The Mushroom Tapes, Mad Mabel triumph at Australian Book Industry Awards
Three respected authors — Sarah Krasnostein, Helen Garner and Chloe Hooper — joined forces to write the now-award-winning The Mushroom Tapes. (Supplied: Text/Darren James)
In May 2025, three of Australia's most respected literary true-crime writers set off on the almost two-hour drive from Melbourne to Morwell in regional Victoria.
Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein have written on subjects as diverse as the trial of Robert Farquharson, the Black Saturday bushfires, and the daily work of trauma cleaners, and boast a Baillie Gifford Prize, Melbourne Prize for Literature, Wyndham-Campbell Prize, Victorian Prize for Literature and a handful of Walkleys between them.
ABC Arts book critic Declan Fry described The Mushroom Tapes as a "monster of a true-crime book". (Supplied: Text)
That day in May, the authors and friends were en route to the trial of the now notorious Erin Patterson, convicted in September of using death cap mushrooms to murder her estranged husband's mother, father and aunt in July 2023.
A book that transcribes the conversations between Garner, Hooper and Krasnostein has just won the prize for non-fiction at the Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIAs).
The Mushroom Tapes sees the authors weighing up the evidence, guessing at Patterson's motivations, and sharing their observations of people and events, both in and outside court.
More than just an account of the trial that inspired countless podcasts, books and even a TV drama, The Mushroom Tapes is an insight into how three authors think and write, and why they and audiences are so fascinated with true crime.
"None of us wants to write about this," they write. "And none of us wants not to write about it."
In November, Garner — known for her true-crime books This House of Grief and Joe Cinque's Consolation — admitted on ABC Radio National's Late Night Live she wasn't especially interested at first in going to Morwell to cover the mushroom murders.
She had recently published The Season, a book about her grandson's AFL team, when Hooper and Krasnostein suggested she join them at the trial.
"I thought, well, that could be fun. That could be interesting. Because a writer's life is quite lonely and solitary usually.
"I thought I might have fun and talk to some other writers and crack a few jokes and find an interesting story."
Among the other winners at the ABIAs, presented in Sydney on May 21, were Geraldine Brooks's memoir, Memorial Days, about her grief at the loss of her husband, which won the biography award; and Zeno Sworder's Once I Was a Giant, a book narrated by a tree, won both Book of the Year and best children's picture book.
Sally Hepworth's latest novel Mad Mabel, about the (fictional) youngest Australian to be convicted of murder, won both best audiobook and best general fiction; while Charlotte McConaghy's Wild Dark Shore, about a mysterious woman washing up on a remote island near Antarctica, won the award for literary fiction.
- Jump to the full list of Australian Book Industry Award winners
Finding the detail
In 2023, Nagi Maehashi won the top prize at the ABIAs for her cookbook RecipeTin Eats: Dinner.
The book remains a bestseller in Australia: It was the second most popular adult non-fiction book last year, selling 128,000 copies, bested only by her latest book RecipeTin Eats: Tonight (an ABIA winner in 2025).
Eerily the book also appears in The Mushroom Tapes as Krasnostein mentions the copy of RecipeTin Eats: Dinner on Patterson's kitchen counter "with its food-spattered beef Wellington recipe on page 252".
On Instagram in July, after the jury found Patterson guilty, Maehashi wrote: "It is of course upsetting to learn that one of my recipes — perhaps the one I've spent more hours perfecting than any other — something that I created to bring joy and happiness, is entangled in this tragic situation."
Speaking to Late Night Live, Garner described the page of the cookbook as part of the "cataract of fabulous detail" you can find in a court.
Patterson leaving court after being sentenced to life in prison in September. (AAP: Joel Carrett)
"The things that I notice in a court, I could never squeeze into one book," she said. "Because there's so many of them, [like the] thousands of little tiny power struggles between the people in the gallery or the little struggle you go through every day on the way through security."
They're the kinds of details Garner has always had an eye for — whether in her debut novel Monkey Grip or in her diaries, which won her the Baillie Gifford last year.
"I'm trying to remain open to them because they're always there,"Garner said.
"When I was young and I had vague ideas that maybe I might like to write something one day, I used to think that I wouldn't be able to, because it seemed to me that I was surrounded always by this sea of tiny details and I thought that's not what you need to write a book.
