Her first book outraged Australian critics – but now she’s scooped the UK’s top nonfiction prize. She talks about female anger, becoming cool at 82 – and why winning made her feel like a stunned mullet
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hen Helen Garner was announced as the winner of the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction in London on Tuesday night, the 82-year-old Australian author was 16,000km away in Melbourne, watching the ceremony on a live stream at home on what was for her Wednesday morning. When the big moment came, she heard “the winner is …” – and then the feed froze. “We were going, ‘Oh God!’ Running around. We didn’t know what to do. The timing was like something in a comedy.” Congratulations immediately rushed in, which is how she knew she’d won the £50,000 (A$100,000) prize for How to End a Story, an 800-page collection of her astoundingly frank diaries, kept between 1978 and 1998.
Garner is still grappling with her win when we speak a few hours later. “I’m a stunned mullet,” she says, sitting in her study, wrapped in a lilac shawl and with glasses on a cord around her neck. “I didn’t think I had a chance.” She has absolutely no idea what she said in her thank you speech: “I think I’m in shock.”
In her 80s, Garner is experiencing a career high. After decades of being ignored overseas, “Australia’s Joan Didion” has become cool. Carrie Bradshaw recently toted a hardback of Garner’s debut novel Monkey Grip in an episode of And Just Like That, as if it were a must-have purse, while Dua Lipa (“a complete sweetheart”) picked Garner’s account of a murder trial, This House of Grief, for her enormously popular book club. Garner is “thrilled to bits” by all of this. “My street cred has gone through the roof!” she laughs.
