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 most well known for writing the Australian classic My Brilliant Career (published in 1901) and for bequeathing her estate to fund this award. As of 2006 the award is worth AU$42,000 and it is administered by the Trust Foundation.
The award was first given in 1957 to Patrick White for Voss. Some of the more notable winners in the intervening years have been, Dirt Music by Tim Winton (2002), Jack Maggs (1998), Oscar and Lucinda and Bliss (1981) by three time winner Peter Carey, Poor Fellow My Country, Xavier Herbert (1975) and Sumner Locke's 1963 winner, Careful, He Might Hear You.
Seek Books has every winner back to the very begining with Voss available- isn't it time that you caught-up on the last 40 years worth of winners? Go to Seek Books to view list>>
Miles Franklin Winner: Steve Carroll Wins with TheTime We Have Taken
June 19th- Melbourne-based author Steven Carroll (left) has won Australia's currently most prestigious literary prize for his novel, The Time We Have Taken.
Carroll was awarded the $42,000 Miles Franklin Literary Award for his work, which the judges said was "moving and indelible in its evocation of the extraordinary in ordinary lives".
The Time We Have Taken is the third novel in a series that Carroll began with The Art of The Engine Driver and continued in The Gift Of Speed, both of which were shortlisted for the Miles Franklin.
All three works detail the life of an unnamed Melbourne suburb, from the 50s through to the 70s. The Time We Have Taken continues to enlarge upon the lives of Peter van Rijn, his wife Rita and their son Michael, who has now moved away from home.
As preparations get under way to celebrate the suburb's centenary, Carroll's central characters reminisce about the past, live in present and look to the future.
"What do they all make of their lives? Do they hear 'the music of the years'? Or are they deaf, missing the wonder of it? Carroll's novel is a poised, philosophically profound exploration of the question," the judging panel said.
Carroll's novel was selected ahead of a four-book shortlist which included works by Rodney Hall and Alex Miller, previous Miles Franklin winners.
Humble Author
Carroll says it is an honour to win.
"But it's also daunting to be joining a long list of authors whom you've either studied or admired for years," he said on accepting the award.
"The Miles Franklin comes with the gravitas of a whole literary tradition, and you feel that weight almost instantly."
The idea came for the trilogy came to him in a dream about his family walking down his street in the Melbourne suburb of Glenroy. He spent 10 years writing the books, all of which he hand wrote. He's now considering a fourth addition.
Carroll said he didn't think he would win this time around.
The author, who was in a rock band in the 1970s, plans to use the money to buy a Rickenbacker guitar, after he traded his in for an electric typewriter to kick start his career 30 years ago.
"It was one of these pivotal moments, life defining moments, it's got a real sadness to it," Carroll said.
"You can't buy your youth but you can buy back your Rickenbacker."
One of the judges, Morag Fraser, described this year's competition as "extreme" and "the most impressive" in history.
She said it was a difficult decision, but Carroll's novel won because of its consistency.
"He's looking at what most people would think was an unpromising suburban milieu and he turns it into this extraordinary fictionalised vibrant world, so that's very hard," Prof Fraser said.
"It's stylistically very unusual and stylistically very adventurous. He plays very risky games with narrative structure and with time."
Franklin Star Set to Fade?
With a new Prime Minister's Literary Award of $100,000 and a Western Australian Premier's Asia/Australia Award of $110,000 looming, the days of the Miles Franklin as Australia's number one literary award may well be numbered. Even the NSW Premier's Prize is matching it in prize money these days, and, arguably, in the quality of the selections. Whilst it is to be celebrated for it's unique Australian qualities, it is hardly rates a stir outside of these shores with few of the novels, save a couple of noticeable exceptions, rating any notice at all in the broader global literary award spectrum or overseas sales.
That said, the Miles is what it is by virtue of the terms of Miles Franklin's terms of legacy and Steve Carroll, this years winner, is fine writer and deserving of the award. Having read the five short listed titles, Carroll, in my view, probably deserved it in a pretty equal field. Whereas Carroll's star may be in the ascendancy, the glow of the Miles F. may well grow dimmer as other literary prizes, perhaps more relevant to a global literary ethos, gain momentum. Still love it though. Kevin Parker
About the Book
The Time We Have Take
Steven Carroll
Fourth Estate (HarperCollins Publishers Australia)
One summer morning in 1970, Peter van Rijn, proprietor of the television and wireless
shop, pronounces his Melbourne suburb one hundred years old. That same morning, Rita is awakened by a dream of her husband’s snores, yet it is years since Vic moved north. Their son, Michael, has left for the city, and is entering the awkward terrain of first love.
As the suburb prepares to celebrate progress, Michael’s friend Mulligan is commissioned
to paint a mural of the area’s history. But what vision of the past will his painting reveal?
Meanwhile, Rita’s sometime friend Mrs Webster confronts the mystery of her husband’s
death. And Michael discovers that innocence can only be sustained for so long.
The Time We Have Taken is both a meditation on the rhythms of suburban life and a
luminous exploration of public and private reckoning during a time of radical change.
About Steven Carroll
Steven Carroll was born in Melbourne. He was educated at La Trobe University and taught English in high schools before playing in bands in the 1970s. After leaving the music scene he began writing as a playwright and became the theatre critic for the Sunday Age.
