Bernice Barry and Meg Caddy bring overlooked lives into historical fiction
The ARA Historical Novel Prize winners were announced on 15 October: The Names of a Hare and A Flash in the Dust take the main awards.
The past looks different when overlooked characters tell its stories. The 2026 ARA Historical Novel Prize winners, announced on 15 October by the Historical Novel Society Australasia, put those voices centre stage. Bernice Barry wins the Adult category with The Names of a Hare, published by Fremantle Press: in seventeenth-century Cornwall, a woman must repeatedly reinvent herself to escape accusations of witchcraft.
Meg Caddy wins the Children and Young Adult category with A Flash in the Dust, published by University of Queensland Press, bringing the experiences of queer teenagers in Western Australia in 1899 into historical fiction. The Readers’ Choice Award goes to Wayne Marshall for Henry Goes Bush. Three different books return to neglected lives, exclusions and the possibilities of the historical novel.