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The Miles Franklin Literary Award

The Miles Franklin Literary Award is an annual literary prize for the best Australian ‘published novel or play portraying Australian life in any of its phases’. The award was set up according to the will  of Miles Franklin (1879 – 1954), who is best known for writing the Australian classic My Brilliant Career (published in 1901) and for bequeathing her estate to fund this award. As of 2008, the award is worth AU$42,000.

Miles Franklin

Miles Franklin (born “Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin”; 14 October 1879 – 19 September 1954) was an Australian writer and feminist who is best known for her autobiographical novel, My Brilliant Career, published in 1901. While she wrote throughout her life, her other major literary success, All That Swagger, was not published until 1936.

She was committed to the development of a uniquely Australian form of literature, and she actively pursued this goal by supporting writers, literary journals, and writers’ organisations. She has had a long-lasting impact on Australian literary life through her endowment of a major literary award known as the Miles Franklin Award.

The 2010 Miles Franklin Literary Award Shortlist

On Wednesday 21 April, Trust announced the six authors and their novels selected for the 2010 shortlist.

The 2010 shortlist features some of Australia’s most established literary names alongside new and emerging authors, each showcasing Australian character and creativity.

The judging panel are excited by the diverse range of novels and what this means for Australian literature.

In deciding on a shortlist of six, longer than usual, the judges have acknowledged the quality of the works offered this year, and also their extreme diversity. The six novels chosen cover an extraordinary range. Their sheer quality, what Miles Franklin would have termed their ‘literary merit’, makes pigeonholing them impossible. Notions of genre could not contain them. Ideas about specific audience – is this young adult or adult fiction? – proved irrelevant. And in their exposition of Australian life ‘in any of its phases’, the six shortlisted writers gave the judges an exhilarating sense of just how bewilderingly varied those phases of Australian life could be. It has been a fascinating and challenging year.

The Miles Franklin Literary Award 2010 Presentation dinner will be held on 22 June 2010.

Lovesong by Alex Miller (Allen & Unwin)

Seeking shelter in a Parisian cafe from a sudden rainstorm, John Patterner meets the exotic Sabiha and his carefully mapped life changes forever. Resonant of the bestselling Conditions of Faith, Alex Miller’s keenly awaited new novel tells the deeply moving story of their lives together, and of how each came undone by desire.

Strangers did not, as a rule, find their way to Chez Dom, a small, rundown Tunisian cafe on Paris’ distant fringes. Run by the widow Houria and her young niece, Sabiha, the cafe offers a home away from home for the North African immigrant workers working at the great abattoirs of Vaugiraud, who, like them, had grown used to the smell of blood in the air. But when one day a lost Australian tourist, John Patterner, seeks shelter in the cafe from a sudden Parisian rainstorm, a tragic love story begins to unfold.

Years later, while living a quiet life in suburban Melbourne, John is haunted by what happened to him and Sabiha at Vaugiraud. He confides his story to Ken, an ageing writer, who sees in John’s account the possibility for one last simple love story. When Ken tells his daughter this she reminds him ‘Love is never simple, Dad. You should know that.’ He does know it. But being the writer he is, he cannot resist the lure of the story.

Told with all Miller’s distinctive clarity, intelligence and compassion, Lovesong is a pitch-perfect novel, a tender and enthralling story about the intimate lives of ordinary people. Like the truly great novelist he is, Miller locates the heart of his story in the moral frailties and secret passions of his all-too-human characters.

The Bath Fugues by Brian Castro (Giramondo Publishing)

The Bath Fugues is a meditation on art and melancholy, in the form of three interwoven novellas, centred respectively on an aging art forger; a Portuguese poet, opium addict and art collector; and a doctor, who has built an art gallery in tropical Queensland. Each deals with issues of sincerity and deception, counterfeiting and rewriting, transmission and identity, as the characters try to make sense of their intertwined lives and anxieties, and the fragile friendships thrust upon them. Only the act of bathing will reconcile them to truth and revelation.

