Anger and political passion built during a long night at the Australian Book Industry Awards in Sydney on Thursday, where speakers including Jeanette Winterson and Jonathan Franzen, Tim Winton and Jackie French condemned the federal government's proposals for free import of books and free use of copyrighted material.

Author Richard Flanagan, the final speaker of the night, put it most bluntly: "F--- them. If you care about books, don't vote Liberal."

Flanagan, whose prisoner-of-war novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, shared a 2014 Prime Minister's Literary Award after Tony Abbott overruled the judges, said, "The last two Liberal governments have been the worst in history for arts and culture."

He was on stage at the Art Gallery of NSW to give the biggest award of the night, for book of the year, to Magda Szubanski for her family memoir, Reckoning.

Szubanski had already received the biography award for her debut book, which she said might be her last because the changes would make it impossible to make a living from writing.

She urged writers, "Go on strike".

British author Winterson, one of many international authors in town for Sydney Writers' Festival, spoke with evangelistic fervour, questioning the Dickensian idea of a Productivity Commission.

"If you attack the life of the mind, you are saying human beings don't matter," she said. "Fight it with every breath."

The government intends to remove parallel importation restrictions, which risks flooding the market with cheap foreign editions of books, and to reduce authors' copyright in their own work - the right to income and control of its use - from lifetime plus 70 years to 15-25 years from publication.

The argument for the changes is that it will make books available to  booksellers and customers more quickly and cheaply, and widen fair use of copyrighted material. But the critics say the only effects will be to reduce authors' income and damage the publishing industry.

Peter Frankopan, a historian at Oxford University, said it was unbelievable that neither the Prime Minister nor any of his ministers had attended such an important cultural evening.

Shadow Minister for the Arts Mark Dreyfus, the only federal politician at the dinner (and son of a composer), suggested a Labor government would once again reject the Productivity Commission's recommendations.

Tim Winton, on accepting the general non-fiction award for Island Home, said: "There's an election in July. Australian readers need good, clear information about what's at stake. It's the job of the Australian publishing family to let them know."

Louise Adler, publisher and president of the Australian Publishers Association, who welcomed Abbott to the same event as prime minister and one of her authors, also spoke fiercely against Malcolm Turnbull and his government's dismissive attitude to the industry.

"Copyright allows writers, all writers to maintain a living," she said. "Publishing is the most successful industry in Australia, so why would we change copyright to disadvantage these writers?"