This weekend, Radio National will count down its Top 100 Australian books poll, in which voters picked their favourite work of any genre. The winner will be crowned on Sunday.

It’s an ambitious enterprise – around 200 years of Australian writing subject to a popular vote. And yet, if such polls get people talking and thinking about literature, what’s not to like?

Ahead of the countdown, we asked a range of authors to nominate their two best Australian books of all time: ideally one fiction or poetry, the other non-fiction. Their picks are varied and surprising.

And our own favourites? I’ve gone for a novel I return to for the pleasure of each sentence, Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus (1980), and Helen Garner’s fierce work of reportage Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004).

My fellow editor Jo Case chose Frank Moorhouse’s deliciously dark, light and complex Dark Palace (2000) and Garner’s propulsive How to End a Story (2025) – perhaps the ultimate divorce memoir, in diary form.

Our colleague James Ley has picked Christina Stead’s classic The Man Who Loved Children (1940) and Judith Wright’s memoir Half a Lifetime (1999).

What would you choose? You can add your picks in the comments section at the end.

– Suzy Freeman-Greene

Patrick White’s The Tree of Man (1955) is simply the most beautiful and true thing I’ve ever read. It tells the story of a continent and its colonisers with such rapturous visions that the reader forgets that sentence structure is lost and all that remains is words, like a floating vision of a long-lost world.

Alan Jock Marshall’s essay Australia Limited was published in 1942 in the Think or be Damned series. This sharp, witty essay describes a limited and parochial Australia that Marshall, a soldier, is about to risk his life to defend, fighting the Japanese behind the lines in New Guinea.

Beautifully observed, with an unflinching eye, it describes an ignorant, self-satisfied Sydney, whose residents repeat ad nauseum that it is the best city in the world. On the eve of embarking, Marshall struggles with the idea of whether this place is worth losing your life for, and whether it can ever become truly great.

Tim Flannery is honorary fellow, The Australian Museum

The Australian books that have meant most to me are those concerning the Indigenous dispossession. I have chosen Judith Wright’s haunting The Cry for the Dead (1982), where history and family memoir of the 19th-century Queensland pastoral frontier come together seamlessly, and Henry Reynolds’ penetrating and ground-breaking study of Aboriginal resistance, The Other Side of the Frontier (1981).

Robert Manne is emeritus professor of politics, La Trobe University

The Fatal Shore and The Shock of the New might be Robert Hughes’ masterpieces, but I adore his superlative mini-essays on artists from Warhol to Watteau, Degas and Constable.

In Nothing if Not Critical (1990), Hughes illuminates the Old Masters and punctures the art world’s overblown enfants terribles with ferocious intelligence, wit and joyously idiosyncratic taste. His criticism is companionable, startlingly poetic, at times acerbic – and hilariously contemptuous of the art world’s shallowness and capitalistic excesses. No one writes about painting better, or with more feeling.

There are many reasons to love Gwen Harwood, not least for her playfulness and flat-out refusal to genuflect before orthodoxies.

Her poetic pseudonyms and stealthy acrostics designed to embarrass sexist newspaper editors still delight – but reading her Collected Poems 1943–1995 (2003), you’re left with an overwhelming sense of awe at the clarity and richness of her body of work, and the expansive range of her imagination. Her poems move fluently between the cerebral and the quotidian, balancing lyrical and narrative impulses, illuminating ordinary figures and lives in extraordinary lines.

Sarah Holland-Batt is a poet and professor, and head of Creative Writing in UTS’ Faculty of Design & Society.

Drylands (1999), Thea Astley’s final novel, throbs with her perennial themes – social, cultural and ecological degradation – and spits out acerbic wit. Yet its protagonist, Janet, battling the small minds, desiccated imaginations and inflated egos around her, also succeeds in teaching someone to read. No better solace exists for her – or for us.

Evelyn Araluen’s first book of poetry, Dropbear (2021), takes no prisoners in its dissection of settler-colonialism and interrogation of so-called reconciliation. This is a lyrical, funny, disturbing and intelligent reimagining of history, culture, narrative – and of words themselves. I’ve bought multiple copies as gifts for the fierce and moving poem Welcome to Cuntery alone.

Debra Adelaide is an adjunct associate professor in creative writing at the University of Technology Sydney.

Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006) re-imagines Australian fiction. Wright’s all-too-human characters enact their dreams across a vast tract of earth, water, sky and the “alltimes”. The writing crackles. It’s a big story of Country, where ancestral voices offer wisdom and hope, enfolding the reader in a planetary embrace.

My nonfiction pick is David Malouf’s 12 Edmondstone Street (1985). If we had only this one small book, it would still be important.

Bookended by essays about growing up in wartime Brisbane in a family of a migrant background, Malouf distils his formation as a writer in place – and as an Australian going out into the world in the 20th century. Attentive, luminous, modest, it shows the author at his conversational, reflective best.

Nicholas Jose is emeritus professor in the School of Humanities at Adelaide University and a novelist.

At the end of the 20th century, Australians were learning of the violence of their nation’s past and the significance of Aboriginal Country.

Alex Miller’s novel Journey to the Stone Country (2002) superbly captured that awakening. It seems to hold the beauty and terror of the Australian experience in every sentence. The land itself emerges as the most powerful and mysterious character of all.

A masterpiece of historical writing, Grace Karskens’ The Colony: A History of Early Sydney (2009), reconfigured our understanding of Australia’s colonial origins. It is a subtle and intimate portrait of early Sydney as well as an exhilarating exploration of imperial vision and cultural encounter. The prose has a magical glow, creating a space within which emotions, senses, dreams and hopes might be given proper play as forces of history.

Tom Griffiths is emeritus professor of history at the Australian National University.

One of the unfortunate things about Australian literary culture is how easily great books can be overlooked. If I could assure two books against obscurity, they would be Shannon Burns’s Childhood (2022) and Antigone Kefala’s collection Fiction (2025).

Burns’ memoir is unusually sophisticated in its tonal range. His account of the cruelty people visit on one another makes parts of the story almost unbearably tense. Yet the........

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