Tim Winton is in pole position to win Australia's most prestigious literary award, the £20,000 Miles Franklin prize, for the fourth time after making the shortlist for this year's award.
Twice shortlisted for the Booker, western Australian Winton has won the Miles Franklin three times already, for Shallows (1984), Cloudstreet (1992) and Dirt Music (2002). Breath, his ninth novel, is an exploration of a young man's addiction to danger whether through surfing or sex. It was described by judges who selected it for this year's shortlist as "a searing document about masculinity, about risk, and about young people's desire to push the limits". Winton, the judges said, "is at the height of his powers as a novelist, and this is his greatest love letter yet to the sea".
If he were to win, he would draw level with four-time winner of the prize Thea Astley. But Winton will be facing stiff competition from a novel gaining plaudits across Australia, Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap, which has already won the regional Commonwealth writers' prize for best novel and is shortlisted for the Australian Literature Society's gold medal. About the consequences that ensue when a man hits someone else's fractious child at a barbecue, told from multiple perspectives, judges said it had "echoes of John Updike and Raymond Carver, if with a distinctly Greco-Aussie accent".
"It's great company to be in," Tsiolkas told Australian paper the Age. "I'm aware that fortune doesn't always shine in the world of art. But there is a validation (in the shortlisting) and a certain freedom that I can write what I want that comes with such a nomination."
The all-male shortlist – "draw no conclusions whatever from our having chosen five men", spokesperson Morag Fraser told local press – includes another former winner of the prize, Murray Bail, whose novel The Pages explores what happens when two Sydney women visit a rural sheep station in the interior of Australia. It is his first new novel since Eucalyptus, which won the Miles Franklin in 1999.
The line-up is completed by two novels providing fictionalised accounts of colonial history. Ice by Louis Nowra tells the story of Malcolm McEacharn, who towed an iceberg back to Sydney harbour from Antarctica, while Richard Flanagan's Wanting intertwines two 19th-century lives – that of the family of Sir John Franklin, dogged with rumours that the explorer's voyage into the Arctic ended in cannibalism, and of Charles Dickens.
The winner will be announced on 18 June at the state library of New South Wales. Last year's prize was won by Steven Carroll's The Time We Have Taken, and other past winners include Peter Carey, David Malouf and Patrick White.
The shortlist:
Breath by Tim Winton
Ice by Louis Nowra
The Pages by Murray Bail
The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas
Wanting by Richard Flanagan
