5 days ago
All the snubs, surprises and favourites from the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlist
The shortlist for the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award — Australia's most prestigious literary prize — features a dual winner (Michelle de Kretser), two repeat shortlistees (Brian Castro and Fiona McFarlane), and three writers shortlisted for the first time (Julie Janson, Siang Lu and debut author Winnie Dunn).
Tim Winton, longlisted for his dystopian cli-fi thriller Juice, missed out on the shortlist and his chance to bag a fifth Miles Franklin award.
The shortlist has grown increasingly diverse in recent years, and 2025 is no exception, with five writers of colour in the running for the $60,000 award.
Female writers have also dominated the prize in the past decade. If Castro or Lu win, it will be the first time a male author has taken out the award since 2016, when AS Patrić won for his debut novel, Black Rock White City.
Last year, Waanyi writer Alexis Wright won for Praiseworthy, an epic novel set in northern Australia that also took out the Stella Prize. This year's winner will be announced on July 24.
To take a closer look at the shortlist, we've brought together The Book Show's Claire Nichols and Sarah L'Estrange, The Bookshelf's Kate Evans, and writer and critic Declan Fry.
Sarah L'Estrange: Each of the six books investigates race, class and gender in contemporary Australia but in different ways. It's very hard to compare books like Ghost Cities and Dirt Poor Islanders because they're written in such distinct ways, but they both encourage us to think about narrative and who owns stories.
Declan Fry: I was surprised to see Highway 13 on the list — it's a short story collection. That's a first, and it could be the most radical thing the Miles Franklin has ever done. I'm here for it — I love to see the definition of the novel always expanding.
Claire Nichols: We're getting a novel competition that is moving further from the traditional novel form.
DF: Many of these novels are also quite formless.
Kate Evans: I like the fact that they're not afraid to include things that are a bit difficult. I thought this shortlist was more interesting than some of the shortlists we've seen recently because they're not all conventional narratives.
CN: The list leaves me a little cold. I wanted to see Tim Winton make it. We know he doesn't need another Miles Franklin — he already has four — but I thought Juice was an exciting novel. It was Winton outside his comfort zone, writing a speculative fiction story. There was a great urgency to the writing and a thrilling plot there, too. It felt like a big moment in his writing career.
I also wanted to see The Burrow make it. This tiny, perfect novel by Melanie Cheng, did so much with so little: one family, a rabbit, COVID and grief. I thought it was a gorgeous piece of traditional novel writing.
SL: Perhaps not a traditional Miles Franklin novel, Woo Woo by Ella Baxter is about a woman on the edge and I found it enjoyable and vital. Catherine McKinnon's To Sing of War is another one that didn't even make the longlist — I thought that was a wonderful book.
CN: There's been an explosion of own-voices fiction in Australia in the last five to 10 years, and I think Dirt Poor Islanders is up there with the best examples of the genre.
SL: It was a pleasure to read. It felt like Ruth Park's Harp in the South for our times, an entrée for most of Australia into this small Tongan Australian community.
It's charming, it doesn't pull its punches and, while it might seem like a simple story because it presents as semi-autobiographical, I appreciated the layers as well.
DF: It's a very honest book; it has a lot of integrity. One thing I loved was the self-deprecating and ironic humour. There's pathos in it too. Meadow's dreams are limited by the structural constraints on her family's lives.
CN: It's a fascinating study of motherhood. The narrator, Meadow, just like Winnie Dunn, lost her mother very young, but in Tongan culture everyone is a mother, so the grandmother and all the aunties are her mother as well.
I admired the liveliness of the writing, and I love how tactile it is — you can smell the food, and you can feel the sweat and how crowded that house is in Mount Druitt, full of all those aunties.
KE: Theory & Practice starts as one thing, which is an archetypal Australian outsider narrative, and then it ditches that and becomes something else, which is the story of a young woman in the 1980s, immersed in the Melbourne academic world of both theory and practice.
This is one I've read twice, and I read it differently the second time. The first time I was struck by the deftness and the humour of it. When I re-read it, I felt like I was reading into other layers of the work. The more you look at it, the more it offers you.
SL: I feel like it wore its seriousness heavily, Kate!
KE: Oh, you didn't find it funny?
SL: I read it as a sad-girl novel — it has all the elements. This one, though, is set in 1980s Melbourne. A woman disaffected is looking back over her life, finding it hard to find her place, having relationships with the wrong men, knowing that she shouldn't be, but still doing it.
DF: I didn't care for the interrupted narrative at the beginning, but I did think it was cool that de Kretser has an 'I' who says, 'My novel was failing, so I decided to do something different.' That makes it sound like de Kretser is speaking to us but of course, it's not her, it's an authorial persona. I thought that was clever.
