Immaculate by Australian author Anna McGahan wins The Vogel Award for Young Writers

Anna McGahan’s Immaculate is the winner of this year's The Australian / Vogel’s Award for Young Writers, which has launched the careers of over a hundred Australian authors, including Anna’s uncle, beloved Australian novelist Andrew McGahan. The award is one of Australia’s richest and most prestigious awards for an unpublished manuscript by a writer under the age of thirty-five.

About the book...

All Frances wants is a cure for her daughter, but that would take a miracle, and miracles aren’t something Frances believes in anymore.

Newly divorced from her pastor ex-husband and excommunicated from the church community she once worked within, she wrestles alone with the prognosis of her terminally ill child. Any suggestion of ‘divine intervention’ is salt in the wound of her grief. So when Frances is forced to take in a homeless and pregnant teenage girl who claims to have had an immaculate conception, she’s deeply challenged.

But 16-year-old Mary is not who she seems, and soon opens the door to perspectives that profoundly shift Frances’s sense of reality, triggering a chain of astonishing events. It seems that where there is the greatest suffering lies an unexpected magic. Frances begins to hold hope for her family’s future, but the miracle prayed for is not always the one received.

Immaculate is a provocative and tender exploration of loss, identity and healing, and the secret worlds we hide within in order to survive.