Miles Allinson has worked in a bookshop for more than 15 years, so has probably got used to selling copies of his own novels. But he’s not the sort of bloke to pipe up with a quick “I wrote that” to unsuspecting customers.

The chances are Allinson will be selling many more copies of his second novel, In Moonland, after it won The Age fiction book of the year award on Thursday night. The book explores the relationship between three generations of a family, with a man’s search for the lost life of his dead father at its heart.

Miles Allinson was interested in writing about different forms of community.Credit:Chris Hopkins

Bernadette Brennan has served on many literary prize judging panels, but says it never occurs to her that her own books might be up for a prize. So when Leaping into Waterfalls won the National Biography Award, she was thrilled; the book, after all, is a biography of Australian writer Gillian Mears. But winning The Age non-fiction award, Brennane said, “really threw me sideways” because it was judged against the whole gamut of non-fiction books.

The awards were presented by The Age editor Gay Alcorn on Thursday evening at the opening of this year’s Melbourne Writers Festival, at which Miles Franklin-winner Jennifer Down, British Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid and Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson riffed on the festival’s theme, “ambition”. Last year, the award for fiction returned after a nine-year absence and this year the non-fiction prize was revived. The winners each receive $10,000, thanks to the Copyright Agency’s cultural fund.

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The non-fiction judges were author and critic Simon Caterson and Professor Joy Damousi, director of the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at the Australian Catholic University and Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor at the University of Melbourne. Novelist Bram Presser and author Susan Wyndham judged the fiction prize.

They said In Moonland was “a novel about the ways we yearn to belong; a deeply moving excavation of faith, autonomy, identity and, ultimately, mortality. Allinson writes with great warmth and insight, his exquisite prose offering light to even the darkest corners of his characters’ hearts.”

And they described Leaping into Waterfalls as profound and haunting. “The canvas that is drawn is wide and broad with a nuanced exploration of various themes including the creative process and the practice of writing, the intensity of familial relationships, the drive of ambition and recognition, as well as beautifully capturing the Australian literary scene of the late-20th and early-21st centuries.”

Allinson, who won the Victorian Premier’s unpublished manuscript award for his first novel, Fever of Animals, said he was worried that In Moonland might disappear as a consequence of being published during lockdown. He began it when his daughter was a newborn and said that partly explained the writing about the central character Joe’s relationship with his daughter.

“It’s not an autobiography, but it certainly draws heavily in places on my own life. I started as she was born and finished it when she was about six.”

In Moonland is about different family arrangements and kinds of community and how people work out a way to live together. So while it begins with Joe in Melbourne in 2016 and goes back in time to his father hanging out at an ashram in India for “the orange people”, the followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, it also moves a couple of decades into the future.

“I didn’t write it as a simple critique of utopianism or of religious communities, or of that particular religious community. I wanted to be true to people’s experiences of it, but I also wanted to allow for there to be some reckoning with the consequences of that attempt to live differently.”

He said he was interested in different forms of community. “Family would be one form, but there is a whole set of other kinds of arrangements of how you figure out a way to live together. And none of them are perfect.”

One element that both his novels have in common is a quest. In Fever of Animals it was a search for a mysterious Romanian surrealist painter. “That kind of slightly unresolved quest narrative feels very natural. So I wonder if one day I can do something else.”

Can he? Unfortunately, he said, the book he is working on now is not that dissimilar: “It’s about a ghostwriter who’s writing the autobiography of an Australian Rules footballer. I think what he finds is more than he was searching for.”

There’s an element of synchronicity in Brennan’s biography winning — her subject won The Age fiction prize 10 years ago for her final novel, Foal’s Bread.

Bernadette Brennan had no idea Gillian Mears’ archive was so huge.Credit:Rhett Wyman

When Brennan finished her biography of Helen Garner, she wanted to work on the life of another Australian female writer. There was enough in Mears’ writing – three novels, four collections of short stories, essays, and masses of letters – to intrigue her.

“And I was really interested in her life. I had met her once and I just knew the vague outline of her bravery with multiple sclerosis.” Mears struggled with MS for more than 15 years and eventually took her own life in 2016. What clinched it for Brennan was the discovery of Mears’ enormous archive at the State Library of NSW.

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“It was mind-blowing. I just had no idea that it was so big. It took a while to get access because Gillian had sold off everything – all the letters that she’d ever got from people, photo albums, everything,” she said. “The State Library said to me that I had to get permission from every writer whose work was in each section to say that I could look at them.”

As a literary biographer, Brennan believes her subject’s writing should always be central to the book: “I think if you are a writer and particularly someone like Gillian who has determinedly lived her life as a writer and has caused all sorts of issues with herself and her family or whatever to write, then that writing needs to be respected.”

But, she said, you could never capture someone’s whole life. There was always lots of gossip and other sorts of things that could be included, but they didn’t interest her.

“I don’t see the point of doing that. I think you need to give a shape to a life and allow people to understand why this person wrote the way they did and why they acted the way they did,” Brennan said. “My intention is to encourage readers to discover this writer or to go back to her work. So because her life was so phenomenally close to her work, it needed to have a really significant focus on exactly what was happening in her life.”

Meet the winners of The Age awards at the Melbourne Writers Festival on Friday, 6.30pm. mwf.com.au

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