Don Anderson

My fiction choices are Midnight Empire, by Andrew Croome (Allen & Unwin, 11/12), a post-De Lillo geopolitical thriller set in Las Vegas, by a recent Vogel Prize winner; and Proofs (Puncher & Wattmann), by Christopher Conti: postmodern miniatures – assured, elegant, teasing.

Ian Donaldson’sBen Jonson: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2/12) is scholarly, subtle, persuasive, a biography of this great Elizabethan/Jacobean playwright and poet for our times. ‘O rare Ben Jonson’, indeed.

On the poetry home front, I was delighted by Ladylike by Kate Lilley (UWA Publishing, 6/12), conversational but never ‘coquettish’. But the real revelation was the poetry of the American Frederick Seidel (b. 1936), whose Poems 1959–2009 appeared in 2009, to be followed this year by Nice Weather (both Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Witty and tough. ‘What could be more pleasant than talking about people dying?’ Reading Seidel talking about it, that’s what. All that and his poems rhyme, edgily.

Judith Beveridge

There have been many excellent poetry books published in 2012, but it is hard to go past Rosemary Dobson’s Collected (University of Queensland Press, 7/12) and Robert Gray’s Cumulus: Collected Poems (John Leonard Press, 11/12). Dobson’s work is deeply pleasurable for its formal grace and disciplined passion. Her poems, restrained and subtle, masterfully reconcile the tensions that constitute a lifetime of love and art. In compiling his new book, Gray has significantly rewritten a number of poems. I am not convinced that all these new versions are improvements on the old, but there are so many meticulously observed and finely constructed poems that you can forgive his failure to see what his earlier work might have achieved. The best poems show that he is one of the finest poets writing today.

Glyn Maxwell’s quirky collection of essays and reflections On Poetry (Oberon Books) is a sheer pleasure, as is John Foulcher’s The Sunset Assumption (Pitt Street Poetry), for the way in which he brings Paris to the fore.

Tony Birch

Josephine Rowe’s Tarcutta Wake (University of Queensland Press, 11/12) delivered wonderful stories just a few pages in length, with each piece perfectly weighted, evoking mystery and curiosity. Rowe casts her eye on the human condition with microscopic tenderness.

With The Cove (Text Publishing), Ron Rash delivered my novel of the year. Set in North Carolina during World War I, The Cove tells the story of Laurel and Hank Shelton, a sister and brother, who take in a stranger during a time of acute suspicion. A gripping read.

Martin Amis’s Lionel Asbo: State of England (Jonathan Cape) received a mixed reception, particularly in Britain. I loved the book, because Lionel himself is such a (cartoonishly) brutal and ugly character. Those who criticised the book missed the point. It is not a critique of the lumpen working class, but a savage indictment of a consumption-at-all-costs society.

Andrea Goldsmith

Betty Churcher, in Notebooks (Miegunyah Press, 6/11), takes us on a tour of her favourite works of art – paintings by Botticelli, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Cézanne, and many others. In this richly illustrated book, Churcher shows us how to look at a painting, how to see it, really see it, and how to remember it – poignantly urgent in her case, as she was going blind when she wrote the book.

Joseph Anton (Jonathan Cape) is Salman Rushdie’s own account of the events, the friends and foes, the politicians and artists who featured during the nine-year long period of the fatwa of 1989. Rushdie is brilliant, peevish, loving, unforgiving, grateful, resentful, depressed, arrogant – and always compelling. So much kowtowing to a murderous régime and inhumane values: it is truly shocking.

Simon Mawer’s new novel, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky (Little, Brown), pitches English spy Marian Sutro into occupied France during World War II. Mawer is a master storyteller. His characters are complex, his prose elegant, his settings lightly yet vividly portrayed. I am eager to see what he does next: and you can’t say that about too many novelists writing today.

Kerryn Goldsworthy

The further back in history a novelist chooses to go, the more inaccessible are the inner lives of the subjects. But this has worked in Hilary Mantel’s favour, as the lack of personal information about Thomas Cromwell gave her room to move imaginatively. One of the many great pleasures of reading Bring up the Bodies (Fourth Estate, 6/12) is observing her adroit negotiation of these and other pitfalls. The result is a deep, dark, rich book of great sophistication and fearsome intelligence.

