Shortlists are odd things. Put two lots of judges in separate rooms with the same works and you will not come up with the same one. But it is always interesting when their choices overlap.
Two novels on this year’s Miles Franklin shortlist were also on that of this year’s Stella prize: Sanya Rushdi’s Hospital, which explores her experience of psychosis, and Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy, a monumental epic that is also this year’s Stella winner (both published by Giramondo).
While skewing literary, this year’s Miles Franklin shortlist actively seeks new ways of understanding style, form and technique. There is an openness too: three authors are shortlisted for their debut long-form works.
The Miles Franklin, while always prestigious, had earned a reputation for being male, pale and stale. But it has demonstrably evolved since the establishment of the Stella prize in 2012. (Only one man, AS Patrić, has received the award since, for Black Rock White City in 2016.) The Miles Franklin shortlists of the past two years showcase the most diverse groups of writers in the prize’s history.
This shortlist is further evidence of the ongoing dominance of small publishers, who are clearly more adept – and willing – to invest in developing cultural rather than commercial capital. Giramondo, a small literary publisher that often has books represented on major shortlists, features twice. So does Puncher & Wattmann, perhaps best described as a micro-publisher, with Hossein Asgari’s Only Sound Remains and Jen Craig’s Wall.
Significantly, almost all the works on this shortlist play with the form of fiction itself. André Dao’s Anam (the only book published by a major publisher, Penguin Random House), Hospital, Only Sound Remains and Wall blur the lines between fiction and fact. Each, in their own way, presents versions of autofiction and fictionalised autobiography. Praiseworthy is also a deliberate and direct challenge to classification.
Anam by André Dao
Readers who follow unpublished manuscript awards have been waiting for Anam for a while. The manuscript won the Victorian premier’s literary award for an unpublished manuscript in 2021.
From the reader’s perspective, Anam feels like a memoir of the Vietnamese diaspora. The narrator – a slightly fictionalised Dao – interrogates his family history, including his paternal grandfather’s decade-long detention without trial by the Vietnamese government, from 1978, three years after the war ended. This history is intimately linked to the grand geopolitical and cultural conflicts of the 20th century, and runs across the globe, playing out in “Hung-Xa, Hanoi, Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City, Laon, Paris, Boissy, Cambridge, Footscray”.
Through family, Anam interrogates the fractures rent by imperialism, colonialism and communism, and the ongoing pain of exile, wandering and wondering. The plot is simple: the Melbourne-based narrator is studying in Cambridge with his young family. His studies focus on his family history and collective remembering, especially his grandfather’s experience of the Vietnam war and being held as a political prisoner. As Dao writes, “we remember to give shape to our forgetting”.
Dao knows his craft, and in June won the Pascall prize for cultural criticism in the Walkley awards. He is also the founder of the oral history project Behind the Wire. The presence of those detained after seeking asylum in Australia echoes throughout Anam.
The Bell of the World by Gregory Day
In terms of a reader’s typical understanding of what to expect from a novel, The Bell of the World, Gregory Day’s sixth novel, represents the most traditional understanding of fiction on this shortlist.
Day, who lives in the eastern Otways, Victoria, writes about the place he knows best. The Bell of the World is set in early-20th-century regional Victoria, on Wadawurrung country. And place matters here, more than character or plot. This is the story of Sarah Hutchinson, her Uncle Ferny, and the lands and sounds and beings of Ngangahook, their inherited family estate.
The basic plot that keeps the narrative moving is the question of a bell: locals want Ferny to pay for an English-style church bell that would keep them “from being spiritually, civically, communally naked”. Sarah and Ferny, on the other hand, prefer “No schoolbell, no churchbell, no bell for service nor for storm. Just the silence that is so filled with sound.” This propels the central question: an alternative to European thought and convention, and their historical imposition on this continent.
Day is a poet and musician, and his prose style leans to the lyrical. The work explicitly explores the sound and meaning, with multiple and repeated references to the “velar nasal” (the “ng” sound in Ngangahook). This is tied to Day’s question of how to understand this continent. After all, “if you were going to embark on putting together a truly Australian alphabet it most likely wouldn’t start with the Roman A”.
In The Bell of the World, Day joins a small but growing number of white writers exploring how settler Australians can learn to care for and build relationships with its lands and waters. Day’s previous novel, A Sand Archive, was also shortlisted for the Miles Franklin in 2019.
Hospital by Sanya Rushdi
Hospital is Sanya Rushdi’s debut. It is a short, intimate account of her personal experience with psychosis and schizophrenia, and of how the health care system medicalises her experiences. Rushdi wrote Hospital in Bengali, and Arunava Sinha then translated it into English. The unusual listing of a translated work for the Miles Franklin represents a significant evolution of the prize.
