Ten outstanding novels have been recognised for their contribution to Australian literature, landing them on the Miles Franklin Literary Award longlist! Each work explores themes that challenge, illuminate, and inspire.
The Award celebrates novels of the highest literary merit that tell stories about Australian life. The winner will receive $60,000.
According to the judging panel, “The limits of novelistic expression continue to be challenged in Australian letters. This year’s field of Australian novels judged for the Miles Franklin Literary Award encompassed a sometimes dizzying variety of writing. From political fables to picaresque counter-histories, from taut Covid parables to heart-warming family chronicles, Australian life in all its multiplicity is on display in these novels. The novels enlarge our sense of what it is to be Australian as a diasporic nation with an ancient and living human history. Pulsing through these works are the memories and imaginaries of medieval China, modern India, Moana Pasifika and the Indigenous experience of colonisation. Settings shifted from Sydney’s outer suburbs to Melbourne’s inner city, from the Adelaide Hills to the state forests of the Southern Highlands.
The novels also straddle the phases of life, depicting the experience of young children and the existential crises of aging. Writers were unwilling to take the form of the novel for granted and showed a restlessness and inventiveness that opened up our reading in startling ways. Duelling timelines, unexplained discontinuities, temporal uncertainty, and absurdist comedy all worked through these novels to strip the patina from everyday life. There was also a marked singularity in the voices of narration. More than anything, it was the authenticity of these voices, with all their ticks and textures, that spoke to us judges.”