2019 Archibald Prize

Hahndorf artist Nora Heysen was the first woman to win the Archibald Prize, and Australia's first female painter to be appointed as an official war artist. A portraitist and a flower painter, Nora Heysen's life was defined by an all-consuming drive to draw and paint. In 1989, aged 78, Nora re-emerged on the Australian art scene when the nation's major art institutions restored her position after years of artistic obscurity. Extensively researched, and containing artworks and photographs from the painter's life, this is the first biography of the artist, and it has been enthusiastically embraced by the Heysen family. This authorized biography coincides with a major retrospective of the works of Nora and her father, landscape painter Hans Heysen, to be held at the National Gallery of Victoria in March 2019.

Carment is one of Australia's best-known plein air artists. It is his distinctive mark as a writer that he writes as he paints - from life - capturing the likeness of a particular place in time, remaining faithful to the moment when he sees something striking or strange. And just as his paintings and drawings are small, limited by what he can carry with him on his travels, so in his writing he is a miniaturist working on a large scale: the tone of his writing matches the style of his brushwork. Free-flowing yet nuanced, it evokes the places he visits and the people and objects he encounters, friends and strangers, the homeless and the famous - farms, beaches, cottages, building sites, even typewriters and eggs and telegraph poles - each has its story. In this richly illustrated collection of Tom Carment's essays about people and landscapes has been thirty years in the making. It covers the period that he has lived in Womerah Lane in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst, while travelling the country as a plein air artist. Womerah Lane is composed of written pieces set in every state of mainland Australia, accompanied by paintings and drawings made in those places. 'Tom Carment's writing, like his art, seduces quietly: austere, highly articulate, always fresh, with a dry sense of the absurd. In this calm, modest register he commands great territories.' -- Helen Garner 'Tom Carment's Womerah Lane is a lively and pensive personalhistory, chronicling 30 years of life and art from one of Australia's mostwell-known landscape artists...Womerah Lane isa rich study of contrasts, likely to appeal to readers with an appetite forAustralian biography, the arcane of the everyday and the many (sensory)pleasures of landscape artwork.' -- NathanSmith, Books+Publishing 'Inthese gentle paintings, drawings and stories drawn from three decades as a peripateticplein air painter based in Darlinghurst, Tom Carment evidences the lightesttouch and the keenest intelligence. An intelligence, it must be said, whosesecret lies in an eye-head-hand co-ordination which borders on the mystical.Yet Carment's writing is as aquarelle, as calligraphic, as deceptively simple,as his art.' -- The West Australian

In 2008, the artist Adam Cullen invited journalist Erik Jensen to stay in his spare room and write his biography. What followed were four years of intense honesty and a relationship that became increasingly claustrophobic. At one point Cullen shot Jensen, in part to see how committed he was to the book. At another, he threw Jensen from a speeding motorbike. The book contract Cullen used to convince Jensen to stay with him never existed. Acute Misfortune is a riveting account of the life and death of one of Australia’s most celebrated artists, the man behind the Archibald Prize–winning portrait of David Wenham. Jensen follows Cullen through drug deals and periods of deep self-reflection, onwards into his court appearance for weapons possession and finally his death in 2012 at the age of forty-six. After much critical acclaim, Acute Misfortune was developed into a feature film, winning The Age Critics Award at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2018. The story is by turns tender and horrifying: a spare tale of art, sex, drugs and childhood, told at close quarters and without judgement. Winner of the 2015 Nib Waverley Library Award for Literature Shortlisted in the 2015 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards and for the 2015 Walkley Book Award ‘Erik Jensen is a Boswell or Vasari for our baffled, fractured, fucked-up times. Acute Misfortune is the most intimate, revealing, and original take on an artist’s life I know of.’ —Sebastian Smee ‘Erik Jensen gives us that ingenious place where biography is also art.’ —Jennifer Clement ‘This is supposed to be about an artist, a wild man, his lifetime, and it is; but Jensen has written such a beautiful window that all art and life is shining through. I'm supposed to be an artist but I cannot put this down.’ —DBC Pierre

Finalist for the 2015 Giller Prize Finalist for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award One of Quill & Quire’s Books of the Year, 2015 A twenty-five-thousand-copy bestseller in Quebec, Arvida, with its stories of innocent young girls and wild beasts, attempted murder and ritual mutilation, haunted houses and road trips heading nowhere, is unforgettable. Like a Proust-obsessed Cormac McCarthy, Samuel Archibald's portrait of his hometown, a model town design by American industrialist Arthur Vining Davis, does for Quebec's North what William Faulkner did for the South, and heralds an important new voice in world literature. Samuel Archibald teaches contemporary popular culture at the University of Quebec in Montreal, where he lectures on genre fiction, horror movies, and video games, among other subjects.

A tribute to portraiture, as well as the artists and sitters, Archie 100: A Century of the Archibald Prize marks 100 years of Australia's oldest and most-loved annual portraiture award. Curator Natalie Wilson unearths fascinating stories behind more than 100 artworks representing every decade. Arranged thematically, these works reflect not just how artistic styles and approaches to portraiture have changed over time but, importantly, how the Archibald Prize reflects our society. Resulting from many years of research for lost portraits, Archie 100 includes paintings from the Art Gallery of New South Wales' collection as well as works from libraries, galleries and museums across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, and private Australian and international collections. Some have not been exhibited since they first were seen in the Archibald Prize. Archie 100 includes: A fascinating essay by Wilson on her quest to find Archibald portraits from the past 100 years and the difficult task of selecting 100 for the centenary exhibition Illustrations of each portrait and accompanying text A timeline of Archibald Prize landmarks Some fabulous facts and figures An index of artists and sitters

Australia's first female prime minister. The country's first female judge. The first woman to win the Archibald Prize for portraiture. Australia's first female chief diplomat. The nation's first female winemaker. These women were all trailblazers, but they have something else in common - every one of them was South Australian. And they are just a handful of the 100 remarkable women whose stories are told in this beautiful book, illustrated with hundreds of photographs. Written by historian Carolyn Collins and journalist Roy Eccleston, Trailblazers shines a light on the lives of these extraordinary women whose feats inspired their state, nation and, often enough, the world. Now they can inspire a whole new generation.