Award-Winning novel!
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Moreno blends fiction and family memoir, paying tribute to the lives and labour of his parents and their community of postwar Italian immigrants in Australia.
Life for Italian immigrants in Australia in the years immediately after the WWII is full of work opportunities (relative to back home, particularly), and Moreno’s family focus on the art of growing tobacco. Soon after arriving they relocate four hours north of Melbourne. They work for others, then set out on their own. This isn’t just farming, it’s life, and Giovannoni writes with proud, respectful insight about his parents, their fellow immigrants and their work.
‘The Immigrants’ is an understatedly beautiful book, about a critically important part of Australia’s history and social fabric. The labour and suffering of Moreno’s family and others like them is fittingly remembered, and celebrated, in this remarkable book.
Book Now to hear more with MORENO GIOVANNONI
Meet Moreno Giovannoni
Moreno Giovannoni, a long-standing freelance translator, first gained major literary recognition as the inaugural recipient of the ‘Deborah Cass Prize for Writing’ in 2015.
His acclaimed novel ‘The Immigrants’ won the ‘2026 Age Book of the Year Award’ and the ‘Christina Stead Prize for Fiction’ at the 2026 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and was shortlisted for the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.
A story of love, dreams, exile and tragedy, told with heartbreaking beauty.
In The Immigrants, Moreno Giovannoni depicts his family as they build a new life in a strange land. Through love and exile, industry and tragedy, their unspoken dreams and fears unfold in this astonishing and moving book.
The poverty of postwar Europe encouraged thousands of migrants to try their luck in Australia. Italians formed a large cohort of these migrants, but many of them didn’t see their migration as permanent, rather as a chance to make some money and then return home to build a better life.
The happy story of the immigrant who arrives and finds a home and place in their new country is not necessarily always the true one. For many, their dreams were never fulfilled and their lives were ‘founded on homesickness, disappointment and failure’.
Moreno’s father, Ugo, was one of them. At his home in Tuscany, there was little prospect of making a decent living and in 1957, at the age of 30, he left his home and his young wife and son to try his luck in the ‘English Colony’. In the 1950s, it was possible to make good money growing tobacco, providing the weather was good and you could keep the bugs down. Yet for many of these lonely men, Australia never felt like home; often when they had a little money they sent for their wives and children or fiancées to join them, but the goal of returning for good was always there.
Moreno has brilliantly drawn on techniques of memoir, documentary-making, and social and oral history to create a compelling and genre-bending picture of life in a new country — and a broader view of 20th-century Australia and the immigrant labour that fuelled it. Its humour (and sly observations of both Italians and Australians) are juxtaposed with sobering acts of violence. This is storytelling of the vernacular kind.
‘This book is written with such tenderness and clarity, you’ll be instantly drawn into the suffering and joy of these lives.‘
– THE GUARDIAN
‘This delicious autobiographical novel about Italian migrants in Victoria’s tobacco-growing country starts, quite literally, with a bang and charms with its large cast of distinct characters, tender wit and sensitivity.‘
– THE AGE
‘Giovannoni writes about his subjects with such care, tenderness, and gentle humour … The Immigrants, a compelling, emotionally rich work, offers a poetic and at times moving treatment of a little-known part of Australian history‘
– AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW
‘Just when you think you have its measure, the book pivots in some delightful, unexpected direction. It is a joy …The Immigrants branches steadily outward until it is telling something far larger than one family’s story – something universal and necessary.‘
– JUDGE’S Comments ~ The Age Book of the Year Award 2026
‘The Immigrants was selected as this year’s winner due to its flawless writing, sublime experimentation with form and extremely sensitive sense of place. Giovannoni’s autofiction wraps the reader around his life like some sort of spell, creating a humbling reflection on the entire life that someone lives – and what remains of it once they’re gone. The judges were particularly impressed by its polyphonic form and distinctive Australian quality. It will take readers to places they’ve never been before.’‘
– JUDGE’S Comments ~ NSW Literary Awards 2026
‘Moreno Giovannoni has a gift for words that resonate beyond their surface meaning. The book is epic in the breadth of its detail — the vastness of the landscape seen through a child’s eyes, the struggle to live, the sadness of disappointed hopes, and the growing sense of a punitive fate that blighted those initial dreams.‘
– EUREKA STREET