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The nation’s most high-profile literary prize, the Miles Franklin, has a long and storied history, and has often proved controversial. But its winners are never uninteresting; it is certainly not averse to recognising works from left-field.
This year’s shortlist was typically eclectic, skewed toward established authors, but with a couple of intriguing young writers to keep things interesting. It made picking the winner a dicey proposition, though there was a clear favourite in Michelle de Kretser who should be on everyone’s list of Australia’s best living novelists. Your correspondent, who has served his time on the judging panel in past years, was quietly barracking for Brian Castro, a greatly underappreciated writer, whose name should also be an automatic inclusion on any such list.
In the end, Australia’s most venerable literary award went to one of the new voices, Siang Lu, for his second novel Ghost Cities. Lu’s first book The Whitewash, which we reviewed back in 2022, was an irreverent satire of Hollywood’s
attitudes to race. In his appraisal of its no less comical successor, Joseph Steinberg declares Ghost Cities possibly the funniest Miles Franklin winner ever.
This week we’re also featuring reappraisals of two books that have come to be regarded as modern classics. Kazuo Ishiguro’s much loved novel Never Let Me Go turned 20 this year. Looking back at the work, Matthew Taft argues that the sentimental responses it has inspired are missing the novel’s real point.
It’s ten years since the publication of Max Porter’s bestseller Grief is the Thing with Feathers, which will be marked this weekend when its stage adaptation opens at the Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney. In her admiring essay, Jen Webb
celebrates Porter’s hybrid work as an imaginative and powerfully resonant response to personal tragedy.
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