His first novel, Remember Me, Jimmy James, was published in 1992. This was followed by Momoko (1994), The Love Song of Lucy McBride (1998), and then The Art of the Engine Driver (2001) and The Gift of Speed (2004), shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2002 and 2005, respectively. The Art of the Engine Driver was also shortlisted in 2005 for the Prix Femina, France’s prestigious literary award for the best foreign novel. Steven Carroll lives in Melbourne with his partner and son
2008 Shortlist- Then there Were Five- But How Strong They Are........
17th April- The judges could only let go of four out of the nine long listed titles for this years award suggesting a strong field.
Two previous winners, , Alex Miller (2003, Journey to the Stone Country, 1993, The Ancestor Game) and Rodney Hall ( 1994 The Grisly Wife, 1982 - Just Relations), are now up for a hatrick . Alex Milllers' hope lies with the powerful Landscape of Farewell whilst Mr. Hall's, Love Without Hope, which tells the story of Laura Shoddy - a woman wrongly committed to a mental asylum, has also made the cut.
Gail Jones continues to grow in stature. Currently shortlisted for the world's richest literary prize, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for Dreams of Speaking (also short listed for last years Miles) , Ms. Jones now has a fine chance of winning the prize for the first time with Sorry. She is a previous winner of both the South Australian Premier's and Western Australian Premier's Prizes for Sixty Lights (short listed for Miles in 2005).
First time nominee, David Brooks, who teaches Australian Literature at Sydney University, will take the podium with a touch more authority when the new term starts. He has been short listed for The Fern Tattoo, a beguiling novel about the certainty of fate and the randomness of love.
The final contender is Steve Carroll's, The Time We Have Taken. Mr Carroll is no stranger to the Miles Franklin shortlist having been previously nominated for The Gift of Speed, 2005 and The Art of the Engine Driver in 2002. The latter, incidentally, was also short listed for the Prix Femina, France’s prestigious literary award for the best foreign novel.
A strong field indeed this year. The final five have been selected from a filed of 59 entrants for this years award. The winner will be announced at the NSW State Library on June 19th.
2008 Shortlist
(these links below will take you to details about the shortlisted titles on this page)
Details of 2008 Shortlisted Books and Authors
Landscape of Farewell
Alex Miller
Allen & Unwin
A profound and moving story about the land, the past, exile and acceptance, this deeply intelligent and thoughtful novel is a worthy successor to Miller's much-loved and critically admired Journey to the Stone Country.
A hauntingly beautiful meditation on the land, the past, exile and friendship, Landscape of Farewell is the powerful new novel from acclaimed Australian author, Alex Miller.
It is the story of Max Otto, an elderly German academic. After the death of his much loved wife and his recognition that he will never write the great study of history that was to be his life's crowning work, Max believes his life is all but over. Everything changes, though, when his valedictory lecture is challenged by Professor Vita McLelland, a feisty young Australian Aboriginal academic visiting Germany. Their meeting and growing friendship sets Max on a journey that would have seemed unthinkable just a few short
weeks earlier.
When, at Vita's invitation, Max travels to Australia, he forms a deep friendship with her
uncle, Aboriginal elder Dougald Gnapun. It is a friendship that not only gives new
meaning and purpose to Max, but which teaches him the profound importance of truth telling
in reconciliation with his own and his country's past.
Following Alex Miller's Miles Franklin-winning Journey to the Stone Country, Landscape
of Farewell is a wise and grave novel of power, beauty and truth.
About Alex Miller
Alex Miller is one of Australia's best loved writers. He is twice winner of the prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia's premier literary prize, the first occasion in 1993 for The Ancestor Game, and again in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country. Conditions
of Faith, his fifth novel, was published in 2000 and won the Christina Stead Prize for fiction in the 2001 NSW Premiers Literary Awards. It was also nominated for the Dublin IMPAC International Literature Award, shortlisted for the Colin Roderick Award in 2000, the Age Book of the Year Award and the Miles Franklin Award in 2001. He is also an overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, for The Ancestor Game, in 1993.Miller's eighth novel, Landscape of Farewell, was published in 2007.
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Love without Hope (blue link will take you to Fishpond books)
Rodney Hall
Picador (Pan Macmillan Australia)
The elderly Mrs Shoddy suffers acute depression as a result of a bush fire that kills her beloved horses. A capable countrywoman, she loses her grip and is living in squalor when the district nurse finds her and has her committed to an insane asylum. The time is 1982; the place, a country town in NSW. The NSW Department of Lunacy is still in operation, headed by an official with the title The Master in Lunacy.
In this powerful novel, finding herself pitted against the power of the state, Mrs Shoddy calls on her memories of her missing husband, on the spirit of her horses and on the recovery of her self-respect and resilience to create a world in which she can remain sane, even against the institutional brutality she is subjected to. And the characters in her 
mind become as palpable as the real people she is surrounded by. A hymn of praise to human tenderness, the power of memory and the power of music,Love without Hope confirms Rodney Hall's status as one of Australia's finest
storytellers.
About Rodney Hall (left)
Rodney Hall is a novelist and a poet. His novels include Just Relations, Kisses of the Enemy, A Dream more Luminous than Love, The Island in the Mind, The Day We Had Hitler Home and The Last Love Story. He has twice been awarded the Miles Franklin Award, and has been honoured with membership of the Order of Australia. He lives in Box Hill North, Victoria.
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Sorry
Gail Jones
Vintage (Random House Australia)
This is a story that can only be told in a whisper...’
