Latest news with #MilesFranklinAward
News.com.au
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- News.com.au
Brisbane author Siang Lu wins 2025 Miles Franklin literary award
First time author Siang Lu has won the prestigious $60,000 Miles Franklin literary award for his novel, Ghost Cities, described as 'a genuine landmark in Australian literature'. It was rejected more than 200 times, both in Australia and overseas, and stayed in a drawer unpublished for 10 years before Lu's first novel The Whitewash was published. Ghost Cities is about a young Chinese-Australian man who is fired from his translator job at the Chinese consulate after it is discovered he cannot speak Mandarin. The deception goes viral on Chinese social media, with Xiang dubbed #BadChinese. 'Siang Lu's Ghost Cities is at once a grand farce and a haunting meditation on diaspora,' the judges said. 'Sitting within a tradition in Australian writing that explores failed expatriation and cultural fraud, Lu's novel is also something strikingly new. 'Shimmering with satire and wisdom, and with an absurdist bravura, Ghost Cities is a genuine landmark in Australian literature.' On winning the award, Lu, 39, said he was 'honoured beyond belief, and beyond words'. 'I didn't dare dream of this. It didn't seem possible.' Lu, who is of Chinese-Malaysian descent, moved with his family moved from Malaysia to Brisbane in the 1990s when he was four. The 2025 judging panel comprised Richard Neville, Jumana Bayeh, Dr Mridula Nath Chakraborty, Prof Tony Hughes-d'Aeth, and author, Prof Hsu-Ming Teo. The Miles Franklin literary award was established in the will of My Brilliant Career author, Stella Miles Franklin, for the 'advancement, improvement and betterment of Australian literature'. Perpetual serves as Trustee for the Award.
The Guardian
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Siang Lu wins Miles Franklin award for Ghost Cities, ‘a genuine landmark in Australian literature'
When Siang Lu found out he'd won the Miles Franklin literary award, he had a physical reaction. 'I was in such shock that I lost all feeling in my hands and legs,' the Brisbane-based author says. 'I teared up. I lost my voice a little bit. It was the first time in my life that I've ever had to ask someone with a straight face, 'Can you just please confirm to me that I'm not dreaming?'' The feeling Lu describes is akin to the surreal nature of his experimental, prize-winning novel, Ghost Cities. Set between modern and ancient times, and inspired by the vacant megacities of China, the sprawling, ambitious novel is shot through with absurdist humour, cultural commentary and satire in what the Miles Franklin judges describe as 'at once a grand farce and a haunting meditation on diaspora', and 'a genuine landmark in Australian literature'. Many of Ghost Cities' characters, from emperors to civilians, are devoted to telling, and preserving, stories. It's something Lu hadn't realised until a keen-eyed reader pointed it out – now, he says it's key to the novel itself and the $60,000 prize he's just won. 'I think people are responding to a combination of the humour, which I care very deeply about, but also the idea that we should venerate art, storytellers and storytelling,' he says. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning 'Amongst the cast of characters in Ghost Cities … It was the storytellers that had any hope of claiming agency. I did not consciously do that or plan that, but I recognise it now as something that is true, that my mind was working towards. I hope that at some subconscious level, this is what readers and the judging panel might have responded to: the love for storytelling and literature.' Like many of Australia's most acclaimed writers, Lu works a full-time job (in tech) and has two children, aged nine and 11. Some of Ghost Cities was written many years ago on his hour-long commute to and from the office. 'From the outside in normal, real life, it might appear that in some ways, I've de-prioritised literature in my life: I work a normal job, try to be as present as I can for my children, do what I can for the community,' he says. 'But in fact, secretly, I've put literature above everything … I'm grateful for the things that ground me, because they inform the things that I want to write.' Ghost Cities is Lu's second novel and follows 2022's The Whitewash, a madcap, satirical oral history blending real and fictional stories of Hollywood's race problem. An online project, The Beige Index (described as 'the Bechdel test for race'), is a companion piece of sorts. The perennially shy author says it was a 'gift' for this to be his debut in the Australian literary world, because it meant 'I could be an advocate for something that I care about very deeply, which was more and better representation – that very quickly became like armour for me. I thought, 'Let me be a good advocate for this cause, and then I don't need to talk about myself,' which is a win-win.' This year Lu was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin alongside Brian Castro (Chinese Postman), Michelle de Kretser (Theory and Practice), Winnie Dunn (Dirt Poor Islanders), Julie Janson (Compassion) and Fiona McFarlane (Highway 13). He observes that prize shortlists have become more diverse. 'I don't think that is possible without people behind the scenes, the judges themselves, the readers who are reading critically and thinking about these questions: where are we, where are we going, and how do we get there?' he says. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion But the author also believes it is, first and foremost, about the work itself: 'I've been in judging panels and session groups … [In] the conversations about whose voices we want to champion, always, always, the first cornerstone to that is quality.' The writing community matters a lot to Lu. He expresses it in his own idiosyncratic way through what he calls 'Silly Bookstagram', where he Photoshops fellow authors' book covers to be about himself. Lu stresses that the braggadocious nature of the posts is an exaggerated persona but he enjoys connecting with, and promoting, other writers through this tongue-in-cheek project, which has had a real-life impact. 'It started to hit me when those fellow authors actually showed up for my book launch in Sydney,' he says. 'I didn't know them other than through Instagram but it felt like a way to connect in the most 'me' way possible.' So what's next for Australia's latest Miles Franklin winner? Lu is tight-lipped but promises one thing: 'It's gonna be weirder than Ghost Cities.'
