West Girls (2024). The Love of a Bad Man was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction. Beautiful Revolutionary was shortlisted for the 2019 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. West Girls was longlisted for the 2024 Stella Prize and is shortlisted for the South Australian Literary Award for Fiction. Woollett was the City of Melbourne’s 2020 Boyd Garret writer-in-residence, a 2020-22 Marten Bequest scholar for prose, and will be a 2025 writer-in-residence at the Keesing Studio in Paris.
At Electric Lit the author shared a list of "books about models, ranging from young adult fiction to critical thinking, [that] exposes the contradictory ugliness and transcendence of being professionally beautiful." One title on the list:
Read about the other entries on the list at Electric Lit.Meat Market by Juno Dawson
I never demand likeability of fictional characters, yet it’s hard not to love Jana Novak, the heroine of Juno Dawson’s Meat Market, a 2019 novel. A gangly South London girl from an immigrant family, Jana gets into modeling for some extra dosh. Grounded and intelligent, she is nevertheless believably vulnerable to the industry’s dizzying heights, exploitative lows, and crushing boredom. Tackling big themes—from #MeToo to class to casual sex– for a YA audience without being preachy is no small feat, but Dawson does so with absolute facility.
--Marshal Zeringue
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