Triumph and Demise: The Broken Promise of a Labor Generation (MUP) by Paul Kelly has won this year’s Walkley Book Award.

The judges described Kelly’s book, which analyses the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government from 2007 to 2013, as ‘an outstanding work of journalism as history from one of our finest writers and thinkers’. ‘[Kelly] demonstrates rare skill in capturing intimate testimony from key players, while managing to stand back from the tumult to offer calm observation and reflections on politics and the nation.’

Paul Toohey’s essay ‘That Sinking Feeling: Asylum Seekers and the Search for the Indonesian Solution’, published in Quarterly Essay 53 (Black Inc.), won the Walkley Award for Feature Writing Long (over 4000 words).