The Guardian
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Miles Franklin 2025: your guide to the shortlist of Australia's biggest literary prize
All dull awards shortlist books that are alike; every important award recognises books that are remarkable in their own way. This is what makes them worth paying attention to, what makes following them fun – and this year's Miles Franklin award shortlist is no exception. All six books hail from different publishers. Each book is markedly different in genre, style and form. The self is an uncertain site in all these books – one where concepts like nationhood, sexuality, class and ethnicity are negotiated. There is a portrait of coming-of-age and Tongan community, a bawdy historical novel told by a self-styled horse thief, and an interlinked short-story cycle that turns on the omens and aftershocks of a serial killing. And three very different novels of ideas playfully reference other texts (as well as themselves) – and draw attention to how they are made. Notably, Fiona McFarlane's Highway 13 is the first work of linked stories to be shortlisted for the prize, which is awarded to 'the novel of the highest literary merit'. But the shortlist is not, curiously enough, diverse in length: none of the entries break 400 pages, though Burruberongal writer Julie Janson's Compassion comes close. 'I was never good at philosophy,' quips Abraham Quin, Chinese Postman's occasional narrator. After being humiliated by his philosophy tutor at university, he learns to see himself in the third person as well as the first, to move 'easily between the two'. This gives us the basic shape of Castro's narrative, which takes the form of a series of ruminations, in either Quin's voice or a close third-person perspective. So: philosophy's out. Quin is also 'through with all that novel-writing'. Despite this protest, Castro's book is best described as a philosophical novel or a novel of ideas. Chinese Postman is largely plotless, though Quin's email correspondence with a Ukrainian woman named Iryna Zarębina gives it a flexible spine. Quin has a penchant for maxims, particularly when their content is scatological. 'Shit', in his telling, is 'a symptom of lowly creation's failure to survive as gods'. It is, for him, a substance 'without hierarchy', in which 'All are equalised'. Reflections of this kind are Quin's way of 'composting' – rather than composing – his thoughts. For those who read for the sheer delight of allusive, tricky, irreverent sentences, Chinese Postman will be the most exciting work on the shortlist. Compassion is the shortlist's only realist historical novel. Set between the years 1836 and 1854, it is a story of maternal reconciliation and paternal reckoning told largely from the point of view of a Darug woman named Duringah, who escapes abuse and traverses Darkinjung and Awabakal country (as well as the country of many other clans and nations) in order to return home. Compassion is a sequel: it continues the dramatised life story of Janson's ancestors from her 2020 novel, Benevolence, which centred on Duringah's (now-estranged) mother, Muraging. In turning to Duringah, who takes up the alias Eleanor James, Compassion flirts with conventions drawn from an array of literary and popular genres, including colonial romance, revisionist history, melodrama and the picaresque. Duringah outwits and eludes colonial authorities with palpable glee. But Compassion has its heartfelt scenes, too. Duringah's arrival at a mission station, where Koori women sing a church hymn, serves as the occasion for a moment of reverence and some of Janson's best writing. Their voices, 'pure like bells', summon memories of 'singing the country with a corroboree'. Yet this memory culminates in a plea for quiet, lest their songs become a 'beacon for vengeful white men'. This tension – between the desire to speak up, and the risks of doing so – lies at the heart of Janson's truth-telling project. Winnie Dunn once remarked in an interview that she considers 'all forms of writing' to be 'autobiographical fiction'. This has clearly informed her work as an editor for the Sweatshop Literacy Movement, as well as her debut novel. Semi-autobiographical writing, as Dirt Poor Islanders well knows, always takes place in productive tension with the right to privacy – of the writer's family and their broader community. The novel's first chapter thinks this through when Dunn's Tongan-Australian avatar, Meadow Reed, locates her family members in the blotches, beauty spots and wrinkles on her grandmother's face. This intimate moment is promptly interrupted by their racist neighbour Shazza, who tells the pair to 'eff off to Fiji'. This suggests Dunn's keen awareness of the risk of telling stories grounded in personal experience before an ignorant, even hostile, audience. Dirt Poor Islanders refuses to be cowed by this risk. Like two of her clear influences, Melissa Lucashenko and Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Dunn responds by doubling down. Meadow unapologetically narrates scenes of cockroach eating and chicken plucking, force feeding and constipation, menstruation and childbirth. 