From the winner of the 2022 Penguin Literary Prize.

Told from five different points of view, each one revealing something different, On a Bright Hillside in Paradise, tells the story of a family of convict descendants in the back-blocks of Tasmania, on a farm in a place called Paradise. They lead hard-scrabble lives. The drama begins when strangers arrive, Christian Brethren evangelists who hold big revival meetings in local barns.

On a Bright Hillside in Paradise tackles big questions of faith and family but remains grounded in the dreams and strivings of its beautifully drawn characters. Higgs takes lives that history might have judged as small and imbues them with immense dignity and complex and compelling inner lives.

Avoiding the myth of the ‘frontier pioneer’ On a Bright Hillside in Paradise instead shows how these convict descendants wanted nothing more than to retreat to the bush to heal from their trauma, developing a deep love of the landscape in the process.

At its heart the novel is about a close-knit community, and home-making in the bush. Despite injuries, losses, deaths, and near-starvation the family survives.

Annette Higgs is a writer living in Sydney, Australia. A Pushcart nominee, her short fiction has been published in a number of US journals- The Writing Disorder, Typehouse, LitroNY, Litbreak, RueScribe, The New Guard, The Plentitudes Journal, and in the Adelaide Literary Journal, where she placed as a finalist in 2019. Her stories also appear in the Australian TEXT Journal and the online journal Brain Drip, and in the anthology Signs of Life; in the UK in Confluence and The Selkie; and in India, in the Bangalore Review. She earned a Master of Creative Writing degree from the University of Sydney, and has just completed the requirements for Doctor of Arts.
She tweets @sendchampagne