Sad as it was to lose her, if Ramona Koval had remained at ABC Radio National she would never had had the time to write By the Book: A Reader’s Guide to Life (Text Publishing), an irresistible study of the symbiotic relationship, for the bookish, between life and books. The subject matter ranges from the simplicities of childhood reading to the complexities of interviewing great writers. The voice is easily recognisable as the one we know from her decades in radio: generous, warm, and fearless.

Lisa Gorton

It was exciting, of course, to read Patrick White’s Happy Valley (Text, 9/12) and The Hanging Garden (Vintage, 5/12) in the same year: the first and last of his novels, one disowned and one unfinished. Though they don’t seem to belong to 2012, they did start me thinking about early- and late-career books.

Lachlan Brown’s début poetry collection, Limited Cities (Giramondo), is sparky and smart. Set for the most part in the outer suburbs and on commuter trains, it draws in an unusual amount of the world, and stays individual and surprising: ‘Who says our dreams can stretch out like a roller door / before it curls upwards and disappears into its automated self?’

I also very much admired Ian Donaldson’s Ben Jonson: A Life. This biography, which draws on a lifetime’s study, is wittily structured and everywhere alive with details.

Paul Kane

Lisa Cohen’s All We Know: Three Lives (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is a biography of three unconventional but obscure women whose lives refract modernism through the lenses of haute couture, intellectual brilliance, and deep intimacy with legendary figures. It is an extraordinary recuperation of three all-but-forgotten women.

The Italian poet Andrea Zanzotto’s enigmatic bilingual collection, Haiku for a Season (University of Chicago Press), edited by Anna Secco and Patrick Barron, was written first in English and then translated into Italian. These pseudo haikus, set in vibrant landscapes, evince a strange and captivating obliqueness.

Lisa Jacobson’s The Sunlit Zone (5 Islands Press, 7/12) deserves all its recent acclaim: a book-length poem in the grand tradition of Australian verse narratives and novels.

Finally, though published at the turn of the year, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) deserves mention, as it radically redefines our understanding of ourselves (think: Darwin, Marx, Freud, Foucault).

John Kinsella

The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett (Faber & Faber) is expertly edited by Seán Lawlor and John Pilling, and has replaced my long-cherished, much earlier Collected Poems in English and French (John Calder/Grove Press, 1977). Beckett’s translation of Rimbaud’s ‘Drunken Boat’ was a scene-changer, and ‘Cascando’ gets to the heart of the matter: ‘the churn of stale words in the heart again / love love love thud of the old plunger.’ This is where poetry started to tell me that I think, therefore I am not (necessarily).

Kate Fagan’s First Light (Giramondo) is a superbly poised volume of invigorated and freshly innovative poetry that speaks across inner and outer spaces.

Andrew Grace, to my mind, is the finest post-pastoral poet of his generation writing in the United States. His volume of cumulative and subtly narrativised ‘prose poems’ (or, maybe, a ‘prose’ stanza per page), Sancta (Ahsahta Press), is like no other. A book of arrival, disturbed meditation, and departure, of observation and loss, it tracks days by the lake with lucid and devastating insight into the errors and celebrations of the self’s relationship to another and to place, into the self’s psyche in and of the landscape.

Master poet Robert Hass’s What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World (Ecco), with its familiar tone, deeply intelligent, insightful, compassionate, and frank readings of his points of contact with the natural and constructed world, is rich reading. I am also deeply indebted to this book for learning of the work of poet Peter Dale Scott, and his remarkable poem of traumatic political exposure, ‘Coming to Jakarta’.

Geoffrey Lehmann

This year I greatly enjoyed Christopher Koch’s novel Lost Voices (Fourth Estate, 12/12), Robert Gray’s collected poems Cumulus, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (Crown Business), and Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies. Koch’s beautiful (yes, beautiful) eighth novel is set in the Tasmania of 1853 (a poetry-loving bushranger) and 1953 (a murder trial), and achieves a strangely affecting assonance between two eras within a gripping narrative structure.

Robert Gray (with whom I have co-edited three anthologies) is simply one of our best poets: a philosophical imagist with a unique, welcoming, and emotional voice.

