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Tasmanian Literary Awards

The Labyrinth by Amanda Lohrey (Text Publishing)

Winner Tasmanian Literary Awards 2022 Badge

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More about The Labyrinth

The Labyrinth

Erica Marsden’s son, an artist, has been imprisoned for homicidal negligence. In a state of grief, Erica cuts off all ties to family and friends, and retreats to a quiet hamlet on the south-east coast near the prison where he is serving his sentence. There, in a rundown shack, she obsesses over creating a labyrinth by the ocean. To build it—to find a way out of her quandary—Erica will need the help of strangers. And that will require her to trust, and to reckon with her past. The Labyrinth is a hypnotic story of guilt and denial, of the fraught relationship between parents and children, that is also a meditation on how art can both be ruthlessly destructive and restore sanity. It shows Amanda Lohrey to be at the peak of her powers

Read an extract from the book

About the author

Amanda Lohrey lives in Tasmania and writes fiction and non-fiction. She has taught at the University of Tasmania, the University of Technology Sydney and the University of Queensland. Amanda is a regular contributor to the Monthly magazine and a former senior fellow of the Australia Council’s Literature Board. She received the 2012 Patrick White Award. In 2021 The Labyrinth, her eighth work of fiction, won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, a Prime Minister’s Literary Award and the Voss Literary Prize, and was shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year and a Queensland Literary Award.