Ghost Cities, by Siang Lu, wins 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award

25 July 2025

Ghost Cities, by Australian author Siang Lu, who is based between Brisbane, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, was yesterday named winner of the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award.

The Miles Franklin is one of Australia’s most prestigious literary awards for novel writing, with the winner receiving sixty-thousand Australian dollars.

I’m yet to read Ghost Cities, but it certainly has an award-winning synopsis:

Ghost Cities — inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China — follows multiple narratives, including one in which a young man named Xiang is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate after it is discovered he doesn’t speak a word of Chinese and has been relying entirely on Google Translate for his work.

How is his relocation to one such ghost city connected to a parallel odyssey in which an ancient Emperor creates a thousand doubles of Himself? Or where a horny mountain gains sentience? Where a chess-playing automaton hides a deadly secret? Or a tale in which every book in the known Empire is destroyed — then re-created, page by page and book by book, all in the name of love and art?

The Miles Franklin judging panel had this to say:

Siang Lu’s Ghost Cities is at once a grand farce and a haunting meditation on diaspora. Sitting within a tradition in Australian writing that explores failed expatriation and cultural fraud, Lu’s novel is also something strikingly new. In Ghost Cities, the Sino-Australian imaginary appears as a labyrinthine film-set, where it is never quite clear who is performing and who is directing. Shimmering with satire and wisdom, and with an absurdist bravura, Ghost Cities is a genuine landmark in Australian literature.

Lu also wrote The Whitewash in 2022, which won the Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer, and was shortlisted in both the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and the Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIAs).

But writing books isn’t Lu’s only claim to fame, he’s also created SillyBookstagram (Instagram page). I know all about Bookstagram (Instagram’s book readers’ community), but SillyBookstagram is a new one on me. It looks like a fun offshoot of Bookstagram though.