Tim Winton’s ‘Cloudstreet’ Crowned Australia’s Favourite Book in ABC Radio National Poll

Tim Winton’s sweeping Australian family saga Cloudstreet has been voted the nation’s favourite book in a nationwide poll conducted by ABC Radio National.

The broadcaster unveiled the results of the survey, which compiled a list of the top 100 Australian books as chosen by readers, over the weekend.

Markus Zusak’s 2005 novel The Book Thief secured second place, while Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe rounded out the top three.

First published in 1991, Cloudstreet chronicles the intertwined lives of two working-class families—the Lambs and the Pickles—over two decades in a rambling Perth house known as Cloudstreet. The novel, Winton’s fifth, won the Miles Franklin Award in 1992 and has remained a fixture of Australian literature curricula for decades, selling hundreds of thousands of copies domestically.

The novel has topped previous Australian literary surveys, including a 2003 Australian Society of Authors poll of writers and a public ABC poll the same year. It also featured in the BBC’s 2019 list of “100 novels that shaped our world.”

This year’s top 100 spanned a broad spectrum, encompassing adult fiction, non-fiction, young adult and children’s literature, history, and cookbooks. The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book entered at number 22, Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion at 56, and Nagi Maehashi’s RecipeTin Eats: Dinner at 96.

Several authors appeared multiple times, including Helen Garner, Melissa Lucashenko, Geraldine Brooks, Anna Funder, Peter Carey, and Hannah Kent. Children’s authors Alison Lester, Paul Jennings, Mem Fox, Jeannie Baker, and Ruth Park were also well represented.

The oldest work on the list was Marcus Clarke’s 1874 novel For the Term of His Natural Life (No. 80), while the most recent were Sally Hepworth’s Mad Mabel and Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore, both published in 2025.

Kate Evans, host of ABC Radio National’s literary program The Bookshelf, noted the list’s diversity, ranging from “audacious literary fiction to historical accounts of who we’ve been and how we might understand all that complicated past, to joyful children’s books, Indigenous stories of both pain and humour, and many, many family stories.”

“This list defies any glib conclusions about how we read – and surely that’s the point,” Evans said.

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