In the remote outback of North-west Australia, English anthropologist Nicholas Keene and his wife Stella raise a curious child, Perdita. Her childhood is far from ordinary; a shack in the wilderness, with a distant father burying himself in books and an unstable mother whose knowledge of Shakespeare forms the backbone of the girl's limited education. Emotionally adrift, Perdita develops a friendship with an Aboriginal girl, Mary, with whom she will share a very special bond. She appears content with her unusual family life in this remote corner of the globe until Nicholas Keene is discovered murdered. Through this exquisite story of a young girl's survival against the odds,
Gail Jones explores the values of friendship, loyalty and sacrifice with a skill that has already earned her numerous accolades for her previous novels Dreams of Speaking and Sixty Lights.
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About Gail Jones
Gail Jones is the author of two collections of short stories, Fetish Lives and The House
of Breathing. Her first novel, Black Mirror, won the Nita B. Kibble Award and the Fiction Prize in the Western Australian Premier's Book Awards in 2003.
Her second novel, Sixty Lights, was long listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2004, shortlisted for the 2005 Miles Franklin Award, and won the 2005 Age Book of the Year Award for Fiction, and the Fiction and Premier's Prize in both the Western Australian Premier's Book Awards 2004 and the South Australian Festival Award for Literature in 2006 Dreams of Speaking has been shortlisted in 2007 for the Miles Franklin Award, the NSW Premier's Award and the Nita B. Kibble Award.
The Fern Tattoo
David Brooks
University of Queensland Press
‘Evidently she knew who I was, or thought she did, since I had apparently needed no
in
troduction and certainly hadn’t received one… She told stories. One could almost say
she rushed into them, on the merest of pretexts, as if the world was ending very shortly
and they had to be got through before it happened.’
A century of family secrets starts to unravel when Benedict Waters is summoned to an
audience with an old friend of his mother. He is seduced by her storytelling and it takes
time and an astonishing revelation before he realises that it is his own family he has
been hearing about, his own life that is being undone.
From the Blue Mountains to the Hawkesbury and from Sydney to the south coast of New
South Wales, The Fern Tattoo takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey through several
generations of three families. We meet a range of extraordinary characters including a
bigamist bishop, a librarian tattooed from neck to knee, a young girl who kills her best
friend in a tragic shooting accident and a pair of lovers who live each other’s lives for years after they have separated. As with all families, there are lost loves, tragic passions and unspoken – sometimes unspeakable – histories.
The Fern Tattoo is a beguiling novel about the certainty of fate and the randomness of
love that announces David Brooks’ return as one of Australia’s most distinctive literary
novelists.
About David Brooks
Born in Canberra, Brooks then spent his earliest years in Greece and Yugoslavia. He
studied at the Australian National University and the University of Toronto. He has
taught at various Australian universities and has edited and/or served on the editorial
board of numerous Australian literary journals and been a guest at many writers’
festivals. A significant portion of his life has been spent on the south coast of New South
Wales where much of The Fern Tattoo is set.
Brooks is the author of the highly acclaimed novel The House of Balthus (1995), three
collections of poetry and three books of short fiction. His poetry and fiction have won and
been shortlisted for many awards and have translated into many languages from
German to Arabic and Mandarin to Swedish. Brooks has also edited multiple selections
of the poems of one of Australia’s most celebrated poets, AD Hope. He currently teaches
Australian Literature at Sydney University and is the co-editor of Southerly.
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2008 Longlist
The Other Long Listed Titles for the 2008 Award
Orpheus Lost
Janette Turner Hospital
Fourth Estate (HarperCollins Publishers Australia)
‘Love can take you to the darkest places …’
Leela is a gifted mathematician who has escaped her small Southern town to study in
Boston. From the first moment she hears Mishka - a young Australian musician - playing his violin in a subway, his music grips her, and they quickly become lovers. Their souls,bodies and lives are fused, and love offers protection of sorts from the violence and anxiety around them, until Leela is taken off the street to an interrogation centre somewhere outside the city. There has been an ‘incident’, an explosion on the underground; terrorists are suspected, security is high. And her old childhood friend Cobb is conducting a very questionable investigation.
Now he reveals to her that Mishka may not be all he seems. That there may be more to his past than his story of growing up in the Daintree with an eccentric musical family.
Leela has already discovered that Mishka is spending some evenings not at the Music Lab but at a café. A café, Cobb tells her, known to be a terrorist contact point. Who can she believe? In this compelling re-imagining of the Orpheus story, Leela travels to an underworld of kidnapping, torture and despair in search of the truth … and the man she loves.
About Janette Turner Hospital
Janette Turner Hospital (righT)was born in Melbourne in 1942, but her family moved to Brisbane when she was a child. She began her teaching career in remote Queensland high schools, but since her graduate studies she has taught in universities in Australia, Canada, England, France, and the United States. Her first published short story appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (USA) where it won an “Atlantic First” citation in 1978.
Her first novel, The Ivory Swing (set in the village in South India where she lived in 1977), won Canada’s Seal Award (a $50,000 prize) in 1982. She lived for many years in Canada, and in 1986 she was listed by the Toronto Globe & Mail as one of Canada’s
“Ten Best Young Fiction Writers”. Since then she has won a number of prizes for her seven novels and three short story collections, and her work has been published in twelve languages. Three of her short stories appeared in Britain’s annual Best Short Stories in English in their year of publication, and one of these, Unperformed Experiments Have No Results, was selected for The Best of the Best, an anthology of the decade in 1995.