Mantel’s extraordinary evocation of Thomas Cromwell (blamed for the death of the saintly Thomas More) is a triumphant vindication of modern secularism. Acemoglu and Robinson show why institutions are the key, but read Jared Diamond’s critique in the New York Review of Books.

James Ley

John Banville’s Ancient Light (Viking) is the third book in a trilogy that includes Eclipse and Shroud. It stands as an intricate, beautifully crafted novel in its own right, but read alongside its predecessors it becomes an even more impressive achievement: a brilliant exploration of the vagaries of memory, guilt, identity, and desire.

I also enjoyed reading Ian Donaldson’s Ben Jonson: A Life, the definitive modern biography of a fascinating character and a great writer who was fated to have his reputation eclipsed by an even greater writer. It is a superb piece of scholarship that is never less than compelling in its depiction of the vibrant culture and society of Jacobean England.

Patrick McCaughey

From the pea shooter’s gallery, may I add my encomium for Ian Donaldson’s Ben Jonson: A Life as one of the most revelatory literary biographies? Jonson’s relations with his eminent contemporaries such as Shakespeare and Donne and the complexity of his social, political, and theatrical times plus such bizarries as his Walk to Scotland are all deftly limned.

Brenda Niall’s True North: The Story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack (Text, 4/12) tactfully and candidly unfolds the life of the stalwart historian (Mary), author of Kings in Grass Castles, and her artist sister, who once adopted an Aboriginal nom de plumeand style in a brilliant essay on family, social, and pastoral history.

Permanent Revolution: Mike Brown and the Australian Avant-Garde 1953–97 (Miegunyah Press, 3/12) by Richard Haese is a most refreshing, readable, and original contribution to the literature of Australian art history and has gone under-acknowledged in the field.

David McCooey

Among the many superb poetry collections published this year, Rosemary Dobson’s Collected and Randolph Stow’s The Land’s Meaning: New Selected Poems (Fremantle Press, 9/12) summarise two important careers. The poems of Dobson (who died earlier this year, aged ninety-two) are astonishingly rich and skilful. Stow’s poetic output, while less sustained than Dobson’s, shows an epic imagination inhabiting sharply honed lyrics. John Kinsella’s long introduction to The Land’s Meaning is a major work of literary scholarship, placing Stow in a powerful new light.

In criticism, I was entirely delighted by Andrew Ford’s Try Whistling This: Writings about Music (Black Inc, 9/12). Ford is the most literate of composers; the most musical of writers. He demonstrates a seemingly endless knowledge of his field, while writing brilliant, entertaining criticism.

Finally, On Poetry, by the English poet Glyn Maxwell, is sometimes dogmatic and defensive, but it is also funny, inventive, and one of the best books about reading and writing poetry I have ever read.

Brian McFarlane

Few books gave me more pleasure this year than Peter Fitzpatrick’s The Two Frank Thrings (Monash University Publishing, 10/12), not because of any particular veneration for either Frank, but because it is a superbly executed biographical account of them. It is elegantly written, spiked with wit and insight, immaculately researched, and structured with a style and originality that enable the reader to get inside the lives of these two disparate Thrings.

The other new books I most valued were Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot (Fourth Estate), with its compelling study of relationships and literature – and a lot more; Brenda Niall’s True North, another fine biography; andPico Iyer’s tantalising and unclassifiable The Man Within My Head: Graham Greene, My Father and Me (Bloomsbury), in which the author felt chosen by the ubiquitous author, whom he never met, as mentor and father figure. Last, I reread The Mill on the Floss, one of the greatest English novels, funny as well as heartbreaking.

Alex Miller

Mark McKenna’s An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark (Miegunyah, 12/11) is a great biography of Australia’s most controversial historian. It reveals a man who never really knew whether he was storyteller or historian, and who, in writing his monumental six-volume history of Australia, created a confused and mysterious story of a mythic Australia that did not exist until he wrote it. McKenna’s biography is an epic act of the imagination that uncannily mirrors the works of its subject.

