Miles Franklin Literary Award 2024 shortlist: Book experts on the surprises and likely winner of Australia's biggest literary award
The shortlist includes a previous winner, a previous shortlistee and three debut novelists. (ABC: Luke Tribe)
The shortlist for the 2024 Miles Franklin Literary Award has now been announced, with six authors selected from the longlist to vie for Australia's most prestigious literary award.
The shortlist is:
- Hossein Asgari, Only Sound Remains (Puncher & Wattmann)
- Jen Craig, Wall (Puncher & Wattmann)
- Andre Dao, Anam (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Random House)
- Gregory Day, The Bell of the World (Transit Lounge)
- Sanya Rushdi, Hospital (Giramondo Publishing)
- Alexis Wright, Praiseworthy (Giramondo Publishing)
The list includes a previous winner (Wright), a previous shortlistee (Day) and three (!) debut novelists (Asgari, Dao and Rushdi).
Along with last year's, it's the most culturally diverse Miles Franklin shortlist ever, with four writers of colour in the running, and the third year in a row to feature more writers of colour than writers from Anglo-Saxon backgrounds.
And if Craig, Rushdi or Wright win, they'll become the eighth woman winner in a row (12 women have won in the 13 years since the controversial 2011 shortlist was entirely composed of men), and the 20th woman to win the $60,000 award since 1957.
Last year's winner was Shankari Chandran for Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens. This year's winner will be announced on July 30.
To take a closer look at the list, we've convened a literary cabal of The Book Show's Claire Nichols and Sarah L'Estrange, The Bookshelf's Kate Evans and book critic Declan Fry.
Surprises and themes
Sarah L'Estrange: It's no surprise to see Alexis Wright there!
But I'm surprised at the uniformity of the shortlist. Often there'll be a bit of a range of more literary and then maybe more populist fiction, like last year's list, whereas this shortlist is absolutely singing the praises of high literary fiction.
Kate Evans: It's noticeable how many of the books are from smaller publishers, who, arguably, are able to take more risks and play around with the form. The shortlisted books do play around with form and are a bit more experimental.
And that, to me, is exactly what the Miles Franklin should be. It's supposed to be looking at novels of the highest literary merit — that's in their actual guidelines — "that presents Australian life in any of its phases".
Claire Nichols: I was disappointed that Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko didn't make the shortlist.
It's interesting what Kate was saying about how it's a very literary list. But I would argue that it shouldn't have to be literary at the expense of heart.
I think the best novels can do both, like when Lukashenko won the Miles in 2019 for Too Much Lip or when Tara June Winch won a year later for The Yield. These books had high literary merit, but also had characters you could really connect with and straddled that popular/literary divide.
I'm struggling a bit with this list to find those stories that I just love in that way.
KE: Hear, hear on Edenglassie: I also would have liked to have seen Charlotte Wood's Stone Yard Devotional there. I like the cleanness of the writing and the exploration of grief, it was really beautifully done.
SL: If we're talking about books that have heart, that also explore ideas, I felt like Angela O'Keeffe's The Sitter was able to do that. I would have happily seen that on the shortlist.
It's not that I don't think these shortlisted books are worthy, but they haven't fired me up like last year's list. I was really excited for Limberlost last year, I really thought Robbie Arnott was gonna win, although he didn't. But part of why we invest in prizes is the excitement, the disagreements, and I don't feel that with this list.
Declan Fry: I feel it's one of the most exciting shortlists in ages. I think that, actually, a lot of the books have so much heart.
Anam by André Dao, I really love. It explores how we make sense of time and displacement, what we might retrieve from the past or choose to forget, incorporating this meta-fictional weaving of the narrator's life as a human rights lawyer raising a family against his Vietnamese grandfather's dissidence and his forebears' migration, all of which inform the shape of a book he is struggling to write.
It reminds me of Javier Marías; it's about time and memory. But it's very much about family too.
And of course, Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy. What a family! You've got a father on a quixotic quest to reinvigorate his community with the help of a donkey-powered transportation conglomerate, a mother seeking repatriation to China, their son, a kind of representative of the town's hopes and yearnings and anxieties, and his fallen-angel brother, who believes he belongs with the blonde power brokers dealing bread and circuses up in Canberra.
Plus a cast of cruel, unjust, hypocritical and violent characters struggling against cruel, unjust, hypocritical and violent circumstances. A realist's view of colonisation if ever there was one, told in language that is roiling and choral and haranguing and acrobatic.
Wright is always willing to be paradoxical and contradictory, funny and serious, high and low, ridiculous and full of gravitas.
CN: Something that is really interesting in a lot of these books is how time is expressed.
For instance, the set-up of Gregory Day's The Bell of the World is that there's this small community on the south coast of Victoria. And some people in the community want to install a bell to measure out the time of the day.
It's about the colonial imposition of time on the natural world — which is an idea Alexis Wright is grappling with, too.
KE: This list shows how we've obviously moved away from an old-fashioned Anglo idea of Australian-ness (which, to be fair, has long been the case with the Miles Franklin). The shortlist includes stories of exile and displacement and refugees and voices in translation.
That is something to celebrate: the way in which not just fiction itself, but that this prize in particular, is making us think about what our ideas of Australian-ness and representation are.