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Secrets of the Sea
Nicholas Shakespeare
Harvill Secker (Random House)
Following the death of his parents in a car crash, eleven-year-old Alex Dove is torn from his life on a remote farm in Tasmania and sent to school in England. Twelve years on,
he must return to Australia to deal with his inheritance. But the timeless beauty of the land and his encounter with a young woman, whose own life has been marked by tragedy, persuade him to stay. They marry, and he finds himself drawn into the eccentric, often hilarious dynamics of island life. Longing for children, the couple open their home to a disquieting guest, a teenage castaway, whose presence on t
he farm begins to unravel their tenuously forged happiness, while at the same time offering the prospect of a much greater fulfillment. Secrets of the Sea Shakespeare’s finest novel to date.
About Nicholas Shakespeare (left)
Nicholas Shakespeare is the author of The Vision of Elena Silves, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, The High Flyer, for which he was nominated for the Grants list in 1993 and The Dancer Upstairs which was chosen by the American Libraries Association as the best novel of 1997. In 1999 his biography, Bruce Chatwin, was published to great critical acclaim. His novel Snow Leg was published in 2004. In Tasmania won the inaugural Tasmania Book Prize in 2007.
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The Memory Room
Christopher Koch
Knopf (Random House Australia)
What is a spy? Are they born, or are they made?'
With these words, Vincent Austin analyses his future occupation. Some spies are made,he says, but his kind is born. He is devoted to secrecy for its own sake.
Vincent is orphaned early, and his boyhood in Tasmania is spent with an elderly aunt.His fascination with secrecy and espionage - and much else besides - is shared to an uncanny degree by Erika Lange, daughter of a post-World War German immigrant. She too has lost her mother, and she and Vincent see themselves as twin spirits, inhabiting a shared, platonic world of fantasy and ritual.
At University, Vincent aims to enter Foreign Affairs - an ambition shared by his easygoing friend Derek Bradley. However, in his final year, Vincent is recruited by ASIS - Australia's overseas secret intelligence service - and his adolescent dream becomes reality. Erika becomes a journalist, eventually entering the overseas service as a press officer. She is an attractive and magnetic woman, but her emotional life is chaotic. She, Vincent and Bradley meet again in 1982, when they are in their thirties, and have all been posted to the Australian Embassy in Beijing. Here, Erika and Bradley begin an affair which is ultimately doomed to fail. At the same time, Vincent attempts an espionage coup which ends in disaster for himself and Bradley. Both men are expelled from China, and are based in Canberra, where Vincent is confined to the ASIS Registry: the 'memory room' of the book's title. This is the year of Star Wars, and the final phase of the 
Cold War. Erika, also returning to Australia, becomes a television journalist, and enjoys a period of national prominence. The fantasies of youth have become reality for Erika and Vincent, and lead to a tragic climax for them both. It is left to Bradley, who inherits Vincent's diaries, to contemplate their fate.
Although The Memory Room deals with espionage, its aims go far beyond those of a thriller. A psychological study of a brilliant but eccentric secret intelligence operative, it is also an exploration of the mystical nature of secrecy itself, and of the consequences of a shared obsession.
About Christopher Koch left)
Christopher Koch was born and educated in Tasmania. For a good deal of his life he was a broadcasting producer, working for the ABC in Sydney. He has lived and worked in London and elsewhere overseas. He has been a full time writer since 1972, winning international praise and a number of awards for his six previous novels, many of which are translated in a number of European countries. One of his novels, The Year of Living Dangerously, was made into a fillm by Peter Weir and was nominated for an Academy Award. He has twice won the Miles Franklin award for fiction: for The Doubleman and Highways to a War . In 1995 Koch was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for his contribution to Australian literature.
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The Widow and Her Hero
Tom Keneally
Vintage (Random House Australia)
I knew in general terms that I was marrying a hero. The burden lay lightly on Leo, and to be a hero’s wife in times supposedly suited to the heroic caused a woman to swallow doubt… The Japanese had barely been turned back and had not abandoned the field of ambition. It was heresy and unlucky to undermine young men at such a supreme hour.
When Grace married the genial and handsome Captain Leo Waterhouse in Australia in 1943, they were young, in love – and at war. Like many other young men and women, they were ready, willing and able to put the war effort first. They never seriously doubted that they would come through unscathed.
But Leo never returned from a commando mission masterminded his own hero figure, an eccentric and charismatic man who inspired total loyalty from those under his command.
The world moves on to new alliances, leaving Grace, like so many widows, to bear the pain of losing the love of her life and wonder what it had all been for. Sixty years on, Grace is still haunted by the tragedy of her doomed hero when the real
story of his ill-fated secret mission is at last unearthed. As new fragments of her hero’s story emerge, Grace is forced to keep revising her picture of what happened to Leo and his fellow commandos – until she learns about the final piece in the jigsaw, and the
ultimate betrayal.
About Tom Keneally
Thomas Keneally )left) won the Booker Prize in 1982 with Schindler’s Ark, later made into the Academy Award-winning film Schindler’s List by Steven Spielberg. He has written nine works of non-fiction, including The Commonwealth of Thieves, The Great Shame and American Scoundrel, and 27 works of fiction, includingThe Widow and Her Hero, An Angel in Australia and Bettany's Book. His novels The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest, and Confederates were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize, while
Bring Larks and Heroes and Three Cheers for the Paraclete won the Miles Franklin Award.
