What is Australia’s best book? Our experts pick their favourites

The Conversation This weekend, Radio National will count down its Top 100 Australian books poll, in which voters picked their favourite work of any genre.

The winner will be crowned on Sunday.

It’s an ambitious enterprise – around 200 years of Australian writing subject to a popular vote.

And yet, if such polls get people talking and thinking about literature, what’s not to like? Ahead of the countdown, we asked a range of authors to nominate their two best Australian books of all time: ideally one fiction or poetry, the other non-fiction.

Their picks are varied and surprising.

And our own favourites? I’ve gone for a novel I return to for the pleasure of each sentence, Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus (1980), and Helen Garner’s fierce work of reportage Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004).

My fellow editor Jo Case chose Frank Moorhouse’s deliciously dark, light and complex Dark Palace (2000) and Garner’s propulsive How to End a Story (2025) – perhaps the ultimate divorce memoir, in diary form.

Our colleague James Ley has picked Christina Stead’s classic The Man Who Loved Children (1940) and Judith Wright’s memoir Half a Lifetime (1999).

What would you choose? You can add your picks in the comments section at the end. – Suzy Freeman-Greene Tim Flannery Patrick White’s The Tree of Man (1955) is simply the most beautiful and true thing I’ve ever read.

It tells the story of a continent and its colonisers with such rapturous visions that the reader forgets that sentence structure is lost and all that remains is words, like a floating vision of a long-lost world.

Alan Jock Marshall’s essay Australia Limited was published in 1942 in the Think or be Damned series.

This sharp, witty essay describes a limited and parochial Australia that Marshall , a soldier, is about to risk his life to defend, fighting the Japanese behind the lines in New Guinea.

Beautifully observed, with an unflinching eye, it describes an ignorant, self-satisfied Sydney, whose residents repeat ad nauseum that it is the best city in the world.

On the eve of embarking, Marshall struggles with the idea of whether this place is worth losing your life for, and whether it can ever become truly great.