His first book Dancing Home has just been named ACT Book of the Year. Speaking after the awards, Collis said he was pleased to win "an ACT government sticker to put on books".

As for the $10,000 cash prize? There was no mention of that.

Up until a few days ago, he wasn't even aware he had been nominated, or that the awards were on.

"I was really surprised! I found out on Monday, somebody told me that I was shortlisted, so I thought I'd go along to the awards," said Collis.

"I was clueless, I was really shocked."

It's his lack of concern for the material world that makes Dancing Home so spiritually powerful, someone entrenched in the Western sense of reality as we know it couldn't have written the book.

The novel tells the tale of Blackie and Rips, two drug-addicted Indigenous men who have just been released from prison.

It's written in the style of a "road movie", and tracks their journey to Wiradjuri country to seek revenge on a crooked cop and reconnect with family roots, while weaving in elements of dreams and the supernatural. Such elements position the novel as a genre-defining work of "Koori-noir".

The ACT government offers an ACT Book of the Year Award for exceptional literary works including fiction, non-fiction and poetry by ACT-based authors. The finalists include Jackie French (Facing the Flame), Omar Musa (Millefiori) and Rachel Sanderson (The Space Between) and Merlinda Bobis (Accidents of Composition).

Collis, a Barkindji man from Bourke, began writing the book during his PhD in which he explored Aboriginal masculinity in the 21st century at the University of Canberra. He now teaches creative writing there.

He won't make conclusive statements on the character deaths in Dancing Home, not because of spoilers, but because he'd like readers to discover for themselves that some people might "do more as a ghost, than as a human being."

"Ghosts represent unfinished business. Like in Shakespeare's Macbeth, Banquo, his best mate who he kills, does so much more as a ghost through memory and guilt than he could ever do in life. Moving through different places, different spaces and affecting people's minds.

"Indigenous people, and I, believe that when people die, their spirits still visit. You might see flashes of colour, smell their certain smell. The smell of baking bread, or fresh jasmine, like my Nan used to really like."

These spiritual experiences are part of Collis, but do non-Indigenous readers understand these parts of the book?

After the book won the David Unaipon Award for an unpublished manuscript by an Indigenous writer, he received emails from people saying they never knew about this spiritual element of Indigenous culture. This didn't sit too well with him.

"I was a bit angry, and a bit bemused that white people didn't know about Aboriginal culture. If you're living in France, you know French. The provinces, the language. In Australia, it's not that people don't want to know about Indigenous culture, it's just that I don't think it's been taught well in schools."

For Collis, this lack of acknowledgement or awareness of country is only one part of the problem.

When the European fleet arrived on Australian soil in 1788, it became a space of cultural clashes that led to vicious frontier wars and massacres of Indigenous people. It was estimated 20,000 lives were lost between 1788 and the mid-20th century. And then an estimated 160,000 people had family members who were part of the stolen generations.

Today, there are multiple cases of Indigenous deaths in custody and incidents of police brutality, which forms the backdrop of Dancing Home.

The book is a dose of an often ignored reality, during an age where many Australians believe chapters have been closed, wrongs have been reconciled.

Collis has written Dancing Home for his people who are still suffering, working to deconstruct the racist structures still very much in place in Australia and acknowledging a brutal and enduring legacy of disenfranchisement.

He's also working on a "justice reinvestment" project in Bourke, in the hopes to engage Indigenous men and women to write or create. It's a project born from his belief in narrative therapy, the healing power of stories.

He believes everyone can write and encourages free writing: five minutes, pen and paper, jotting down whatever comes to mind. And that's what Collis practices too.

"Even if you can't write or read, this won't exclude you from a project. Because you can speak. It's incredible the amount of storytelling talent out there - it just hasn't been engaged."

Paul Collis's book, Dancing Home, is published by University of Queensland Press. $29.95.