'From nits having sex on my head', thinks Meadow, 'to maggots wriggling in lumps of lard to cockroaches crawling in cereal boxes and cushion crevices, I asked, 'Y'.' Dunn's answer? A sanitised self is barely half an identity – and 'No one could live as half of themselves'. Ghost Cities is an ingeniously structured novel that takes tyranny as its central theme. At its heart are two dictators – an emperor and a director – both prone to issuing capricious edicts to terrorise their hapless subjects. Both come to preside over labyrinthine cities, implied to be millennia apart. The emperor reigns over the Imperial City, the director over a ghost city named Port Man Tou, peopled by ill-paid actors. The cities are opposed, respectively, by Lu Shan Liang and Xiang Lu, whose names resemble their author's. The novel's wacky, erratic plot plays out across alternating chapters through two timelines, their narratives routinely contorted by the whims of their respective dictators. At one point, Xiang Lu mentions he is partway through Vladimir Nabokov's early novel, Invitation to a Beheading. Nabokov's burlesque of tyrannical logic is one of many texts Ghost Cities is in dialogue with. But Ghost Cities most strikingly resembles another Nabokov novel, Pale Fire. Both novels have a long poem at their centre (in loose iambic pentameter); both feature half-comic assassination attempts. They share an ear for the comedy of translation and an eye for the absurd. Ghost Cities both embraces and defies its emperor's directive to abandon 'the pursuit of beauty' for art that favours 'furrowed brows and scholar-like interpretation'. In its zany intertextuality, it displays a level of intellectual ambition rarely found in recent fiction. The 12 stories that make up Highway 13 are all loosely connected to a single man, Paul Biga, the perpetrator of a series of brutal highway murders, whose facts reference (but don't mirror) those of the convicted backpacker murderer Ivan Milat, arrested in 1994. Interestingly, Highway 13 is the only book shortlisted not to make extensive use of first-person narration. The settings range from 1950 to 2028, and span Australia, the US and Europe. They extend a preoccupation with the uncanny that runs through McFarlane's body of work. Stylistically, McFarlane errs on the side of minimalism. These are stories of considerable subtlety and restraint. Highway 13 endeavours to surprise – not at the level of the individual sentence, but in what its sentences imply. It invites us to notice: when the bodies of stink beetles are dumped in a garden corner where 'ants had made feasts of the softer flesh', we can't help but see in their decomposing corpses the shadow of a crime. Highway 13 is more concerned with the murders' distant precursors (in the lives of others) and long-term ramifications (the way it resurfaces after the event) than in finding narrow causes. It tactfully avoids too-obvious parallels between the fictional Paul Biga and real Ivan Milat. In these ways, McFarlane creates space for her marvellous collection to linger with the living, with those bound to each other in their respective presents by fragile forms of love. Theory and Practice takes place primarily in St Kilda, Melbourne, in 1986. It is narrated by a female university student, unnamed for most of the novel, who is writing her thesis on Virginia Woolf. 'Theory', she observes with distaste, has 'conquered the humanities', especially the English department where she studies. When compelled to read theorists, rather than the novels she loves, she feels 'headachey and crushed'. Even the work of feminist and postcolonial theorists, which she draws on to help explain her life as a Sri Lankan woman from Sydney, leaves her ambivalent. 'Practice', on the other hand, describes her life as it is lived. In this novel, practice decidedly wins. The narrator is vexed by casual lovers – she is having an affair with a fellow student in a 'deconstructed relationship' – and hypocritical professors. She's also outraged by a diary entry in which Woolf describes Ceylonese freedom fighter EW Perera as a 'poor little mahogany coloured wretch'. Theory and Practice is at its best when it embraces its title's distinction, which it elsewhere compellingly glosses as the distinction between 'realism and reality', through a cast of characters adept at talking their way out of our attempts to interrogate them. The Miles Franklin literary award will be announced on 24 July This article was originally published by the Conversation. Joseph Steinberg is a Forrest foundation postdoctoral fellow in English and literary studies at the University of Western Australia
