SHORTLISTED FOR THE READINGS NEW AUSTRALIAN FICTION PRIZE 2026
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 ARA HISTORICAL NOVEL PRIZE
The price of genius is one hell of a hangover.
In 1892, New South Wales' most promising writer and least promising teetotaller, Henry Lawson, is banished to Bourke to 'find the real bush'. The goal: sober up, gather fresh material, and stop being such a disappointment. But what Australia's favourite literary son discovers in the river town is less a glorious national frontier than a collective nervous breakdown.
History records this as the trip that defined his career. Wayne Marshall records it as a surrealist action movie where Lawson must outrun his own myth and a gunslinger known as The Rider, aka Banjo - a poet significantly better at being a legend than Henry is.
Henry Goes Bush confronts the madness that lies behind our colonial dreaming - a moment where history is a hallucination and 'the bush' a phantasmagoric theme park. A reality in which The Bulletin's famed poetry wars are an actual shootout on the banks of the Darling River.
It turns out finding 'the real Australia' is easy; the hard part is surviving the encounter.
'like nothing you've read before' - MICHAEL WINKLER
'a genre-defying wonder of a novel' - RYAN O'NEILL
'surreal, singular, and deeply moving' - RHETT DAVIS