Moving between her home, a community facility and a hospital ward, this narrative not only illustrates the experience of mental ill health, but shares the specific experience of time spent within the mental health system. Here, her thoughts and feelings are examined, defined and medicalised. Sanya thinks, “I don’t trust psychological treatment in the medical model”, and yearns for another approach. But the narrative is also unsure of this. At points, she experiences paranoia and questions her own sanity (and indeed, what makes someone sane).
The prose is spare and measured, and at 125 pages, this is the shortest entry on the shortlist. While this is published as fiction, Hospital recalls Australian mental health memoirs like Kate Richard’s Madness: A Memoir and Sam Twyford-Moore’s The Rapids: Ways of looking at Mania.
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Only Sound Remains by Hossein Asgari
In Only Sound Remains, Hossein Asgari offers stories within stories. The plot is simple, though profound.
The narrator, Saeed, lives in Adelaide, unable to return to his birthplace in Iran after publishing his novel. His father, Ismael, a retired teacher of Persian literature, unexpectedly visits. Likely dying, his father narrates his own story to his son, and that story is interwoven with the story of Forugh Farrokhzad, an Iranian feminist poet. Her poems – and voice – are in the text and serve to narrate her story, and that of women in Iran before the revolution.
Farrokhzad, a controversial modernist Iranian poet, is a significant figure in 20th-century literature. She wrote of passion, desire and her inner self. She attracted vicious negativity during her lifetime, and died young at 32. Ismael’s recount of her death is tied to one of the novel’s (many) emotional climaxes. Farrokhzad’s poetry was banned after the Islamic revolution, and features prominently, especially the poem Sin. The book borrows its title from one of her poems, of the same name.
This is a work of literature and politics, revolution and exile, love and family and home. The writing is delicate, almost poetic, and incredibly evocative. This work of the Iranian diaspora celebrates Iranian literature, evoking Iran’s millennia of literary tradition and achievement: as deep and rich as the European works more familiar to Australian readers.
Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright
Waanyi writer Alex Wright’s Praiseworthy is a masterpiece, unlike anything else on this shortlist – or published in Australia.
Attempting to describe Wright’s literary achievement as “fiction” demonstrates the failure of conventional understandings of genre. It better fits the grand descriptor of “epic”. It is eulogy and elegy; satire and farce. Wright herself would likely describe it as Indigenous realism, her term for Carpentaria, winner of the 2007 Miles Franklin and a monumental achievement in itself. It is, perhaps, a precursor to Praiseworthy.
There is no linear narrative, and the idea of imposing the western concept of a beginning, middle and end is laughable. The story unfolds across all times, with past, present and future happening on the same page. It revolves around a nuclear family: Cause Man Steel, his wife, Dance, and their sons Aboriginal Sovereignty and Tommyhawk. Their experiences – as individuals and as a family – highlight the ongoing intergenerational effects of colonisation, the absurdity of centuries of mendacious bureaucratic impulses, and the present and ongoing dire ravages of climate catastrophe.
Praiseworthy won the 2024 Stella prize and surely has the shortest odds to win the Miles. In Australia, it has already received the gold medal from the Australian literary society (making Wright the third person to receive this award three times, alongside Patrick White and David Malouf) and the Queensland literary award for fiction. Abroad, Praiseworthy won Edinburgh’s James Tait Black prize for fiction and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary award.
Wall by Jen Craig
In Wall, Jen Craig explores the weight of familial obligations and the impossibility of meeting them. Anorexia and other disorders repeatedly feature. The entire work is written in the first person and addressed to Teun, the narrator’s partner, who remains in London while she dismantles her father’s home in Sydney.
There is very little action, and what events do occur are relevant only so far as they further the reader’s understanding of the narrator herself. Her voice is the unreliable narrator form at its best, creating anticipation and a desire to know what she is struggling to share. While the narrator remains unnamed, she does refer to her “diet company name”, which calls to mind Jenny Craig.
While short, at only 181 pages, this is a challenging read. It has the feel of an interior monologue: looping, obsessive and inconsistent. The text itself is presented in two solid blocks. The first sentence alone takes eight lines to complete, and the subject matter ranges from installation artist Song Dong to city hire skips and the “fifty years of abject living” of the narrator’s father.
Wall offers quite the skewering of the life of an artist, with its grant applications and the necessity of “talking and writing” rather than doing. Her “one-time mentor at art school” appears throughout the work, conjuring the spectre of every inappropriate older male figure that may have haunted the reader.