Inside the Australian and New Zealand book industry

Image. Advertisement:

All female Miles Franklin shortlist announced

The shortlist for this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award features five books by Australian women.

The shortlisted titles are:

  • Floundering (Romy Ash, Text)  
  • Questions of Travel (Michelle de Kretser, A&U)
  • The Beloved (Annah Faulkner, Picador)  
  • The Mountain (Drusilla Modjeska, Vintage)  
  • Mateship with Birds (Carrie Tiffany, Picador).

 

The winner of this year’s award will be announced on 19 June at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. To see a list of all the titles longlisted for this year’s award, click here.

As previously reported by Books+Publishing, this year’s winner will receive $60,000, up from $50,000 last year. Each of the shortlisted authors will also receive a cash prize of $5000 as a result of funding from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. Last year’s award was presented to Anna Funder for All That I Am (Penguin).

This year’s shortlist features three debut novels—Floundering by Romy Ash, The Beloved by Annah Faulkner and The Mountain by Drusilla Modjeska—and one previously shortlisted author, Carrie Tiffany, who was a finalist for the 2006 Miles Franklin Literary Award for Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living (Picador). Ash, de Kretser and Tiffany were also longlisted for the inaugural Stella Prize, which was awarded to Tiffany for Mateship with Birds in March.

Speaking on behalf of the judging panel, Richard Neville from the State Library of New South Wales said the five novels on the shortlist share a common theme. ‘The five novels … are at a surface level all about family—the searching for their comfort, the crises when they fail, escaping their pervasive grasp, or the despair when they do not seem possible—but more deeply, these books write about the intersection of people’s lives with national, indeed international, stories and ideas,’ said Neville. ‘Each approaches their subject from very different perspectives, but all deliver complex, engrossing narratives which persist long after the books are closed.’

Simon Lewis, head of philanthrophy and community at the Trust Company, which manages the award, said the shortlist ‘demonstrates how strong Australia’s pipeline of female literary talent really is, as witnessed with last year’s Miles Franklin winner Anna Funder, as well as by the growing number of first time female authors included in the long and shortlists in recent years’.

As previously reported by Books+Publishing, the Trust Company has launched the Miles of Reading Challenge to encourage Australians to read the titles nominated for this year’s award. The Trust Company is also partnering with Griffith REVIEW and the Copyright Agency to produce reviews of the longlisted titles, and will commission authors to write essays about the themes evident in the shortlist. For more information, visit the Miles Franklin website.

To see reviews of each of the shortlisted titles, visit Books+Publishing’s Fancy Goods blog here.

 

Tags:

Category: Local news