‘A very strange feeling’: Helen Garner on global attention and winning $100,000 UK literary award

In the 24 hours since Helen Garner was named winner of Britain’s top non-fiction prize for her deeply intimate diaries, How to End a Story, she has been inundated with congratulations from fellow writers and readers and undertaken almost a dozen media interviews, including the BBC.

“Flabbergasted” and “exhausting” are how she describes the immediate aftermath of her being named as the winner of the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, her first major award in the UK.

Until shortlisted, she’d never heard of the literature award, and has long been ambivalent about the value of prizes themselves.

“It’s a very strange feeling because I’m getting all this kind of attention at the moment,” Garner, who turns 83 on Friday, told this masthead. In recent months, she has also gained international attention as a favourite of pop singer Dua Lipa’s book club and when the cover of her gripping debut novel Monkey Grip appeared in an episode of Sex and the City sequel And Just Like That.

“At this very advanced age, suddenly my back list is being published and praised in other countries, and it’s the same books that I couldn’t get published in those places years ago when I wrote them. Now it’s a different story. That’s gratifying and yet at the same time people say, ‘Oh, you must be so happy’ and, well, ‘no, I’m not actually’. I’m just so ordinary.”

The acclaimed writer is the second Australian to win the Baillie Gifford Prize, worth $100,000, in as many years. Garner follows in the footsteps of last year’s winner Richard Flanagan, who won the 2024 prize for his genre-bending memoir Question 7. Other notable winners include Anna Funder in 2004 for Stasiland and Helen Macdonald for H Is for Hawk in 2014.

Garner’s How to End a Story is a collection of diary fragments recorded over 20 years, spanning her career in bohemian Melbourne, the reception to Monkey Grip’s release in 1977, and her collapsing marriage in the 1990s. The collection was first published in three separate volumes in Australia.

Rachel Cooke of The Observer wrote that, “these are the greatest, richest journals by a writer since Virginia Woolf’s”. In his review for this masthead, Peter Craven described it as a “tremendous feat” of “bloodcurdling credibility”.

Chair of judges Robbie Millen, who is literary editor of London’s The Times and The Sunday Times, said Garner was the judges’ unanimous choice.

“All six judges agreed that How to End a Story, the first diaries to win the Baillie Gifford Prize, is a remarkable, addictive book. Garner takes the diary form, mixing the intimate, the intellectual, and the everyday, to new heights.”

An avid diarist, Garner was initially confronted with an enormous amount of material to bring the volume to publication. “I had to do some radical slashing for length and I made a deal with myself that I would just try not to be boring,” she said. “That’s one of my main aims as a writer is not to be a bore.”

She did contact those she loved to forewarn them of her intentions to publish. An ex-husband, nicknamed V in the diaries, did not fall into that category.

Garner eschews the comparisons with Woolf but is gratified that the diary hit a nerve with readers. “It’s not that I’m just out there kind of standing in the street with no clothes on going, ‘Look at my suffering’. It’s a sort of first-person plural feeling I get. The deeper I go into myself in the diaries in the examination of my own life, the more I find other people there on that level.

“The picture of a collapsing marriage is archetypal and the marriage itself is archetypal, so it’s not as if my marriage was excruciatingly worse than anyone else. In fact, I can see that it wasn’t because there’s a number of people who said to me, ‘That could be my marriage’. I mean, they put it in those exact words, and it was enlightening to see how I entered the relationship and what happened to it. But I wouldn’t use the word catharsis.”

Despite this success, the author doesn’t intend to publish another volume, though she still keeps a diary. Her latest book, written with fellow Australian authors Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein about the Erin Patterson mushroom murder trial, will be released next week.

A diary would touch on her life as a grandmother, and she’s not sure those grandchildren would enjoy the public scrutiny. Diary writing as a literary form has much to recommend it, she says.

“I want everybody to expose more of themselves. I want to know more about people. I want [them] to understand themselves better.”

Read an exclusive extract from The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations on a Triple Murder Trial (Text Publishing), by Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein in Good Weekend on Saturday.

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