Brenda Niall

I can’t imagine a better biography of the great novelist than Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens (Viking, 3/12). Tomalin brings insight and compassion, not just to the prodigious writer, but to his unlucky family. She makes sense of the extraordinary contradictions that some biographers have dodged or muffled. Magnificently creative, generous to the world, but cruel and neglectful to his wife and children, Dickens is a demanding subject. The best and the worst of his times are brilliantly dramatised. And for once, in this often-told story, the minor figures are given room to breathe.

Tony Judt’s The Memory Chalet (William Heinemann, 3/11) is a triumph of memory and storytelling. Judt’s exploration of self and past experience, composed from within the prison of his failing body, reads more as an adventure than a struggle.

A brilliant Australian novel that has been half forgotten for more than forty years, Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watch Tower (Text Publishing, 10/12) is back in print, as powerful and painful as ever.

Peter Stothard

After reading 145 novels this year for the Man Booker Prize, I don’t have to choose our winner, Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies, for this feature. There were many other fine novels in a magnificent year for fiction. Nicola Barker’s The Yips (Fourth Estate), a story of golf, goodness, and pubic tattoos, is one that still resounds in my head now that the judging is over. Beware. As a gift it will probably suit more tattoo-wearers than golfers.

Skios by Michael Frayn (Faber & Faber), a classical satire dressed as farce, is as clever a comedy as you are likely to find on a beach.

When I fell occasionally from novels to poetry, I loved John Kinsella’s Armour (Picador) and its reflections, through the characters of Cicero and Peter Porter, on the best critical tradition of reading and reading again.

Jane Sullivan

The novel I admired the most was Richard Ford’s Canada (Bloomsbury, 7/12). I have always loved Ford’s quiet, graceful writing, but I became lost in the obsessive detail of The Lay of the Land (2006), his previous novel. Canada is also long and detailed, but feels stark and spare. A superb coming-of-age story recalled in the maturity of a teenage boy who is flung out of his home in the most bizarre circumstances to make a new and no less precarious life in a remote Canadian township, it aches with longing, regret, helplessness, menace, and a comical sense of the strangeness of things.

My favourite Australian novel was by a newcomer – well, a newcomer in 1939. A sardonic, grotesque, oddly moving ensemble piece about thwarted lives in a dismal country town, Happy Valley (republished this year) presages the later Patrick White, but is also refreshingly original and feels as contemporary as the latest bestseller.

John Tranter

Rosemary Dobson’s first book appeared in 1944; she passed away in June 2012. Her Collected reveals a lifelong search for ‘a state of grace which one once knew, or imagined, or from which one was turned away’.

Kate Lilley’s poems in Ladylike are restrained, subtle, and dry. Her confessions revel in a dazzling array of cultural and historical references, with hints of suffering redeemed.

John Ashbery is a real original. His work was seen as obscure in the 1950s, but he won fame in the mid-1970s and has by now (he is in his eighties) claimed a vast audience. The appearance of the first volume of his Collected Poems1956–1987 from the Library of America is a wonderful and rich surprise, and his recent versions of Rimbaud’s Illuminations (W.W. Norton & Company) are fresh and startling.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe

My books of the past year would certainly include the magisterial sweep of Anthony Beevor’s The Second World War (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 11/12). Like his blood-drenched Stalingrad, it does nothing to minimise the scale of a war’s casualties.

A lively piece of Australian scholarship is Tony Moore’s Dancing with Empty Pockets: Australia’s Bohemians since 1860 (Pier 9); this is a history in which our inspired larrikinism reigns supreme, thank goodness.

The American poet John Ashbery has long devoted his elegant syntax to virtual experience, but he has something new and substantial to offer in his magnificent translation, Illuminations: these are prose poems that really soar on the pinions of mystery.

Most outstanding of all, though, was Ian Donaldson’s Ben Jonson: A Life. We have long known Donaldson as a world authority on the burly poet and dramatist, but this page-turning biography is remarkably exciting, and everywhere persuasive.

Children and Young Adults

Bec Kavanagh

Ambelin Kwaymullina stormed to the top of my reading list with The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (Walker Books, 9/12). Her first Young Adult novel is a unique and captivating dystopia.

Equally powerful was Kirsty Eagar’s Night Beach (Penguin, 7/12), where obsession and art meet a dark ‘other’ in Eagar’s trademark surf setting.

