Beautiful Revolutionary by Laura Elizabeth Woollett has been shortlisted for the 2019 Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction.
Here is what the judges had to say:
Laura Elizabeth Woollett's novel, Beautiful Revolutionary, explores cult psychology and the dangerous lure of the utopian ideology that attracted disciples to Jim Jones's infamous Peoples Temple. Charting the cult's dissolution from its heady socialist beginnings to mass suicide in a Guyanese compound, Woollett's vision moves beyond the charismatic figure of Jones to imagine the lives of his followers and their ultimate complicity in his crimes. Woollett achieves psychologically complex portraits of her two protagonists—minister's daughter Evelyn and conscientious objector Lenny—as they are indoctrinated into a degrading system of punishment and reward that delivers dire consequences for their marriage and sense of selfhood. Wry and incisive, but also imbued with great empathy for the trauma Jones wrought, Beautiful Revolutionary compels the reader to consider the conditions and compromises that allow groupthink to overpower individual responsibility and agency.
Congratulations to Laura and all the shortlisted authors. Discover the full shortlist and find out more here.
