydney, from the ‘spongiform’ tenderness of language to the hard forms of our ‘bruising’, into the areas of the city in which a Torture Rehabilitation Clinic sits next door to a delicatessen, these are finely audacious and significant achievements. It’s one of the best poetry débuts I’ve seen in years.

Felicity Castagna’s Small Indiscretions (Transit Lounge) is a collection of stories about travelling in Asia. Each deals with the complicated alienations and intimacies of travel. The stories are sophisticated, intelligent, and strikingly original. No tourist posters here: the experiences are more often sorrowful and lost.

Last: a recent English translation of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (Harvill Secker) reanimates the text with new sparks of energy.

Jacqueline Kent

Maria Tumarkin’s Otherland: A Journey with My Daughter (Random House, 5/10) is a multilayered account of the author’s return to the former Soviet Union with her teenage daughter. It allows Tumarkin to examine issues of belonging and expectation, as well as the nature of history. Otherland is also an appealing meditation on the treachery of memory and the seductive dangers of nostalgia.

My next choice is Steven Carroll’s Spirit of Progress (Fourth Estate, 9/11). I have always admired Carroll’s capacity to deal with serious issues through the lives of his warm and appealing characters, as well as his treatment of time: his use of the present tense is masterly. This is a prequel to his three ‘Glenroy’ novels, and I think the most evocative of them all.

Essentially describing how apparently banal events in the past, culminating in the narrator’s one angry, spiteful action, can reverberate for the rest of a life, or lives, Julian Barnes in The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape) manages to cover an enormous amount of territory in only 150 pages. It is a novel that stays with you long afterwards.

John Kinsella

UQP maintains its place as one of the most significant publishers of poetry in Australia with vital new collections by poets such as Ali Alizadeh (Ashes in the Air, 4/11) and Jaya Savige (Surface to Air, 11/11), and the exciting anthology Thirty Australian Poets (12/11), edited by Felicity Plunkett (UQP’s poetry editor).

Louis Armand’s Letters from Ausland (Vagabond Press) is an intellectual and linguistic tour de force, a push to investigate the instabilities of perception between ‘art’ and language, how poetically to ‘convey’ slippage between different cultural registers.

Gig Ryan’s superbly selected and tightly edited New and Selected Poems (Giramondo, 12/11) acts as a commentary not only on a generational period in Australian poetry, but also on how a highly individual voice has cut across the divisions, doing its own thing while having communal subtexts, forging a poetry that probes the breakdowns between what is said and what is.

Of the many exciting volumes of poetry I have come across from outside Australia over the year, Matthew Cooperman’s constructively innovative Still: Of the Earth as the Ark Which Does Not Move (Counterpath Press) is a cleverly designed book full of political and ecological passion and fury.

James Ley

Suzanne Falkiner’s The Imago: E.L. Grant Watson & Australia (UWA Publishing) is the kind of absorbing literary biography that creates interest in its subject, whether you have heard of him or not. The novels of Elliot Lovegood Grant Watson are not widely known, but his fictional treatment of the Australian landscape and Aboriginal culture was ahead of its time. As Falkiner’s excellent book demonstrates, the progress of Grant Watson’s life and thought reflects some of the major intellectual currents of the early twentieth century. He is surely the only person ever to have gone on anthropological expeditions with Daisy Bates and to have hung out with Gertrude Stein.

The two Australian novels that I think have earned a plug are Wayne Macauley’s The Cook and Jennifer Mills’s Gone (UQP, 4/11). The former is a gruesome satire of modern consumerism, written with an impish spirit and a blacker-than-black sense of humour. The latter is a beautifully paced road novel, a meditation on the meaning of home and family that is notable for its simmering psychological tension and the deft way Mills handles the evocative symbolism of her tale. Both are well worth checking out.

Patrick McCaughey

Two exhibition catalogues dominated my Australian landscape this year. Deborah Hart’s Fred Williams: Infinite Horizons (National Gallery of Australia, 10/11) went well beyond documenting her superb retrospective: it offers an original and fresh account of an artist with whom we are still coming to grips. Likewise, Christian Witt-Dörringand Paul Asenbaum’s Vienna: Art and Design (National Gallery of Victoria, 7/11) makes a significant contribution to a well-explored and documented subject. Australian art museum catalogues now rank equally with those produced by the major museums of America and Europe – a great tribute to them.

Tim Bonyhady’s Good Living Street: The Fortunes of My Viennese Family (Allen & Unwin, 6/11) made for perfect cognate reading with Melbourne’s superb Vienna exhibition. In a clear and crisp narrative, Bonyhady threads family history with art history, both well attuned to social and political history – much better than Edmund de Waal’s over-praised The Hare with the Amber Eyes (Vintage, 6/11).

