Miles Franklin alumni have dominated this year’s shortlist of Australia’s most high-profile literary award, with four previously nominated authors including Carrie Tiffany and Tony Birch repeating past success with new books.
The legacy of colonialism is a key theme in the shortlist for the $60,000 prize, which celebrates fiction “of the highest literary merit” that presents “Australian life in any of its phases”.
Tiffany has made the Miles Franklin shortlist for a third time with her latest novel, the sparse and poetic Exploded View. Her previous works Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living (2006) and Mateship with Birds (2013) were both nominated for the prize.
Birch, who was shortlisted for Blood in 2012, was nominated this year for The White Girl, the story of a family trying to stay together despite the persistent intervention of authorities. The White Girl won the 2020 New South Wales premier’s award for Indigenous writing.
Philip Salom, better known for his internationally acclaimed poetry, is back as well with The Returns, a narrative of the minutiae of lives in the streets of north Melbourne. Salom’s Waiting (2017) was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, as well as the prime minister’s literary award and the Victorian premier’s literary award.
This year’s shortlist also includes Tara June Winch’s exploration of language and dispossession, The Yield, which won both the Christina Stead prize for fiction and the people’s choice award at the NSW premier’s literary awards in April. The Yield was also shortlisted for the Victorian premier’s literary awards and the Stella prize.
Peggy Frew’s Islands, which examines a nuclear family as it falls apart, follows in the footsteps of her shortlisted 2016 novel Hope Farm.
Rounding out the list of six, No One by John Hughes grapples with the trauma of Australia’s colonial past and the long-term effects of institutional care. No One is Hughes’s first novel; his 2005 collection of essays, The Idea of Home, was well received, winning the NSW premier’s award for nonfiction.
Due to coronavirus physical distancing restrictions, the shortlist was announced live on Wednesday afternoon via YouTube instead of the usual cocktail event.
Each of the shortlisted authors will receive $5,000 from the Copyright Agency’s cultural fund. The organisation sponsors the prize alongside Perpetual, which manages the prize trust.
Trauma was a unifying theme of the books in this year’s shortlist, the chair of the judging panel, Richard Neville, said in a statement. “From familial stories of neglect and abuse to the national story of racial and cultural dispossession, these novels demonstrate powerfully how past trauma continues to inform the present.”
Alongside Neville on the judging panel are the journalist Murray Waldren, the academic and literary critic Melinda Harvey, the Sydney-based bookseller Lindy Jones and the literary critic Bernadette Brennan.
The winner will be announced on 16 July.
The 2020 Miles Franklin shortlist
The White Girl by Tony Birch (University of Queensland Press)
Islands by Peggy Frew (Allen & Unwin)
No One by John Hughes (UWA Publishing)
The Returns by Philip Salom (Transit Lounge)
Exploded View by Carrie Tiffany (Text Publishing)
The Yield by Tara June Winch (Penguin Books Australia)
