Huge congratulations to all the authors shortlisted for the 2025 Victorian Premier's Literary Award. Very excited to see David Owen Kelly on the list with his book Host City which I designed the cover for. Huge congrats also to Puncher & Wattmann publishing with two of their title in the running.
The cover is actually a photo of the author in his younger days in Darlinghurst. This is the second of David’s books that I have designed the cover for. Here is the wrap up of the book from the awards website:
Title: Host City
Author: David Owen Kelly
Publisher: Puncher & Wattmann
Shortlist: Fiction
Darlinghurst, Sydney: these are the days of strange rumours. Talk you can catch the gay plague from kissing, or from a mosquito bite. Talk of the government building a wall around ‘Darlo' to keep the plague contained. Talk of old quarantine stations around Australia being reopened, of the army being used to round up all the poofters. Bashings increase tenfold and you’re dead meat if you don’t have someone to watch your back. Kit, Ty and Johnnie, three young gay men, just want to live the life Sydney promised when they arrived.
Host City, David Owen Kelly’s third book, is a stunningly innovative fusion of memoir and alternative history that spins an affective tale of persecution, jeopardy and survival from the fear and paranoia that marched lockstep with HIV in the 1980s.
Judges’ report
A young man moves from Sir Joh's Brisbane to gritty Darlinghurst amid the first stirrings of the pandemic then known as GRID. The result is a darkly gleaming novel, seasoned and wise, in language that moves with a nightbound liquid glamour. At a certain point, Kelly’s bildungsroman wholly commits itself to a shocking transformation that readers deserve to discover for themselves. Not content to document the early years of the AIDS crisis – although it does a brilliant, often funny job of that – Host City delivers an unflinching alternative history that asks disturbing questions about past and present urban gay life.
This is the other of David’s work that I designed the cover for