Katherine Johnson’s Every Wild Soul and Chris Ames’ I Made This Just For You do not have much in common. Every Wild Soul traverses the complexities of sheltered upbringings, fragile ecosystems and environmental bureaucracy; I Made This Just For You navigates the absurdity of everyday life in the 21st century with humour, heart and a healthy helping of criticism.

Review: Every Wild Soul – Katherine Johnson (HarperCollins) & I Made This Just for You – Chris Ames (Hardie Grant)

And yet there is something these books share: both were awarded unpublished manuscript prizes. Every Wild Soul won the Australian Fiction Prize (formerly the Vogel Literary Award) and I Made This Just For You won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award.

So what was it about these two works that made them prize-worthy even before publication?

Every Wild Soul is Katherine Johnson’s fifth novel, and not her first prizewinner. Two of her earlier works, Pescador’s Wake (2009) and The Better Son (2016), won awards for manuscript development. The Better Son also won the University of Tasmania Prize and the People’s Choice Award as part of the Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Awards.

Every Wild Soul follows two women at very different stages of their lives. Eighteen-year-old Min lives a sheltered life on the remote Maria Island, off the east coast of Tasmania. She is struggling against the boundaries imposed by her single father, the head park ranger.

Min has built strong relationships with other people on the island. The most significant is with Werner, a homeless biologist and former national parks worker, who is undertaking his own, sometimes unorthodox, environmental research. Min works alongside Werner and others to facilitate various conservation efforts.

Also navigating the crossover between the natural world and her personal life is Lucie. After years of struggling as a freelance journalist in London, she is trying to revive her career with a series of stories on rewilding efforts around the world. She has returned to her native Tasmania after years abroad, where she covered storks nesting in England and elephant migration patterns in China.

Upon her return to Maria Island, Lucie works hard to better understand the Tasmanian ecosystem – the extinct thylacines, the endangered devils, the........

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