The Voice to Parliament Handbook by Thomas Mayo and Kerry O’Brien has won Book of the Year at the 2024 Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIAs).

The book, published in the lead-up to the 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum, also took out the General Non-Fiction Book of the Year and Social Impact Book of the Year.

Mayo, an Indigenous leader and one of the signatories of the Uluru Statement of the Heart, told ABC RN Breakfast in 2023 how he invited O’Brien to create a simple guide to the referendum to address misinformation that plagued the campaign.

“I thought a handbook — something simple that people could hold onto, pass around and share with others to help them find the truth — would be important,” he said.

The awards acknowledged in a statement that even though the Voice to Parliament was voted down, the guide “stands as a poignant reminder of a significant moment in Australia’s history”.

O’Brien, a Walkley Award-winning journalist and former host of The 7.30 Report and Four Corners on ABC TV, explained why he was eager to work with Mayo on the project:

“When I see something as important as The Voice and the challenge it lays out and the opportunity it lays out for all Australians … I want to do what I can to help the process of debate and discussion and to clear up the misunderstandings, the confusion and the misinformation because I think this is such an important moment in our history.”

Trent Dalton and Pip Williams among 2024 winners

The 2024 ABIAs, presented at a ceremony in Melbourne on May 9, recognised the achievements of authors, illustrators, editors and publishers across 22 categories.

Trent Dalton — who swept the 2019 ABIAs with his debut novel Boy Swallows Universe — won the Literary Fiction Book of the Year for his third novel, Lola in the Mirror (4th Estate, HarperCollins Publishers).

The novel — which tells the story of a mother and daughter on the run from a violent past — tackles the issue of homelessness, which Dalton says is at crisis levels in Brisbane as the city prepares for the 2030 Olympic Games.

The Bookbinder of Jericho (Affirm Press) — Adelaide author Pip Williams’s follow-up to her bestselling 2020 debut, The Dictionary of Lost Words — took out the General Fiction Book of the Year and Marketing Strategy of the Year.

Set during World War I, Williams’s novel centres on Peggy and Maude, two young sisters from a working-class background who work in the bindery of Oxford University Press.

“There’s no shortage of World War I books or World War II books … but what I found is that most of those books either portray the experience of men in the trenches or women waiting for someone to come home, or they’re about espionage,” Williams told The Book Show.