"But as the years went by, I realised what treasures they were and how there are ways that you can use them and they serve themselves to you."
Writing about court
On 7.30 on November, Garner recalled how it felt to realise her "mind and emotions were working in tandem" when she started writing about court.
"I do feel awe-struck by the law," she said. "I think law is like religion. It's our efforts to bear what we've been handed in life.
"You see the law trying to smooth the awful jaggedness of people and make sense of it.
"When I discovered courts and that you could go and watch a trial, I really thought I'd died and gone to heaven. It just seems to use up every part of me."
Loading...But Garner also noted she, Hooper and Krasnostein were never really able to make sense of Patterson's motivations.
"I had sort of fantasies as [the trial] went along thinking, 'Well maybe that's why she did it', and 'Could that be a big enough reason to kill someone?'" Garner said.
"The judge made a point of saying many times to the jury that the prosecution does not have to prove a motive — that's not part of a murder charge. He said often someone who commits a crime like this has no idea why they did it. It's as if motive is a kind of a phantom idea that hovers around a really ugly act."
Garner with journalist Fran Kelly and her fellow Mushroom Tapes authors Sarah Krasnostein and Chloe Hooper in Sydney in 2025. (Supplied: SWF/Jacquie Manning)
Still, Garner added she was "never surprised when I hear about a woman murdering someone" — a sentiment she also expressed in The Mushroom Tapes.
"I think that women stifle in themselves a huge amount of rage and we haven't got the wherewithal to express it much,"she said.
In The Mushroom Tapes, Garner described the "weird kind of empathy" she always has for the person on trial.
She explained the feeling to Late Night Live: "People suffer from enormous gusts of feeling that they only barely control."
"I think human beings are full of potential violence and rage. And in order to live in society, we're taught to control the destructive parts of our nature, and it's a big struggle.
"I look at the person in the dock as somebody who's lost that struggle in themselves."
In The Mushroom Tapes, Garner even described a moment when she lost control in a former marriage, one she writes about in the final part of her diaries, How to End a Story.
"Once I exploded with rage and wrecked a kitchen, and it was wonderfully gratifying," she told Hooper on the way to court.
"I threw a pot of beetroot soup against the wall. It looked like a giant bloodstain. I could have kept going! You can commit real destruction if you're only wrecking somebody's stuff."
But while Garner had flickers of empathy for Patterson, she still never felt she could "nut her out".
That's one reason she thinks the trial attracted so much attention.
"It wasn't a story from the depths of suffering and brutality in society," she said.
"This was a highly educated, middle-class woman of great articulacy when she spoke … and we couldn't get a handle on who she was.
"That's what puzzled us all the way through and I think still puzzles everybody."
Australian Book Industry Award Winners 2026
ABIA Book of the Year
Once I was a Giant by Zeno Sworder (Thames & Hudson)
Audiobook of the Year
Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth; narrated by Hannah Fredericksen and Jenny Seedsman (Pan Macmillan)
Biography Book of the Year
Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks (Hachette)
The John Marsden Book of the Year for Older Children (ages 13+)
Wandering Wild by Lynette Noni (Penguin Random House)
Book of the Year for Younger Children (ages 7–12)
Caution! This Book Contains Deadly Reptiles by Corey Tutt, illustrated by Ben Williams (Allen & Unwin)
Children's Picture Book of the Year (ages 0–6)
Once I was a Giant by Zeno Sworder (Thames & Hudson)
General Fiction Book of the Year
Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth (Pan Macmillan)
General Non-Fiction Book of the Year
The Mushroom Tapes by Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein (Text Publishing)
Illustrated Book of the Year
The Art of Kaylene Whiskey: Do you believe in love? by Kaylene Whiskey and Natalie King (Thames & Hudson)
International Book of the Year
Heart the Lover by Lily King (Canongate)
Literary Fiction Book of the Year
Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy (Penguin Random House)
Small Publishers' Adult Book of the Year
The Rot by Evelyn Araluen (University of Queensland Press)
Small Publishers' Children's Book of the Year
Sundays Under the Lemon Tree by Julia Busuttil Nishimura, illustrated by Myo Yim (Scribble)
Social Impact Book of the Year
A Piece of Red Cloth by Leonie Norrington, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Djawa Burarrwanga and Djawundil Maymuru (Allen & Unwin)
The Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year
Melaleuca by Angie Faye Martin (HQ)