Miles Franklin Literary Award 2012 shortlist announced
The shortlist for this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award has been announced.
The shortlisted titles are:
- Blood (Tony Birch, UQP)
- All That I Am (Anna Funder, Penguin)
- Foal’s Bread (Gillian Mears, A&U)
- Cold Light (Frank Moorhouse, Vintage)
- Past the Shallows (Favel Parrett, Hachette).
The winner of this year’s award, worth $50,000, will be announced on 20 June at the State Library of Queensland. A complete list of the titles longlisted for this year’s award can be seen here.
The Trust Company, as trustee of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, said in a statement that ‘for the first time this year the five person judging panel were formally authorised by the Trustee to use their discretion to modernise the interpretation of Australian life beyond geographical boundaries to include mindset, language, history and values.’
Speaking on behalf of the judging panel, Gillian Whitlock said: ‘This year we had a big longlist that made the judging panel reflect on the power of historical fiction, extending from the colonial period through to memories of the world wars and their aftermath. We see this reflected in the shortlisted fictions by Anna Funder and Frank Moorhouse.’
‘We also see more contemporary lives explored with a turn to trauma narratives and childhood, in the shortlisted novels by Tony Birch, Favel Parrett and Gillian Mears,’ said Whitlock.
Judges’ notes for the shortlisted titles can be found online here.
The 2011 Miles Franklin Literary Award went to Kim Scott for That Deadman Dance (Picador). Scott delivered the 2012 Miles Franklin Literary Award Oration at Curtin University in Perth this week.
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