Olivia De Zilva Wins the 2026 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction

Olivia De Zilva has won the 2026 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction for Plastic Budgie, her debut novel from Pink Shorts Press. Readings, the Melbourne bookshop chain that runs the award, announced the result on October 27. The prize is worth $5,000 (Australian).

De Zilva is the prize's twelfth winner. Readings' award page describes it as going to "the best novel from an emerging Australian author."

The book

Plastic Budgie came out in July 2025. Pink Shorts Press calls it a "brutally funny and inventive debut about family and self." It is autofiction. The narrator, also named Olivia, grows up in Adelaide as the child of Asian immigrant parents, and her grandparents, Poh Poh and Gong Gong, help raise her. The story begins with a baby who remembers being born, and it moves through school discos, a pet bird bought in a shoebox at the Adelaide Central Markets and a trip to Guangzhou for a cousin's wedding. Then the book breaks its own pattern and starts asking how memory and family shape a person.

Gene Pinter chaired the judges and wrote the announcement. He said the book "stood out from our competitive shortlist from the very start," and that the panel saw it doing something none of the other books were trying. He called it "whip-smart, funny like a hit nerve, and devastating in its emotional precision," and compared it to Helen Garner's Monkey Grip and Michelle de Kretser's Theory & Practice.

Fifteen Readings staff members of different ages judged the prize this year, and Readings said the debate "was fierce."

The shortlist

Six books were on the shortlist Readings published in September:

• Desolation by Hossein Asgari (Ultimo Press)
• Mantle by Romy Ash (Ultimo Press)
• Arborescence by Rhett Davis (Hachette)
• Plastic Budgie by Olivia De Zilva (Pink Shorts Press)
• Learned Behaviours by Zeynab Gamieldien (Ultimo Press)
• Henry Goes Bush by Wayne Marshall (Picador)

Half of that list came from one publisher, Ultimo Press.

About the author

De Zilva is from Adelaide. Before Plastic Budgie she published a young adult book, Eggshell, and a poetry collection, Sick Note. Readings says she also works as an educator and consultant, helping schools in South Australia and New South Wales build up young people's own creative writing.

Last year's winner was Dominic Amerena for I Want Everything. Earlier winners listed by Readings include Jessica Au's Cold Enough for Snow and Tracey Lien's All That's Left Unsaid.

Why it matters for writers

This prize is picked by booksellers, not by a jury of critics, and the money is only part of it. The bigger payoff is a whole bookshop chain getting behind your book. That matters most for a small press like Pink Shorts, which has no big marketing budget behind its titles. A debut that's more than a year old can get a second life this way. Small-press authors in Australia should note that Readings looks well past the big houses when it builds its list.

Sources

• Readings, October 27, 2026: The 2026 winner of The Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction
• Readings: The Readings New Australian Fiction Prize 2026 shortlist
• Readings: Award winners
• Pink Shorts Press: Plastic Budgie

Photo: The entrance to Readings in Carlton, Melbourne. Photo by Nick-D, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.