No Country for Girls

"Of course! No Country for Girls is a Thelma and Louise -style road trip through outback Australia. It’s about two teen girls, Charlie and Nao, who are thrown together by an unfortunate incident that leaves a man dead on Charlie’s kitchen floor. They go on the run in the dead man’s Holden Rodeo twin cab ute, and discover a bag of stolen gold bars under the passenger seat. I wrote the book as a love letter to Western Australia and road-trip movies. I was a huge Thelma and Louise fan and I was writing it almost exactly 30 years after that film had come out. I couldn’t believe no one had updated it, though once I started I realized it was actually quite hard! You’ve got two characters in a confined space on a road trip. How do you make that into a page-turning novel? I was so surprised even to get longlisted for the prize because I didn’t think it was enough of an adventure. Which was interesting, because it did satisfy all the criteria. There was a journey, and it took people somewhere most hadn’t been before. For me, writing it, almost the biggest adventure was what happened between the two characters, because although they’re both teenagers, they’re very different. Charlie is white and queer. She’s just been kicked out of school. Nao is Aboriginal. She’s in her first year studying law at university, and she’s straight. There’s a lot more too, that’s different about these two characters. And I felt the adventure was more about what happened between them than anything external. It really came home to me when we were discussing this year’s books. I thought, ‘Wow, my book went through this process with all these people talking about it.’ That was cool. I’ve loved being on the judging panel. It’s been amazing to read these books I might not have discovered otherwise. Emma was joined on the 2024 Best Published Novel award judging panel by Matt Barr , writer, journalist and host of the Looking Sideways Action Sports podcast; Lee Craigie , former professional mountain bike racer, author and director of The Adventure Syndicate; Dr Alasdair Harris , marine conservationist and National Geographic Explorer; and Sarah Outen , record-breaking athlete and therapist."