Showing all posts tagged: Amanda Lohrey
The Conversion, a new book by Amanda Lohrey, past Miles Franklin winner
6 September 2023
Book cover of The Conversion, by Amanda Lohrey.
Tasmanian based Australian author, and winner of the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Amanda Lohrey, has written a new novel, The Conversion, which will be published by Text Publishing, in October 2023. The story follows a couple, Zoe and Nick, who set about converting a deconsecrated church into a home:
The conversion was Nick’s idea, but it’s Zoe who’s here now, in a valley of old coalmines and new vineyards, working out how to live in a deconsecrated church. What to do with all that vertical space, those oppressive stained-glass windows? Can a church become a home or, even with all its vestiges removed, will it remain forever what it was intended to be?
To date, The Labyrinth, winner of the aforementioned Miles Franklin prize, is the only of Lohrey’s books I’ve read. It was an utterly compelling read though, and I’m looking forward to The Conversion, and possibly even seeing it among nominations for the 2024 Miles Franklin.
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Amanda Lohrey, Australian literature, books, Miles Franklin
Another win for Amanda Lohrey’s novel The Labyrinth
16 December 2021
It’s been a good year for Tasmania based Australian author Amanda Lohrey. In July her novel The Labyrinth won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and yesterday the same novel was named winner of The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards for 2021, in the fiction category, with the judges describing the novel as a work of considerable literary artistry.
‘The Labyrinth’ is shadowed and haunted by strangeness. It is a novel in high realist mode that also has romance elements, if only in the way it encompasses a tragicomic mood and a certain formal audacity that brings to mind the moodiness and restless shifts of late Shakespeare. ‘The Labyrinth’ has a gravity that outstares everything that may seem grey or gaunt in a literary endeavour where autumn seems to sink to midwinter. It is a work of considerable literary artistry.
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Amanda Lohrey, Australian literature