Andrew McGahan

In 1991 McGahan won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for unpublished novels with Praise – a semi-autobiographical account of a doomed, drug and alcohol-fuelled relationship. It became an Australian bestseller, and is often credited with launching the short-lived Grunge Lit or Dirty realism movement – terminology that McGahan himself (along with most of the writers to whom it was applied) rejected.[2] In 1995 McGahan followed up with 1988, a prequel to Praise, partially based on time the author spent working at a lighthouse in the Northern Territory during Australia's bicentennial year.

In 2000, having by his own admission struggled to come up with a third novel, McGahan produced his first work of non-autobiographical fiction: the crime novel Last Drinks, a reflection upon the endemic political corruption in Queensland in the 1980s, and the aftermath of the famous Fitzgerald Inquiry. It won a Ned Kelly Award for crime writing. In 2004 McGahan published one of his most successful and respected novels – The White Earth, an epic and gothic tale set in a fictionalised version of the wheat district in which he had grown up. It became another bestseller, and won a raft of literary awards, in particular the Miles Franklin Award. In 2006 came Underground, an absurdist satire attacking the more extreme manifestations of the War on Terror in Australia. It received mixed reviews and caused conservative commentator Andrew Bolt to declare McGahan an "unhinged propagandist".[3]

In 2009 he wrote Wonders of a Godless World, a work entirely without dialogue or proper nouns and delving into such topics as geology, weather and immortality and madness. It won the 2009 Aurealis Award for Science Fiction. In 2011 McGahan published The Coming of the Whirlpool, Book 1 of Ship Kings, a fantasy seafaring series. This was followed by Book 2, The Voyage of the Unquiet Ice in 2012, and Book 3, The War of the Four Isles in 2014. The fourth and final volume in the series, The Ocean of the Dead, was released in 2016.

In 1992, while serving a residency at the Queensland Theatre Company, McGahan wrote the play Bait, which was first performed by Renegade Theatre Company in Brisbane in 1995, directed by Shaun Charles, and which won a Matilda award that year. The play is set in a grim Social Security mailing room and concludes the "Gordon Trilogy" – finishing off the story of Gordon Buchanan that was begun in the novels Praise and 1988.

In 2009 McGahan co-wrote and co-directed with Shaun Charles a stage version of The White Earth for La Boite Theatre Company in Brisbane. Both stageplays, Bait and The White Earth, have been published by Playlab Press.

In 2006, McGahan's novel Last Drinks was performed at La Boite Theatre Company in an adaptation by Shaun Charles.

McGahan wrote the screenplay for the feature film adaptation of Praise, featuring Sacha Horler and Peter Fenton, directed by John Curran and released in 1999. The film won multiple awards, including an AFI Award to McGahan for the screenwriting.

• Praise, Allen & Unwin, 1992, ISBN 978-1-86373-245-1
• 1988, Macmillan, 1998, ISBN 978-0-312-18032-4
• Last Drinks, Allen & Unwin, 2000, ISBN 978-1-86508-406-0
• The White Earth, Allen & Unwin, 2004, ISBN 978-1-74114-147-4
• Underground, Allen & Unwin, 2007, ISBN 978-1-74175-330-1
• Wonders of a Godless World, Allen & Unwin, 2009, ISBN 978-1-74175-809-2
• The Rich Man's House, Allen & Unwin, 2019, ISBN 978-1-76052-982-6

• The Coming of the Whirlpool (2011)
• The Voyage of the Unquiet Ice (2012)
• The War of the Four Isles (2014)
• The Ocean of the Dead (2016)

• Bait (1992)

• Praise (2000)