CN: And she's put her own picture on the cover of the book! She's playing with the expectations of what we look for in fiction, which I find so fascinating when you compare it to something like Winnie Dunn's book, which is just straight-up autobiography. There's no veil there for Dunn, but de Kretser is hiding herself in the book.
KE: The main character of Chinese Postman lives in the Adelaide Hills. He's alienated people, he loves his dogs, he's telling stories, he's surrounded by piles of books.
You could easily make the case that what Castro is doing here is telling stories from his own life and playing around with his identity — he was a postman and he's also Chinese, Portuguese and Jewish, but unlike female writers, male writers aren't generally labelled as autobiographical novelists.
DF: I like his debut, Birds of Passage, a lot. It felt the freest of his books. This one is perhaps the most diaristic and fragmented, even though many of them have mixed theory, fiction and biographical elements.
KE: That's a warning we should make to readers — this is not a plot-driven novel. It's a novel of ideas. It's one of those books in which nothing happens and everything happens, which I like, but you have to be in the right mode to read it.
You can read it like reading James Joyce: start in the middle, read fragments, read it back and forwards. A novel can be hard work and still be worth reading.
CN: I'm Team Ghost Cities. I love Australian fiction that surprises you and I like Australian authors who take a big swing, and Siang Lu did that with his first novel, The Whitewash. It was hysterically funny and weird and had something important to say about race in Australia. Ghost Cities is just as experimental and wild, just as silly yet serious.
Any book that has a guy who has been fired from his job as a translator because he was using Google Translate and then gets picked up by a film director called Baby Bao to work on a film in a place called Port Man Tou — that is all funny, weird stuff that excites me. There's also this gorgeous romance at the centre of it, which feels very true.
There's another section about an ancient Chinese dynasty exploring ideas around art and creation. It's told in this mythic style, and I loved that too.
Siang Lu is doing things that no other author in Australia is doing.
DF: I have problems with the ending; I don't think he quite sticks the landing. It just ends rather than concluding satisfyingly.
SL: It's not an easy read if you don't connect with the fable-like narrative style. You can be left flailing — but there are enough anchors to take you through, and the elements come together like a good puzzle.
KE: I love the fact that a competition about showing Australian life in all its aspects includes Chinese cities and multiple identities.
DF: I second what Kate says — I want to see more Chinese language in Australian fiction. For many people in the big cities, you hear Mandarin as much as English, and this book is filled with Mandarin.
DF: It's lovely to see a small publisher, Magabala Books in particular, on the shortlist.
SL: Compassion is a sequel to Julie Janson's 2020 novel, Benevolence, which was about a young Darug woman named Muraging, also called Mary James, growing up in the NSW colony in the 1800s.
This book is about her daughter Duringah, or Nellie James, and she's based on Janson's great-great grandmother who showed up in court records over the years for stealing cattle and sheep.
CN: Nellie has been a fighter since she was a kid. She's fighting against these men who inflict violence on her and enslave her. What I appreciated about this character was her utter fury and rage about the injustice of the life that she lives. She never settles and she never accepts it, and I found that appealing in a book that is quite confrontational.
DF: I think this is the big talking point — how did a short story collection get onto the shortlist?
KE: I read it as a novel. Each story addresses the same subject in an interestingly lateral way — this serial killer based on Ivan Milat, but McFarlane gives him a different name, Paul Biga. I like the way it explores the repercussions of a terrible event without just focusing on the families of victims or the cops, although they're in there as well.
She also manages to slide in questions about the ethics of crime and true crime, which is so problematic.
SL: I appreciated her agility as a writer to go from one set of characters and leap to another to create this portrait around a central figure who's never present.
Like with Ghost Cities, you're trying to put the puzzle together. In each of the stories, you're primed as a reader: you're thinking, 'How does this relate to the crime? What are the connections?' And you have to stick with it to get the reward of working out what the connection is, even if it's very tenuous.
DF: Fiona McFarlane's a lovely stylist. The prose is consistently very strong and I like how she plays with form.
SL: I'd be happy if Highway 13 or Dirt Poor Islanders won.
DF: My favourite was Theory & Practice, but Dirt Poor Islanders would be my left-field pick.
CN: Michelle de Kretser has already won the Stella Prize this year — I don't think we want to see another calendar year where we have the same winner of both the Stella and the Miles Franklin. I'd love to see the wealth spread around.
I'm going for Ghost Cities — I don't think it's a perfect book, but I love its ambition and that it's different and fun on what is a somewhat stodgy list.
KE: I'll say Highway 13 for the win. It's a book that throws the form up in the air.