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Past Winners of the Miles Franklin 1994-2007
Seek Books has every winner back to the very begining with Voss, in 1957, available- isn't it time that you caught-up on the last 40 years worth of winners? Go to Seek Books>>
2007 Winner - Carpentaria by Alexis Wright
Commenting on the winner's novel, the Judging Panel wrote:
"Alexis Wright’s powerful novel about the Gulf country works on many levels and registers. At its centre is Norm Phantom, an old man of the sea and custodian of indigenous lore, his wife Angel Day, and their son Will, who is involved in a deadly fight for land rights against the shadowy proprietors of the huge Gurfurrit mine. At one level, the novel is a gripping account of that campaign and the mining company’s violent and illegal attempts to protect its interests in the Gulf. At another level, it is a stunning evocation – some will want to call it magic realism or postcolonial allegory – of a sublime and often overwhelming tropical world that is still inhabited by traditional spirits like the rainbow serpent, the groper, the sky people and the ghosts of the dead. These ancient spiritual forces work through the elements of sky and sea and land to throw off the presence of the strangers and restore this remarkable place to something like its ancient rhythms. The novel’s climax is quite literally apocalyptic, drawing together its different stylistic registers of myth, allegory and social satire; its conclusion is cathartic and even inspiring.
2006 Winner -The Ballad of Desmond Kale by Roger McDonald
Commenting on the winner’s novel, the Judging Panel wrote:
“This is an historical novel in a grand, operatic style, an affectionate and bravura performance by a novelist at the height of his powers. Steeped in the lore of wool and bushcraft, it echoes a clutch of Great Australian and American Novels, from Moby Dick and Tom Sawyer to His Natural Life and Such is Life. It also recalls many of the best-loved works of English fiction, suggesting in its darker moments the mordant wit of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair or, in its sunnier moments, the uplifting ethical vision of Fielding’s Tom Jones. It shares something with those novels in its sweeping geographical scope, its rich cast of characters, and the rollicking pace of its events, which take us from the bush beyond Parramatta to the Houses of Parliament in London, from the sheepwalks of Yorkshire to shipwrecks and piracy in the South Pacific, from the chaotic settlement at Sydney Cove to the grim melodrama of the convict system at Macquarie Harbour.“
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2005 Winner- The White Earth by Andrew McGahan
Commenting on the winner's novel, the Judging Panel wrote:
"The White Earth revisits the conventions of the Australian pioneering saga and the gothic novel, investing them with remarkable imaginative force and contemporary significance. On the eve of Native Title legislation, John McIvor of the historic Kuran Station in South East Queensland hopes to pass on the estate and its troubled legacy to his young nephew, William. As if seeing through the distracting pain of the boy's illness, McGahan subjects postcolonial Australia to a searing analysis. William's disease is literally the burden of the past. McGahan writes with a total command of thematic design and narrative structure. The White Earth draws on the full resources of the novel as an imaginative form to explore some of the most urgent social and political issues haunting Australians today."
2004 W
inner- The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard
Commenting on the winner's novel, the Judging Panel wrote:
"Moving from postwar Japan, to Hong Kong, England and eventually New Zealand, Shirley Hazzard’s long-awaited new novel approaches the epic in its range of scenes and characters, though running to only 300 pages. At its heart is the growing love between an English war hero and a young Australian girl, providing one glimmer of hope in a world full of burnt survivors and uncaring victors. Hazzard surrounds her central figures with dozens of others, all perfectly evoked in a few words, as are the sights, sounds and smells of their lives. Complex and utterly engrossing, The Great Fire is a reminder of why, in a digital age, the novel still matters."
2003 Winner Journey to the Stone Country by Alex Miller
Commenting on the winner's novel, the Judging Panel wrote:
"The journey central to Alex Miller’s novel is one of both time and space, through a confrontation with the brutalities of the past to the possibilities for a happier future. Journey to the Stone Country is a moving story of the coming together of Annabelle Beck, granddaughter of a white station owner, and Bo Rennie, an Aboriginal stockman whose own grandparents had ignored racial divisions. Annabelle must not only learn to view the past without sentimentality, but to accept a different way of being in the world, to acknowledge not only that are there are some things it is not appropriate for her to know, but also the depth of her own attachment to place.
Issues crucial to any reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians could be difficult territory for a novelist, but Miller handles them with skill and tact, ensuring that they come alive on the page and that the journey is never less than an engrossing one."
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2002 Winner Dirt Music by Tim Winton
Commenting on the winner's novel, the Judging Panel wrote:
"Dirt Music is a huge, powerful novel about love, guilt, pain, fear - and the visceral, transforming power of music. Beginning in a redneck fishing town, it takes to the road as Luther Fox, abalone poacher, on the run from himself, heads into the trackless country to the north. With his extraordinary powers of physical description and his readiness to take risks with his writing, Winton conjures a primordial land and seascape and unforgettable characters who live on the edge of the continent on the edge of their nerves. Contemporary Australia, on the surface so money-grubbing and self-absorbed, at its heart so deep and unfathomable, has rarely been laid as bare."
2001 Winner- Dark Palace: The Companion Novel to Grand days by Frank Moorhouse-
Commenting on the winner's novel, the Judging Panel wrote:
"In Dark Palace, the companion novel to his earlier 'Grand Days,' Frank Moorhouse takes the twinned histories of the League of Nations of Edith Campbell Berry, his Australian heroine, through to the demise of the League after World War II. As its title suggests, this is a more sombre novel than its predecessor, a song of experience rather than innocence, with Edith's earlier idealism and optimism repeatedly challenged by failures in her private life as well as by the League's failure to prevent a world war. Even her trip home to Australia has its darker moments, as she discovers that Canberra has a yet no room for a woman like her. Moorhouse's effortless control of his historical material is matched by his remarkable insight into his character lives."
