The winner of the 2025 Voss Literary Prize is

Fiona McFarlane, Highway 13

The judges citation follows:

Judges’ Report: 2025 Voss Literary Prize   

From a field of 52 novels, the winner of the 2025 Voss Literary Prize for the best Australian novel of 2024 is Fiona McFarlane, with Highway 13, published by Allen & Unwin.  An earlier novel by McFarlane, The Night Guest (2014), won the inaugural Voss Prize.

The Backpacker Murders have haunted Australians since 1992, when the first bodies were discovered in the Belanglo State Forest, just off the Hume Highway, south-west of Sydney.  These were exceedingly gruesome serial killings: the final number of victims remains unknown.  The case generated extensive media coverage, podcasts and at least one book, a psychological thriller profiling the murderer, the police investigation and the trial.  Highway 13 is not a retelling of these crimes.

Instead, McFarlane asks after those who might have been caught up in a similar series of dreadful events: the victims, their families, their friends, and those not directly involved.  The epigraph to Highway 13, from Richard II, signals her intentions: ‘Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows’.  The twelve stories that comprise this complex novel reveal the glancing impacts, sometimes life-changing, sometimes perceived only by the reader, on the lives of those who, perhaps unknowingly, pass through the ripples generated by such disappearances and murders.  

By not delving into the character and motivation of her murderer, Paul Biga, a quiet taxi-driver who kept pet birds, McFarlane decentres the usual crime focus on the perpetrator.  Instead, we meet eight-year-old Lucy, growing up with her brothers, mother and live-in uncle, until she runs off with a Polish workman, John, around the age of twenty.  They become Lucinda and Jan, parents of Paul.  Many years later, we meet Eva (Lucinda, Jan and Paul’s neighbour), just as the house Paul grew up in is being knocked down.  Eva recalls a pornographic letter he wrote to her when she was his high-school teacher – but there’s little else to indicate the monster he would become.  The stories circle around an unspeakable and therefore absent centre, the knowledge of which haunts, frightens or obsesses McFarlane’s characters.

So the stories go, each identified by a year, ranging between 1950 and 2028 but chronologically scattered.  The murders disrupt linear notions of time, rather as traumatic events do for their sufferers.  While the reader is tempted to comb through every detail in order to build a comprehensive narrative, the structure of Highway 13 suggests that full comprehension is not possible.  It’s also a technique that maintains tension while revealing how all our lives are connected across time and space: the actor who plays Biga in a TV series, the American podcasters discussing the discovery of a 13^th body, the friend of a retired flight attendant whose schoolgirl sister marries Biga, the retired detective’s response when she hears Biga has died in gaol….. McFarlane ensures we care about each of her keenly observed protagonists, sketched with respect, compassion and, sometimes, wry humour.

Fiona McFarlane neither sensationalises the killer nor mythologizes his crimes but instead awakens her readers to the possibilities of evil and wickedness hiding in the most innocent of everyday relationships and transactions. Highway 13 is a wonderfully original, vivid and lyrical contribution to that most literary of preoccupations, thedangers that lurk in the Australian landscape and threaten the unsuspecting.

Judges:

Dr Elaine Lindsay (chair)

Dr Kate Cantrell 

Dr David Ellison 

Dr Bronwen Levy

Dr Emmett Stinson