A panel of judges was recently appointed to select the winner of the ASAA Mid-Career Book Prize for 2026. The panel is pleased to announce the winner as: Dr Sophie Chao from the University of Sydney for the book Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan Theories of Hunger, Duke University Press, 2025.

ASAA President, Associate Professor David Hundt, would like to thank the three judges for their generosity in serving on the prize selection committee: Professor Patrick Guinness (ANU), Professor Vera Mackie (University of Wollongong), and Professor Baogang He (Deakin University).

The judges provided the following citation for the winning book:

Chao’s Land of Famished Beings revisits the site of her earlier book In the Shadow of the Palms to focus more explicitly on the lives and epistemologies of women in Marind society. Her, and their, central focus is on hunger, but they reject its narrow definition in terms of malnutrition and its scientification solely in terms of statistics. Hunger afflicts animals, forests, institutions, infrastructures, spirits and even sorcerers, as well as human families. The capitalist growth of logging and oil palm companies enabled by government policies consumes Marind lifeways, and proves insatiable in its own hungry consumption of people and environment.

The book is exemplary in a number of ways. It focuses on women’s views and shows how their pride in their domestic and land-based identity does not fit easily with Western feminist emphases. Chao emphasises that these views are diverse and should be seen as indigenous theorisation alongside academic scholarship. Indigenous theories of the inter-relations of forest and people in terms of skin, wetness and metabolic justice enable a nuanced account of responses to industrial growth. The book allows these voices to come to the fore through women’s songs, verbatim conversations, and linguistic terms used to depict change. A key contribution is Chao’s reflections on ethnographic practice. In the chapter “Writing Hunger” she draws attention to tensions experienced in navigating relations with companies, government, ancestral spirits and forest beings. This leads her to focus on hesitation in ethnographic writing and on the ethics of representation.