2000 Winners- Drylands by Thea Astley and Benang: From the Heart by Kim Scott
Thea Astley has won the Miles Franklin Award three times; the first time, in 1962, was for The Well-Dressed Explorer. She won it again in 1965 for The Slow Natives, and in 1972 for The Acolyte.
Commenting on the winners' novels, the Judging Panel wrote:
"Drylands takes us into the heart of One Nation territory. Bewildered by what she perceives as a drifting and increasingly illiterate culture, Janet Deakin, a shop-keeper in a small Queensland town, sets out to write ‘a book for the world's last reader'. She offers us seven partly allegorical tales of social upheaval. This is gloomy and sometimes discomfiting ground, f
or the novel deals with gender politics, race relations, the alienation of youth, and violence and hopelessness in rural Australia. But Drylands is written with Thea Astley's trademark concision, bite, and linguistic verve, and brilliantly transcends the darkness at the heart of this novel. It is a powerful achievement by one of our most eminent writers.
Harley, the levitating narrator of Kim Scott's Benang, is the ‘first white man born', the culmination of his white grandfather's enthusiastic pursuit of the official eugenic policy of ‘breeding out' and ‘elevating' the Native Race. Ambivalent, confused, angry, Harley goes in search of the relatives and ancestors whose genealogies - full-blood, half-caste, quarter-caste, octaroon - his grandfather has painstakingly documented. Harley's journey takes him across the inland to the coast, through past and present lives, into Nyoongar heartland.
Homeric in its ambitions and its largesse, unsettling in its swirling narrative, Benang is an absorbing, moving novel, wryly ironic in tone, in which unregarded, powerless lives are given voice and substance against a lovingly observed land- and sea-scape.
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1999 Winner - Eucalyptus by Murray Bail-
Commenting on the winner's novel, the Judging Panel wrote:
"You could say that in terms of the characteristic landscape of Australian writing, Murray Bail's Eucalyptus is about ‘the knowledge'. That is its amusing working conceit; but much more seriously it is about how one acquires the knowledge. In his characteristically elegant and deceptively sparse manner, Bail demonstrates the importance of narratives, of story telling, as a way of acquiring and learning about one's self and one's place. It reconstitutes traditional romance conventions (the father setting an impossible task for those who would win the hand of his daughter) and rewrites them for Australia, so that it is simultaneously local and universal in its orientation. And the point of the novel lies not in the young man's success but in what the daughter learns. This is a masculine construct of femininity, no doubt; but then antipodean courtship has ever been more stringy bark than lemon-scented gum gum."
1998 Winner - Jack Maggs by Peter Carey -
Commenting on the winner's novel, the Judging Panel wrote:
"Peter Carey returns to the nineteenth century in an utterly captivating mystery. The year is 1837 and a stranger is prowling London. He is Jack Maggs, an illegal returnee from the prison island of Australia. He has the demeanour of a savage and the skills of a hardened criminal, and he is risking his life on seeking vengeance and reconciliation. Installing himself within the household of the genteel grocer Percy Buckle, Maggs soon attracts the attention of a cross section of London society. Saucy Mercy Larkin wants him for a mate. The writer Tobias Oates wants to possess his soul through hypnosis. But Maggs is obsessed with a plan of his own. And as all the various schemes converge, Maggs rises into the centre, a dark looming figure, at once frightening, mysterious, and compelling. Not since Caleb Carr's The Alienist have the shadowy city streets of the nineteenth century lit up with such mystery and romance."
1997 Winner - The Glade within the Grove by David Foster- 
Commenting on the winner's novel, the Judging Panel wrote:
"David Foster invokes tradition in his learned and comic novel The Glade within the Grove. The book is a sharp, witty and seductive critique of one of the most influential periods in the recent history of ideas in Australia. A serious interest in the ideologies of the liberation movements of the sixties and seventies, in the rhetoric of Trotskyite politics, and the causes and effects of young peoples' retreat to the promise of a rural paradise is brought into balance by reference back to the myths of Attis and Cybele, and to ancient practices and religious beliefs."
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1996 Winner - Highways to a War by Christopher Koch
Commenting on the winner's novel, the Judging Panel wrote:
"The central character in Christopher Koch's haunting novel, Highways to a War is the strong tall, blond Australian war photographer, Mike Langford, whose essential character is reflected in inner strength , independence and a sense of moral value. Using his own memories, Langford's audio tapes and photographs of his colleagues, the narrator Ray, takes us on a journey of discovery about Langford – who he is now and how he deals with moral and ethical dilemmas. Though Highways to a War is set against the long and bitter saga of the Vietnam War and the subsequent Cambodian conflict, that is such an important component of the social and political landscape of Australian in the Latter part of this century, it is really a novel about loss. Mike Langford's early Tasmanian experience has shaped his character and he carries his haunted past everywhere with him."