Scaling walls of text
DF: Jen Craig's Wall is another shortlisted work that has a lot of heart.
You have this fierce, passionate interiority, a Thomas Bernhard-type monologist-narrator attempting to make sense of her life and familial anguishes and displacements, set against the absurdist comedy of her attempt to dispose of the Song Dong-inspired art installation she's made using her deceased father's possessions.
It's really all about familial angst and the horror of mundane life — something we felt very strongly during and after COVID-19.
I've been listening to music like Brian Eno, Richard Skelton and Hekla and their music has no entry or exit. It just surrounds you, encloses you. I feel that with Wall, you can enter and exit at any point. So it's actually very easy to get lost in.
I think you have to let yourself go and give yourself up to these novels, which is really exciting.
SL: I could relate to many aspects of Wall, especially the narrator's internal monologue and the problem of what to do with the family home after her father's death.
But while I also agree you can come in and out of Wall, that's a bit of a problem for me. I don't want to go in and out, I want to stay in a book.
KE: Yes, with that literal wall of text in that book, it means you're reading in very particular ways.
And one of the things about the shortlist is they're all sort of hard work. I think they all take effort and there's nothing wrong with reading taking effort. But while I could get swept up in Dao's book, I've not yet managed to read The Bell of the World. For various personal reasons to do with timing, I was a bit daunted by it — but will, of course, read it.
DF: We have a lot of dialogue happening about Craig's Wall and it's funny because to be troubled by something or haunted by something, or unsure, suggests a book is successful on some level — it's staying with you.
The difficulty of a work can be a way of growing to love it.
It's a matter of staying with what the work is doing and reading differently: A block of text can be intimidating but, by the same token, sometimes work that reads like a screenplay can also be intimidating and off-putting.
Having said all of this, the language of Anam, Praiseworthy or Wall is very accessible.
KE: I'm not scared of difficult work or even blocky ones. But comparing Wall to other books that offered a block of text, such as (say) Paul Lynch's Booker Prize-winning Prophet Song, they invited me in more readily.
But on Wall: I liked it when I read it and then, rather than being excessively troubled by it, to be honest, it didn't stay with me. And yet on revisiting it, there were images and issues of fragments, objects, houses and memory that I really liked. Even so, for me, Anam was doing something more interesting.
SL: Hossein Asgari's Only Sound Remains is a book that will stay with me. It's a really beautiful book, about Iranian immigrants in Australia and their troubled ties to Iran.
It's a story of obsession, father-son relationships and exile and is written in a confessional style, which parallels the subject of the book, a famous Iranian poet — Forough Farrokhzad — who died young, in the 1960s, and was known for baring her heart's deepest desires in her poetry.
It introduced me to a world I knew little about (I've read a lot about Iran post-1979 but not much in the decades before this major political change) and it also definitely has the heart Claire was talking about earlier, while engaging with politics, literature and religion.
CN: Sanya Rushdi's Hospital is also accessible, simple, slim and really compelling. It's a book in translation, translated from Bengali into English, which is a really cool moment for the shortlist.
It's also a very real story, a work of autofiction. Sanya is writing very directly about her own experience of psychosis. It's not histrionic, it's not like the stories we've read about mental illness in the past, it's coming from a very personal place.
OK, but who will win the 2024 Miles Franklin Award?
DF: As an author, you wouldn't want to be up against Wright when she has a novel like Praiseworthy in contention.
Wright's career reaches maybe an apex in Praiseworthy. It pulls together the form she nailed in Carpentaria [2007 Miles winner] with the non-fictional concerns of books like Tracker [2018 Stella Prize winner], and her ongoing project of cataloguing the dysfunctional nature of colonisation on this continent and the grievous effects it has on both the colonised and the coloniser.
CN: I have never got it right, but I will say I think Alexis Wright is going to win. It's literally twice the size of any other book on the shortlist, it's so hard to put anything next to it to compare it to. She's going for everything in Praiseworthy, which has already won this year's Stella Prize.
SL: Praiseworthy is kind of beyond a novel. I read it more as an incantation or epic that contains the universe. It's like Wright has consumed all the world's ills, injustices and absurdities and she's managed to put it all into this book.
CN: I do think it's important to note that Praiseworthy is a challenging book to read. And I don't think it's going to be a book for everybody. So while critics have loved it, I'm going to be interested to see how readers tackle it.
DF: Claire's right. It's a difficult work, and particularly some of the reflections on death and suicidal ideation and violence are, in a sense, a true block of text, a verbal scream or wall the reader has to confront.
KE: Alexis Wright is the obvious winner, which doesn't mean that she will win. I am not a gambler, I'm a terrible betting person. And I never get any of this right, just for the record.
DF: I would be very happy if Dao, Craig or Wright won.
SL: If it wasn't Alexis, I would be very happy for Anam to win because it is an interesting way of approaching your own broader biography, as in a family biography and ancestry, and how that shapes you, and how you then shape it.
KE: I would be quite delighted if Dao's Anam won. There's so many things I really like about that novel.
The Book Show will be airing interviews with all six shortlisted authors on Monday, July 22; and The Bookshelf will have a special review program on all shortlisted authors and the winner, on Saturday, August 10.