Miles Franklin Award 2005 Shortlist

[Dragonlily]

Mod's apologies, duke. I thought I could copy part of the thread to another forum and leave the rest. It's all yours, even though it's me setting it up again.

duke Posted: Wed May 04, 2005 8:36 pm Post subject: Miles Franklin Award 2005 Shortlist


Here's the list of the novels that have been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin award for 2005. For those of you who arent Aussies, the Miles is the biggest and most prestigious literary award in Australia. It has been dogged with controversy over the years (long story), but is IMO always a good guide to the best new lit fiction written in Australia.

Enough rambling, here's the shortlist.

Sixty Lights by Gail Jones
The White Earth by Andrew McGahan
The Submerged Cathedral by Charlotte Wood
Salt Rain by Sarah Armstrong
The Gift of Speed by Stephen Carroll

And they were chosen from a long list that also had these books on it
Backwaters by Robert Engwerda
The Ghost Writer by John Harwood
The Broken Book by Susan Johnson
A Private Man by Malcolm Knox
The Philosopher's Doll by Amanda Lohrey
I Have Kissed Your Lips by Gerard Windsor
The Last Ride by Denise Young

None of these authors have won the award before, so its anyone's guess as to who will win.

I'm yet to read any of them (still wading through Barnaby Rudge by Dickens), but I hope to read the shortlist over the next year.

[Dragonlily]

Dragonlily Posted: Thu Jun 30, 2005 8:56 pm Post subject:

Where would TOURMALINE by Randolph Stow fit in relation to that list? I picked it up from an international booth a couple months ago. From the back cover:

Tourmaline is an isolated Western Australian mining town -- a place of heat and dust, as allegorical as it is real. Out of the desert staggers a young diviner, Michael Random, offering salvation to this parched town. The once comatose community is indeed stirred to life, by hate as much as by love, and its people find salvation neither in water nor gold.