1995 Winner - The Hand that Signed the Paper by Helen Demidenko-
Commenting on the winner's novel, the Judging Panel wrote:
"Helen Demidenko’s novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper, is about the response of a family of Ukrainian migrants to the war crimes tribunals in Australia at the end of the 1980s. When her uncle Vitaly is one of those charged, Fiona, the idealistic young Queensland university student who narrates the book, feels compelled to understand what Vitaly and his brother and sister - her father and aunt - actually did as Nazi collaborators during the war, and why. Appointing herself the family’s “recording angel”, Fiona gathers their accounts of their lives, as peasant children in the famine-stricken Ukraine under Stalin, as adolescents with the SS, as post-war migrant refugees. From this literary device comes a multi-voiced novel of shifting perspectives which renders, with great authenticity, both the inhuman horrors and the human pleasures of her characters’ lives. Its focus is the story of Vitaly, who becomes a guard at Treblinka. Ever present is the contrast with Fiona’s untroubled Australian childhood and adolescence. Her innocence is the story’s moral centre; her sense of righteousness, its driving force. Helen Demidenko’s first novel displays a powerful literary imagination coupled to a strong sense of history, and brings to light a hitherto unspeakable aspect of the Australian migrant experience."
1994 Winner - The Grisly Wife by Rodney Hall
Commenting on the winner's novel, the Judging Panel wrote:
"Rodney Hall’s The Grisly Wife is a novel with a rather surprising vision. In it he interrogates that curious kind of mind which desires things to be the way they are said to be, and observes what happens when that is found to be not so. For this is a place where astonishing things happen. Given this is about an unorthodox religious group, a band of, as it happens, deformed women led to colonial Australia by a bizarre zealot, this could have been a grimly gothic tale; but it is not. For example, the repressions are all redeemed by the heroine’s comic self-possession and the poetic power of her narrative. Essentially, Hall distinguishes between the fundamentalist and nonconformist cast of mind, and that is a very unusual subject for an Australian writer."
Winners 1957- 1993
* 1993 - The Ancestor Game, Alex Miller
* 1992 - Cloudstreet, Tim Winton
* 1991 - The Great World, David Malouf
* 1990 - Oceana Fine, Tom Flood
* 1989 - Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey
1988 - Date changed from year of publication to year of announcement.
* 1987 - Dancing on Coral, Glenda Adams
* 1986 - The Well, Elizabeth Jolley
* 1985 - The Doubleman, Christopher Koch
* 1984 - Shallows, Tim Winton
* 1983 - No award.
* 1982 - Just Relations, Rodney Hall
* 1981 - Bliss, Peter Carey
* 1980 - The Impersonators, Jessica Anderson
* 1979 - A Woman of the Future, David Ireland
* 1978 - Tirra Lirra by the River, Jessica Anderson
* 1977 - Swords and Crowns and Rings, Ruth Park
* 1976 - The Glass Canoe, David Ireland
* 1975 - Poor Fellow My Country, Xavier Herbert
* 1974 - The Mango Tree, Ronald McKie
* 1973 - No award.
* 1972 - The Acolyte, Thea Astley
* 1971 - The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, David Ireland
* 1970 - A Horse of Air, Dal Stivens
* 1969 - Clean Straw for Nothing, George Johnston
* 1968 - Three Cheers for the Paraclete, Thomas Keneally
* 1967 - Bring Larks and Heroes, Thomas Keneally
* 1966 - Trap, Peter Mathers
* 1965 - The Slow Natives, Thea Astley
* 1964 - My Brother Jack, George Johnston
* 1963 - Careful, He Might Hear You, Sumner Locke Elliott
* 1962 - tie
o The Well Dressed Explorer, Thea Astley
o The Cupboard Under the Stairs, George Turner
* 1961 - Riders in the Chariot, Patrick White
* 1960 - The Irishman, Elizabeth O'Conner
* 1959 - The Big Fellow, Vance Palmer
* 1958 - To the Islands, Randolph Stow
* 1957 - Voss, Patrick White
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Shortlists 1987- 2007
2007
* Careless, Deborah Robertson
*Carpentaria, Alexis Wright- Winner
* Dreams of Speaking, Gail Jones
*Theft: A Love Story, Peter Carey
2006
* The Garden Book, Brian Castro
* The Secret River, Kate Grenville
*The Ballad of Desmond Kale, Roger McDonald- Winner
* Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living:, Carrie Tiffany
* The Wing of Night, Brenda Walker
2005
* Salt Rain, Sarah Armstrong
* The Gift of Speed, Steven Carroll
* Sixty Lights, Gail Jones
*The White Earth, Andrew McGahan- Winner
* The Submerged Cathedral, Charlotte Wood
2004
* My Life as a Fake, Peter Carey
* Elizabeth Costello, J.M. Coetzee
* Three Dog Night, Peter Goldsworthy
* The Great Fire, Shirley Hazzard
* Slow Water, Annamarie Jagose
* Seven Types of Ambiguity, Elliot Perlman
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2003
* The Prosperous Thief, Andrea Goldsmith
* Of a Boy, Sonya Hartnett
* Moral Hazard, Kate Jennings
* An Angel in Australia, Tom Keneally
* Journey to the Stone Country, Alex Miller
* Wild Surmise, Dorothy Porter
2002
* The Art of the Engine Driver, Steven Carroll
* Gould's Book of Fish, Richard Flanagan
* Gilgamesh, Joan London
* The Architect, John Scott
* Dirt Music, Tim Winton- Winner
2001
*True History of the Kelly Gang, Peter Carey
* The Company, Arabella Edge
* The Day We Had Hitler Home, Rodney Hall
* English Passengers, Matthew Kneale
* Conditions of Faith, Alex Miller
* Dark Palace, Frank Moorhouse- Winner
* Life after George, Hannie Rayson
Matthew Kneale's novel is the first by a non-Australian to be shortlisted for the award. Hannie Rayson's, Life after George, is the first play to be shortlisted.