Brian McFarlane

In a year of rich pickings, including lush re-readings of Cloudstreet and A House and Its Head, and coming late to notable works such as Hazel Rowley’s Christina Stead and Lionel Shriver’s chilling We Need to Talk about Kevin, new works have had to fight for their place in my personal canon. Steven Carroll’s poetic evocation of place and period, Spirit of Progress, prequel to his wonderful ‘Glenroy trilogy’, may well stay with me longest, since it chronicles how people stay together or move apart and charts the associations of a moment. Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (Fourth Estate, 12/10), despite having more detail about bird-watching than I really needed, reads almost like an enthralling biography of the new century’s first decade; Hazel Rowley’s Franklin and Eleanor (Melbourne University Press) charts a very complex partnership with sympathy and precision; and Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending is as eloquent and elegant an account of fraying friendships as one could ask for (as well as being a stylish publication).

Michael Morley

The two books from 2011 that I have found myself returning to repeatedly are both portraits of the writer at work: Stephen Sondheim’s dialogue with himself and his lyrics, Finishing the Hat (Virgin Books, 5/11); and the poet Don Paterson’s sparkling and idiosyncratic Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Commentary (Faber). The subtitle is, perhaps, a misnomer, as Paterson’s approach invites the reader to understand these poems through seeing and hearing them.

The best novel I read all year was Paul Harding’s Tinkers (Windmill), which I somehow missed when it won the Pulitzer in 2009. It packs more poetry, voices, and fragmented family histories into its 190 pages than most novels three times its length.

Most diverting and droll? Undoubtedly the personal catalogue of film failures, dramatic duds, and egregious errors of editorial judgement from the greatest German poet of his generation: Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Meine Lieblings-Flops (My Favourite Flops) – English version due from Seagull Books in the New Year.

Brenda Niall

For months I resisted reading Manning Clark: An Eye for Eternity. Too big, I thought; and, anyway, I knew the story well enough. I was wrong. Imaginatively shaped, perceptive, and generous, Mark McKenna’s biography absorbed me. ‘Don’t do it, Dymphna’, I found myself saying as I read her hesitations about marrying Manning. Self-centred and demanding, using his vulnerability as shield and weapon, Manning complained ceaselessly about his wife’s shortcomings while claiming total emotional, intellectual, and practical support. McKenna shows why the marriage endured, and why, in spite of its massive, demonstrable shortcomings, we still value the six-volume History of Australia.

After McKenna’s 800 pages, I turned to Julian Barnes’s Jamesian novella, The Sense of an Ending. Short but not slight, it carries emotional weight. Friends and lovers give up on the dull, mildly bewildered narrator, whose unlived life Barnes examines, subtly, gently, and relentlessly.

John Rickard

Two books by distinguished Australian historians were rewarding reading in 2011. Jim Davidson’s handsome A Three-Cornered Life: The Historian W.K. Hancock (UNSW Press, 7/10) is a masterly account of the life of an eminent Australian historian whose extraordinary, wide-ranging career was part of a British Empire story of which we have lost sight.

On the other hand, David Walker’s Not Dark Yet: A Personal History (Giramondo, 4/11) embraces memoir, autobiography, and family history in a way that forms ‘a personal history’ which is both moving and entertaining.

Because I am a fan of Colm Tóibín, I was drawn to his collection of essays, All a Novelist Needs: Colm Tóibín on Henry James (Johns Hopkins University Press). Here we experience a gifted novelist reflecting on not just the works of the ‘master’, Henry James, but on the process of writing itself.

Peter Stothard

The Editor of the Times Literary Supplement is often asked to justify our choice of published poems. Why him? Why that one? Why not one of mine? A quick answer is not always easy to give, but, after the publication this year of John Fuller’s Who Is Ozymandias? And Other Puzzles in Poetry (Chatto & Windus), there is a book we can recommend that explains, delicately and clearly, some of the ways in which poems can be distinguished from non-poems. For this great convenience alone, this is my Book of the Year, closely followed by Miriam Griffin and Brad Inwood’s edition of Seneca’s On Benefits (University of Chicago Press), a 2000-year-old book on how to give and receive gifts in politics, a topical subject for our times as well as its own.

Eugene von Guérard: Nature Revealed (National Gallery of Victoria, 6/11), Ruth Pullin’s account of the failed Australian gold-prospector who became a famed Australian painter, was an intellectual as well as artistic revelation when it arrived in London this summer.

John Tranter

Gig Ryan has been a sharp, radical voice in Australian poetry for more than thirty years, and poetry editor at The Age since 1998. She writes obliquely and intensely about sex, drugs, and rock and roll (and lots of other things), her cruelly frank tales swirling around in an acid-bath of crushed similes and fragmented images. In the background, the heroes and heroines of classical mythology glow with an unearthly light as they move closer and become frighteningly human. New and Selected Poems, her eighth book of poems, includes the best from seven previous volumes as well as twenty-seven new pieces. I typeset and published her first collection thirty years ago, and it’s good to hear this young, startling voice presented again to a new audience.

I also enjoyed Dany Chouet’s So French: A Lifetime in the Provincial Kitchen (Murdoch Books), Duncan McNab’s Mission 101: Australians at War in Ethiopia (Macmillan Australia), and Ken Bolton’s Sly Mongoose (Puncher & Wattmann).