Kate Wild’s ‘The Red House’ wins The Age Book of the Year Award for Non-Fiction

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this article contains the name of an Indigenous person who has died.

Kate Wild’s The Red House (Allen & Unwin, 2025) has won The Age Non-fiction Book of the Year Award, announced Thursday evening at the opening night of Melbourne Writers Festival.

A Walkley Award-winning journalist, Wild’s book is not simply an accounting of the fatal shooting of Kumanjayi Walker in 2019 and the murder trial of Constable Zachary Rolfe; it is an exploration of the inseparable connections between this country's past, present and future, and the chance to change that story.

The non-fiction judges – author, reviewer and mission director of Caritas Australia Michael McGirr and The Age’s Canberra bureau chief, Michelle Griffin – described Wild’s The Red House as a patient investigation that “has echoes from the past and reverberations into the future”.

Wild’s curiosity and compassion, they said, “is bolstered by the vivid precision with which she describes what she witnesses and learns. The Red House … gives us no sermons, only a compulsively readable story.”

Accepting her award, Wild offered thanks and respect to Warlpiri elder Ned Jampijinpa Hargraves, a leading voice for justice in the shooting, and acknowledged Kumanjayi’s maternal grandparents, Joseph and Annie Lane.

Kate Wild accepting her award at Melbourne Writers’ Festival 2026

She said her years living in the Northern Territory had taught her about connection. “Central to the way The Red House examines connections between black and white Australia is an invitation to look at time differently,” Wild said, referring to the Indigenous concept of the “everywhen”, in which past, present and future are happening at once, affecting each other in every moment.

“For me, the everywhen is the key to understanding the incredible weight some moments carry – where we feel the visceral imprint of unresolved history at work and see possible futures balanced on a knife’s edge,” she said. “Kumanjayi Walker and Zachary Rolfe’s confrontation in a red house in the desert in 2019 was one of those moments. Moments of connection are happening every day. The direction they take relies on what we bring to them.”

The awards, now in their 45th year, were presented by Age deputy editor Orietta Guerrera. The fiction category went to Moreno Giovannoni for his novel The Immigrants. The winners each received $10,000 thanks to the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.