Critical Care: Nurses on the frontline of Australia’s AIDS crisis by Geraldine Fela has received the 2025 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Australian History.
The 2025 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards celebrate the exceptional talents of emerging and established Australian writers, illustrators, poets, and historians.
Last night at the National Library of Australia in Canberra.
“This year’s Prime Minister’s Literary Awards highlight the remarkable breadth of talent in Australian writing,” said Minister for the Arts, The Hon Tony Burke MP.
“From deeply researched histories to works of poetry and fiction that challenge and inspire.”
Gerladine Fela received the Australian History Award for her book Critical Care.
As a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, Fela’s research and teaching traverse histories of gender and sexuality, labour, social movements and medicine.
Critical Care: Nurses on the Frontline of Australia’s AIDS Crisis examines the role of nurses during Australia’s HIV and AIDS crisis.
Bringing together stories from across the country.
Documenting the extraordinary care, compassion and solidarity shown by HIV and AIDS nurses.
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‘Inspiring history of progressive public health strategy’
HIV and AIDS devastated communities across Australia in the 1980s and 1990s.
In the midst of this profound health crisis, nurses provided crucial care to those living with and dying from the virus.
They negotiated homophobia and complex family dynamics, as well as defending the rights of their patients.
In her video acceptance speech, Fela spoke of her sources.
Saying, “their recollection of the profound crisis and suffering decades ago calls on us to think about the healthcare workers in the world right now.”
“Who are working on a very different kind of frontline.”
“In Gaza, hospitals have become the frontline of a genocide, and healthcare workers are caring for their patients as bombs and bullets rain down on them.
“It is far, far past time for Australia to sanction Israel and to end the deadly trade in military parts.”
Critical Care unearths the important and unexamined history of nurses and nursing unions as caregivers and political agents who helped shape Australia’s response to HIV and AIDS.
“In an age when public health is a matter of urgent concern, Critical Care is both an original and revealing history of Australia’s response to AIDS and a valuable source of guidance for the future,” the judges said.
Highlighting the book was “written with empathy and narrative flair.”
“It takes the reader inside remote Indigenous communities, regional areas, and city hospitals.”
“Built on interviews with over thirty nurses and many of those who survived HIV,
“Fela maps the human response to a public health emergency with compassion, insight, and an acute eye for telling detail.”
Nurses and patients at the forefront of her narrative
Siting Critical Care as an “inspiring history of progressive public health strategy should be cause for national pride.”
Praising Fela’s “collaborative, community-based education approach, rather than isolating and controlling patients.”
Highlighting that “nurses played an important role, centring the rights of affected communities.”
The judges said that Fela “draws attention to the largely collaborative response of government to the crisis.”
And that they “expertly traces the intersections between public health policy, frontline care, and the wider impact of AIDS.”
“The voices of nurses and patients always remain at the forefront of her narrative,
“Showing how they coped with the illness and managed the complex terrain of social anxieties and prejudice that came with it.”
Fela told The Australian she was “too much of a bookworm” to take up a role in a hospital, but wanted to salute those who did.
Focusing her research project at a time when many of the nurses who worked at the frontline of the AIDS crisis were at the end of their careers.
“It had a profound impact on them,” Fela said.
“They never forgot. And they were quietly proud of the role they played.”
Fela recalled being told of nurses who gently insisted that a patient’s partner be allowed to be by his bedside as he lay dying.
Even if the family objected.
“When Covid came, we completely forgot the lessons we learnt,” she says. “I was quite dispirited by that, actually.”
Both the winners and the shortlisted authors will share in a tax-free prize pool of $600,000.
Making this the richest literary prize in Australia.
Each shortlisted entry will receive $5,000, with the winner of each category receiving $80,000.
Other winners include:
Children’s Literature – Leo and Ralph by Peter Carnavas
Fiction – Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser
Non-fiction – Mean Streak by Rick Morton
Young adult literature – The Invocations by Krystal Sutherland
Poetry – The Other Side of Daylight: New and Selected Poems by David Brooks
“The 2025 winners reflect the richness and diversity of Australian storytelling,” said Writing Australia Director, Wenona Byrne.
“Each of these works brings a unique perspective, whether it is giving voice to critical moments in our history, sparking imagination in young readers, or offering new ways to think about the world around us.”
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