Tim Winton's Cloudstreet Tops ABC Radio National's Top 100 Australian Books

What topped the list? Tim Winton's Cloudstreet is Australia's favourite Australian book, according to listeners of ABC Radio National. The 1991 novel came in at number one in the network's Top 100 Australian Books countdown, which wrapped up on Sunday, October 18, Australian time. The ABC said more than 280,000 votes were counted.

This is an audience poll, not a juried prize. Still, it is a rare snapshot of what a whole country's readers actually reach for, and the answer was a 35-year-old family saga about a house in Perth.

The top ten

The ABC's final hour, the "8 to 1" episode hosted by Claire Nichols, Kate Evans and Luke Dundon, revealed the last eight places. The full top ten:

1. Cloudstreet, Tim Winton (1991)
2. The Book Thief, Markus Zusak (2005)
3. Boy Swallows Universe, Trent Dalton (2018)
4. Burial Rites, Hannah Kent (2013)
5. A Fortunate Life, A.B. Facey (1981)
6. Tomorrow, When the War Began, John Marsden (1993)
7. The Dictionary of Lost Words, Pip Williams (2020)
8. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan (2013)
9. The Secret River, Kate Grenville (2005)
10. The Dry, Jane Harper (2016)

The hosts noted that war and survival run through much of the top eight, from the Burma Railway in Flanagan's novel to Gallipoli in Facey's memoir and Nazi Germany in Zusak's.

Four for Winton

Winton placed three more books on the list: Breath (2008) at 33, Dirt Music (2001) at 41 and Juice (2024) at 88. Cloudstreet also won him the second of his four Miles Franklin Literary Awards.

The rest of the list mixes old and new. Two 2025 books made it: Charlotte McConaghy's Wild Dark Shore at 16 and Sally Hepworth's Mad Mabel at 28. So did picture books like Mem Fox and Julie Vivas's Possum Magic at 11, and Alison Lester's Magic Beach at 19. And, at 22, the Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book.

A book launched into a recession

The ABC used the result to ask Winton about the book's odd start. He told Radio National's The Book Show the outlook was grim by the time the novel was due at the printer in 1991.

"We were publishing it into a hideous recession," he said. "Interest rates were at 17.5 per cent. The economy was just really struggling. People were doing it hard. We were broke ourselves."

His publishers, Hilary McPhee and Diana Gribble, decided to put it out as a cheaper paperback rather than a pricier hardcover. It worked fast. "Within a week, it was just doing mad things," Winton said.

According to the ABC, the novel has never been out of print in the 35 years since. It has been adapted for radio, theatre, opera and television. "I still get mail," Winton said. "It's an odd phenomenon that I just can't account for."

Where it came from

Cloudstreet follows two working-class families, the Lambs and the Pickles, who end up sharing a big, run-down house in Perth over about twenty years in the middle of the last century. Winton wrote much of it overseas, during a residency that took his young family to Paris, rural Ireland and the Greek island of Hydra. He has said the homesickness sharpened how he saw home.

The book draws on the stories he heard as a child at family lunches. Its matriarch, Oriel Lamb, who lives in a tent in the backyard, is based on his paternal grandmother, Olive, who did the same under a mulberry bush for 30 years. "I just thought it was normal," Winton told the ABC. "I thought everybody's nana lived in a tent."

He writes about the novel's origins in "That Book," the last essay in his new collection, Songs from the Firefront.

Why it matters to the trade

Reader polls like this one hand out no money, but they can give older books a second life. A countdown that runs on a national radio network over several days is the kind of attention a backlist title rarely gets. The list leans old. Only three of the top ten, Boy Swallows Universe, The Dictionary of Lost Words and The Dry, came out in the past decade, and the oldest, A Fortunate Life, dates to 1981.

For authors, it is a reminder of how long a book can keep finding readers. Cloudstreet came out when its publishers were worried about the economy, and it is still the book people vote for.

More on Winton's books and earlier coverage is on our Tim Winton page.

Sources

• ABC News, October 19, 2026: Tim Winton's Cloudstreet named number one in ABC Radio National's Top 100 Australian Books
• ABC Radio National: Radio National's Top 100 Books (full ranked list)
• ABC listen, Top 100 Books: 8 to 1