2000
* Drylands, Thea Astley- Winner
* Too Many Men, Lily Brett
* What a Piece of Work, Dorothy Porter
* Benang, Kim Scott
* Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop, Amy Witting
Dorothy Porter's What a Piece of Work is the first verse novel to be shortlisted.
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1999
*Eucalyptus, Murray Bail- Winner
* Red Shoes, Carmel Bird
* The Golden Dress, Marion Halligan
* Mr Darwin's Shooter, Roger McDonald
* Three Dollars, Elliot Perlman
1998
* Wrack, James Bradley
* Jack Maggs, Peter Carey
* The Service of Clouds, Delia Falconer
* The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Richard Flanagan
* One for the Master, Dorothy Johnston
* Lovesong, Elizabeth Jolley
* Nightpictures, Rod Jones
1997
* The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow, Thea Astley
* Night Letters, Robert Dessaix
* The Drowner, Robert Drewe
* The Glade within the Grove, David Foster
* Oyster, Janette Turner Hospital
* The Conversations at Curlow Creek, David Malouf
* Before I Wake, John Scott
1996
* The White Garden, Carmel Bird
* The House in the Light, Beverley Farmer
* Bracelet Honeymyrtle, Judith Fox
* The Touchstone, Paul Horsfall
* Highways to a War, Christopher Koch
* Camille's Bread, Amanda Lohrey
* The Sitters, Alex Miller
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1995
* The Hand that Signed the Paper, Helen Demidenko
* Death of a River Guide, Richard Flanagan
* Dark Places, Kate Grenville
* A Mortality Tale, Jay Verney
1994
* The Grisly Wife, Rodney Hall
* Remembering Babylon, David Malouf
* Water Man, Roger McDonald
1993
* Vanishing Points, Thea Astley
* After China, Brian Castro
* Cosmo Cosmolino, Helen Garner
* The Last Magician, Janette Turner Hospital
* Shearers' Motel, Roger McDonald
* The Ancestor Game, Alex Miller
1992
* Double Wolf, Brian Castro
* Our Sunshine, Robert Drewe
* To the Burning City, Alan Gould
* The Second Bridegroom, Rodney Hall
* Cloudstreet (Picador Books), Tim Winton
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1991
* Longleg, Glenda Adams
* Taking Shelter, Jessica Anderson
* Reaching Tin River, Thea Astley
* The Bluebird Café, Carmel Bird
* The Country Without Music, Nicholas Hasluck
* The Great World, David Malouf
1990
* Company of Images, Janine Burke
* Oceana Fine, Tom Flood
* Maestro, Peter Goldsworthy
* Avenue of Eternal Peace, Nicholas Jose
* Smyrna, Tony Maniaty
* I for Isobel, Amy Witting
1989
*Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey
* Captivity Captive, Rodney Hall
* Out of the Line of Fire, Mark Henshaw
* Building on Sand, David Parker
* Charades, Janette Turner Hospital
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1988
Date changed from year of publication to year of announcement, so no award was made in this year.
1987
* Dancing on Coral, Glenda Adams
* Holden's Performance, Murray Bail
* Truant State, Nicholas Hasluck
* Bloodfather, David Ireland
* Home is the Sailor, Nancy Phelan
Longlists 2005- 2008
2008
- Landscape of Farewell- Alex Miller-
- Love without Hope- Rodney Hall -
- Orpheus Lost- Janet Turner-Hospital -
- Secrets of the Sea - Nicholas Shakespeare-
- Sorry - Gail Jones
- The Memory Room - Christopher Koch
- The Time We Have Taken - Stephen Carroll
- The Fern Tattoo- David Brooks
- The Widow and Her Hero - Thoma Keneally
2007
*Theft: A Love Story, Peter Carey
* Silent Parts, John Charalambous
* The Unknown Terrorist, Richard Flanagan
* Beyond the Break, Sandra Hall
* Dreams of Speaking, Gail Jones
* The Unexpected Elements of Love, Kate Legge
* Careless, Deborah Robertson
* Carpentaria, Alexis Wright
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2006
* Knitting, Anne Bartlett
* The Garden Book, Brian Castro
* The Secret River, Kate Grenville
* An Accidental Tourist, Stephen Lang
* The Ballad of Desmond Kale, Roger McDonald
* Prochownik's Dream, Alex Miller
* Sunnyside, Joanna Murray-Smith
* A Case of Knives, Peter Rose
* The Broken Shore, Peter Temple
* Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living, Carrie Tiffany
* Dead Europe, Christos Tsiolkas
* The Wing of Night, Brenda Walker
2005
* Salt Rain, Sarah Armstrong
* The Gift of Speed, Steven Carroll
* Backwaters, Robert Engwarda
* The Ghost Writer, John Harwood
* The Broken Book, Susan Johnson
* Sixty Lights, Gail Jones
* A Private Man, Malcolm Knox
* The Philosopher's Doll, Amanda Lohrey
* The White Earth, Andrew McGahan
* I Have Kissed Your Lips, Gerard Windsor
* The Submerged Cathedral, Charlotte Wood
* The Last Ride, Denise Young
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Over 100 Australian and International Award Details. Winners. Shorts. News. All Genres. Enter here>>
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