Tim Winton's novel Cloudstreet has been named Australia's favourite book in an ABC Radio National poll. The results were published over the weekend, with the survey serving to compile a list of the 100 best Australian books as chosen by readers.
Markus Zusak's 2005 novel The Book Thief took second place, while Trent Dalton's Boy Swallows Universe came third. First published in 1991, Cloudstreet follows two working-class Australian families, the Lambs and the Pickles, over 20 years of shared life in an old, spacious house called Cloudstreet in post-war Perth.
It is Winton's fifth novel and ninth book. Following its publication, Cloudstreet won a number of awards, including the Miles Franklin Award in 1992. It has been a standard text in Australian literature education for decades, with hundreds of thousands of copies sold in Australia alone.
The novel was top of the Australian Society of Authors' poll in 2003, which asked writers for their favourites, and was also first in that year's ABC poll of the general public. Winton's work also featured on the BBC's list of 100 novels that shaped our world in 2019.
The final list of 100 for this year's ABC Radio National poll encompassed adult fiction, non-fiction, young adult literature, children's picture books, history and cookbooks. The Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book made the top 50, placing 22nd. Stephanie Alexander's The Cook's Companion took 56th place, while Nagi Maehashi's RecipeTin Eats: Dinner entered the list at 96th.
Several authors had multiple books on the Sunday top 100 list, including Helen Garner, Melissa Lucashenko, Geraldine Brooks, Anna Funder, Peter Carey and Hannah Kent. The final list also included works by children's authors Alison Lester, Paul Jennings, Mem Fox, Jeannie Baker and Ruth Park. The oldest published work was Marcus Clarke's For the Term of His Natural Life from 1874, placed at 80th, while the newest were Sally Hepworth's Mad Mabel and Charlotte McConaghy's Wild Dark Shore, both published in 2025.
Kate Evans, host of ABC Radio National's literary program The Bookshelf, said the list ranged from 'bold literary fiction to historical depictions of who we were and how we might understand all that complicated past, to joyful children's books, Indigenous stories of pain and humour, and many, many family sagas'. She added that the list 'resists any superficial conclusion about how we read – and that is precisely the point'.
