What a challenge for the judging panel of the Miles Franklin award to choose a winner for 2015. The shortlist was widely praised as comprising some of the best Australian fiction released in the previous year. Picking one of the five was always going to be tough and the general chatter about who would win tended to lean towards Joan London for her novel The Golden Age.
Nevertheless, an award that has drawn criticism for its bias towards books written by blokes about the bush and the past, has demonstrated it is capable of surprises.
Sofie Laguna’s The Eye of the Sheep, about a young boy growing up in the working class suburbs of Melbourne with a violent alcoholic father and an asthmatic mother, proved to be the cream of this year’s shortlist.
Laguna deserved to be emotional about her win on Tuesday night. Beating such strong contenders as London, Sonya Hartnett’s Golden Boys, Craig Sherborne’s Tree Palace and Christine Piper’s After Darkness, was no mean feat. But perhaps, when digging a little deeper, not as surprising as it first seems.
For starters, Laguna has been here before. She made the Miles Franklin longlist in 2009 with her debut novel One Foot Wrong, which was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s literary award in the same year. The Eye of the Sheep was also shortlisted for the 2015 Stella prize.
There’s no doubt that the story of a different young boy growing up in a family mired in financial worries and domestic violence meets the Miles Franklin’s main test — that the novel “presents Australian life in any of its phases.” That family violence is front and centre in the Australian conversation at present doesn’t lessen its relevance, but if that were the only criteria for winning, then Hartnett’s Golden Boys, which deals with the issue of paedophilia, is equally topical.
Photograph: Richard Saker for the Observer
Going back to 2009 and 2011, the literary world was loudly critical of the Miles Franklin for having all male shortlists. One response to that perceived bias was the creation of the Stella prize, also named after author Stella “Miles” Franklin, a prize that celebrates fiction and non-fiction published by Australian women writers.
Consciously or otherwise, the Miles Franklin seems to have redressed that gender bias. Indeed, the last four winners have all been all women. In 2014, Evie Wyld’s All The Birds, Singing raised some eyebrows when she won ahead of Richard Flanagan’s Man booker winning, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Surprising people is proving to be a winning strategy for the Miles Franklin judging panel.
Perhaps another reason the win was unexpected has to do with changing perceptions of what constitutes literary fiction. The debate is ongoing about that horrible term “domestic fiction”, a realm supposedly owned by women writers and sneered at by some prominent male writers who deem the domestic ordinary and narrow.
In this context, a novel such as The Eye of the Sheep winning a major literary prize is public affirmation that family, in all its wondrous and damaged forms, is the most universal theme of all. Three of the shortlisted titles deal with themes of family — and one of those, Tree Palace, was written by a man.
Was Laguna’s win deserved? The Eye of the Sheep is not literary in the commonly accepted belief of what literary means. It is a wrenching story of domestic violence and family breakdown as seen through the eyes of six-year-old Jimmy Flick. And there’s no argument that Sofie Laguna is a woman writer. A children’s writer, too, in her other work.
But, ultimately, who cares? What actually matters, what is apparent from the first paragraph forward, is that Jimmy’s voice is the magic in The Eye of the Sheep. Miles Franklin judge Richard Neville described it as “raw, high-energy and coruscating language”. In my own review for The Hoopla, I wrote: “The line of tension in the novel barely falters … The Eye of the Sheep is a treatise on the indefatigable, that the human spirit must, does, ultimately triumph.”
Winning the $60,000 prize will be life changing for Laguna. It brings with it not only financial salve but also recognition. Potts Point Bookshop’s Anna Low, herself a recent Miles Franklin judge, said: “there will be an enormous amount of interest in The Eye of the Sheep. Winning the Miles Franklin always brings a huge boost to sales.” And that, after all, is the power of the literary prize.
Not to anoint the few but to bring readers’ attention to books that challenge them, show them new worlds and new perspectives. On those criteria, Sofie Laguna and her novel The Eye of the Sheep are worthy recipients.