James Roy’s City (University of Queensland Press) was an outstanding follow-up to his first collection of shorts in Town (2007). City juxtaposes a newfound maturity with the naïveté of the characters as they find their footing in unfamiliar territory.

From overseas, Rebecca Stead’s whimsy and clarity found their way into my heart with Liar and Spy, a wonderful novel for upper-primary readers, and a touching fable for everyone else.

Joy Lawn

The Queensland floods are transformed into fantastical chaos in Chris McKimmie’s picture book, Alex and the Watermelon Boat (Allen & Unwin, 9/12). The illustrations and words are imaginative yet raw.

Elizabeth Pulford and Angus Gomes’ Broken (Walker Books) is a ‘mise en abyme’ – graphics tell a story inside a story of words – about a girl in a coma.

Told retrospectively by a girl who lived with thylacines, Into that Forest by Louis Nowra (Allen & Unwin, 12/12) is an allegory of the wild and its loss.

More shocking, but still hopeful, is the cry against child trafficking in Rosanne Hawke’s Mountain Wolf (HarperCollins).

Sonya Hartnett’s atmospheric and reflective The Children of the King (Viking, 6/12) reaches virtuosic heights of fine writing.

Pam Macintyre

Ambelin Kwaymullina’s powerful début novel, The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf, imagines a post-apocalyptic Australia: a world of detention centres, ‘saurs’, and ‘Illegals’ – a tribe of outsider children with special abilities linked loosely to Aboriginal spiritual beliefs – led by the spirited Ashala.

Vibrant characters people James Roy’s City,his welcome companion to Town, in which he captures in linked stories the casual, unexpected, but significant connectedness of young people’s diverse lives in a recognisable city.

Andrew McGahan’s second  book in the Ship Kings series, The Voyage of the Unquiet Ice (Allen & Unwin), is even better than the first instalment: more imagination, more evocative world building, more adventure, more politics, more romantic tension and more lyrical writing.

Stephanie Owen Reeder

It was a vintage year for Australian picture books. The impressive line-up includes Anna Walker’s Peggy (Scholastic, 12/12). Walker’s evocative watercolours and spare text perfectly capture a cold, wet, windy Melbourne day, as a little black hen copes bravely and resourcefully with being taken out of her comfort zone.

Graeme Base’s Little Elephants (Viking, 12/12) is an exciting, heart-warming, and stunningly illustrated tale about a farming family fighting the exigencies of nature. In an interesting twist, they are aided by an irrepressible pack of miniature pachyderms.

And Ursula Dubosarsky’s Too Many Elephants in this House (Viking) is a delightful romp of a book, exuberantly illustrated in cartoon style by Andrew Joyner. This wonderful read-aloud story joyously celebrates the enthusiasms of childhood.

Mike Shuttleworth

Mary and Bryan Talbot’s Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes (Jonathan Cape) – a graphic novel about James Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, entwined with the life of the author Mary Talbot – is difficult to pigeonhole: its spiky, surprising brilliance is both personal and historic.

Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton, creators of The 26-Storey Treehouse (Pan Macmillan), can cry all the way to the bank, but credit is long overdue for their originality, energy, wit, and sheer delightfulness. This series for young readers confirms the pair as the peerless creators of thrill-seeking mayhem. Denton’s visual gags are worth a medal alone.

Alison Croggon’s Black Spring (Walker Books) brings a Brontë-esque mood to a dark literary landscape: a world of blood feuds, passionate friendship, and a spiral of love with tragic consequences. This is superbly crafted storytelling.

Ruth Starke

A story about life, death, love, and two cancer survivors doesn’t sound an easy read, but John Green is a master mixer of levity and tragedy, and The Fault in Our Stars (Penguin) is a heartbreaker.

So is Rosanne Hawke’s Mountain Wolf, which also tackles big themes, albeit with fewer smiles, as young Razaq, orphaned after an earthquake flattens his village in Pakistan, is kidnapped and sold into slavery.

In The Children of the King, by Sonya Hartnett, two pampered children and one feisty refugee escape the London blitz to join Uncle Peregrine in his northern mansion. Lurking around in the mist are two ghostly boys, and, as the children learn about Richard III, they and the reader begin to connect past and present.