Jason Redvers, a drifter, fugitive and art forger, is slowly and painfully dying. Convinced that his memories and history have been wrongfully appropriated by Walter Gottlieb, his one-time mentor and patron, Redvers is driven to write a memoir, exposing and excising all kinds of scandals and secrets about his friends and colleagues. The second novella shifts focus to a Portuguese judge and poet, living in Macau in the 1920s, in a selfimposed exile of mistresses, opium pipes and Chinese art. Struggling with his desire to create, and procreate, Camilo Conceição descends slowly into madness, forgery and squalour. The third section returns to Australia, and takes up the story of a doctor, Judith Sarraute. Professionally privileged to the most intimate thoughts, secrets and desires of her clients, and to a cabinet of exotic venoms, Sarraute is troubled by the theft of her diaries, and the shadowy figure of a grifter, drifting at the edges of her carefully maintained world.

Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey (Allen & Unwin)

Late on a hot summer night in the tail end of 1965, Charlie Bucktin, a precocious and bookish boy of thirteen, is startled by an urgent knock on the window of his sleep-out. His visitor is Jasper Jones, an outcast in the regional mining town of Corrigan. Rebellious, mixed-race and solitary, Jasper is a distant fi gure of danger and intrigue for Charlie. So when Jasper begs for his help, Charlie eagerly steals into the night by his side, terribly afraid but desperate to impress.

Jasper takes him through town and to his secret glade in the bush, and it’s here that Charlie bears witness to Jasper’s horrible discovery. With his secret like a brick in his belly, Charlie is pushed and pulled by a town closing in on itself in fear and suspicion as he locks horns with his tempestuous mother; falls nervously in love and battles to keep a lid on his zealous best friend, Jeffrey Lu.

And in vainly attempting to restore the parts that have been shaken loose, Charlie learns to discern the truth from the myth, and why white lies creep like a curse. In the simmering summer where everything changes, Charlie learns why the truth of things is so hard to know, and even harder to hold in his heart.

The Book of Emmett by Deborah Forster (Random House)

Emmett Brown is as dark as Heathcliff, and as moody. A waylaid romantic with one hand on Hemingway and the other around a bottle. Sometimes he’s an inspiration, but not often. His one obsession is working out ‘the System’, a way to bend mathematical probability to his will and his fortune. But when the lottery numbers and horses fail him, he spirals further into self-loathing and becomes a terror to his wife and children.

For the innocents – Louisa, Rob, Peter, Daniel and Jessie – the bonds formed hiding in hedges at the end of the street waiting for maelstroms to pass, are complex, strong and impossible to break. As they grow older, each must resolve the consequences of Emmett’s rage on their spirit and psyche, and attempt to escape his long shadow.

As Emmett lay dying, they come to discover that love – however imperfect – is the best protection against pain.

Truth by Peter Temple (Text Publishing)

At the close of a long day, Inspector Stephen Villani stands in the bathroom of a luxury apartment high above the city of Melbourne. In the glass bath, a young woman lies dead, a panic button within reach.

Villani’s life is his work. It is his identity, his calling, his touchstone. But now, over a few sweltering summer days, as fires burn across the state and his superior and colleagues scheme and jostle, he finds all the certainties of his life are crumbling.

Truth is a novel about a man, a family, a city. It is about violence, murder, love, corruption, honour and deceit.

And it is about truth.

Truth is a companion piece of sorts, to Temple’s The Broken Shore. The protagonist here is Detective Inspector Stephen Villani, friend and former colleague of The Broken Shore’s hero Joe Cashin.

Set predominantly in Melbourne, the ongoing theme is that there is something rotten in the state of Victoria, and in Villani’s life. It begins with Villani driving between two shocking cases, and ends in devastating bushfire. In between things get complex, with political and police corruption, family disintegration on many levels, linked murders, work hierarchy, political changeover and personal issues for Villani to deal with.

Butterfly by Sonya Hartnett (Penguin Group Australia)

On the verge of her fourteenth birthday, Plum knows her life will change. But she has no idea how.

Over the coming weeks, her beautiful neighbour Maureen will show her how she might fly. Her adored older brothers will court catastrophe in worlds that she barely knows exist. And her friends – her worst enemies – will tease and test, smelling weakness. They will try to lead her on and take her down.

Who ever forgets what happens when you’re fourteen?

(Source: Trust Company Limited)