The 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award Shortlist

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The 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award Shortlist

26 June 2025

Six titles have been included on the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award Shortlist, which was announced yesterday:

Chinese Postman, by Brian Castro
Theory & Practice, by Michelle de Kretser
Dirt Poor Islanders, by Winnie Dunn
Compassion, by Julie Janson
Ghost Cities, by Siang Lu
Highway 13, by Fiona McFarlane

2025 could be a good year for Michelle de Kretser if Theory & Practice wins the Miles Franklin, the title won this year’s Stella Prize. I don’t know about anyone else, but I thought the exclusion of Juice, by Tim Winton was puzzling.

The inclusion of Fiona McFarlane’s Highway 13 has also surprised some people. It’s a collection of short stories, and is the first time the format has reached a Miles Franklin shortlist.

The Miles Franklin honours excellence in Australian novel writing annually, and the winner will be announced on Thursday 24 July 2025. See you then.

Touch Grass by Mary Colussi wins Penguin Literary Prize 2025

17 June 2025

Sydney based Australian writer Mary Colussi has been named winner of the 2025 Penguin Literary Prize, with her manuscript Touch Grass. Going by this brief outline of the story, Touch Grass sounds like a work of speculative fiction:

Touch Grass tells the story of a depressed deletion specialist as she starts to leave her body at unexpected moments and finds herself at the surreal centre of a global panic.

Awarded annually, the Penguin Literary Prize was established in 2017 “to discover, nurture and develop literary fiction writers, providing a platform for new and diverse voices to emerge.”

Melbourne journalist and writer Chloe Adams (Instagram page) won the 2024 award, with the manuscript for her novel The Occupation, which will be published next month.

We’ll probably have to wait on a little while before learning more about the synopsis of Touch Grass.

Pictures of You, a collection of short stories by Tony Birch⁠

7 June 2025

The image features the cover of a book titled 'Pictures of You: Collected Stories' by Tony Birch. The cover is dark with the title in large, prominent letters. Below the title is a black-and-white photograph of two children, one of whom is wearing a dark coloured hat.

Hailing from Melbourne, Australian author Tony Birch has been writing books since 2006. Pictures of You, being published on Tuesday 30 September 2025, is a retrospective of his best short stories written over the last twenty years. I should think that will be quite a few.

Cherrypicking from across his oeuvre, this anthology showcases his skills at finding the extraordinary in ordinary lives, and the often-unexpected connections and kindnesses between strangers. His work is by turns poignant, sad, profound and funny — and always powerful. Throughout this stellar collection, Birch’s preoccupation with the humanity of those who are often marginalised or overlooked, and the search for justice for people and the natural environment shines bright.

I Want Everything, the debut novel of Dominic Amerena

28 May 2025

If literary scandals of the plagiarism variety intrigue you, then I Want Everything, by Dominic Amerena, an Australian author who lives between Melbourne and Athens, Greece, might be a novel worth adding to your TBR list.

The legendary career of reclusive cult author Brenda Shales remains one of Australia’s last unsolved literary mysteries. Her books took the world by storm before she disappeared from the public eye after a mysterious plagiarism case. But when an ambitious young writer stumbles across Brenda at a Melbourne pool, he realises the scoop of a lifetime is floating in front of him: the truth behind why she vanished without a trace. The only problem? He must pretend to be someone he’s not to trick the story out of her.

Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser wins 2025 Stella Prize

24 May 2025

Sydney based author Michelle de Kretser has been named winner of the 2025 Stellar Prize, for her 2024 novel, Theory & Practice, a novel Stella judges say does not read like a novel:

In her refusal to write a novel that reads like a novel, de Kretser instead gifts her reader a sharp examination of the complex pleasures and costs of living.

The novel that does not read like a novel, is indeed a curious work:

It’s 1986, and ‘beautiful, radical ideas’ are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda she meets artists, activists, students — and Kit. He claims to be in a ‘deconstructed’ relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, her work on the Woolfmother falls into disarray. Theory & Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and unmakes fiction as we read, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain.

Established in 2013, the Stellar Prize, which is awarded annually, honours the work of Australian women and non-binary writers.

Should cook book writers sue each other for plagiarism or AI chatbots?

22 May 2025

Malcolm Knox, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald, regarding accusations of plagiarism made by Sydney based Australian cook Nagi Maehashi against Brisbane counterpart Brooke Bellamy:

Nagi and Brooke will be out of their jobs when Microsoft, Google, Meta and the rest of big tech develop AIs to deliver the same caramel slice recipe, at zero cost, provided by an “author” whose personality combines the best of Julia Child, Margaret Fulton, Yotam Ottolenghi, even Nagi and Brooke.

Knox has a point. Perhaps the cooks should be more concerned about the mass appropriation of copyrighted material, without permission or recompense, rather than the alleged wrongdoing of one person, which may be near nigh impossible to prove. Not that the odds of prevailing against big tech would be any better.

I write this in the wake of another AI chatbot surge of activity on this website a few nights ago. Several hundred posts were presumably indexed in a matter of minutes, in the name of machine learning. Sometimes if something I posted here has been used as the basis for a question posed to an AI bot, a link to the source material is supplied with the answer generated.

At least I score a visit or two out of it all.

Nam Le wins 2025 NSW Literary Awards Book of the Year prize

21 May 2025

Vietnamese Australian lawyer turned writer Nam Le has won the Book of the Year Award prize, with 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, a collection of poetry, in the 2025 NSW Literary Awards.

Earlier, Le was named recipient of the Multicultural NSW Award. Winners of the NSW Literary Awards, previously known as the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, which span eleven categories, including the people’s choice prize, were announced at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, on Monday 19 May 2025. The Book of the Year recipient is selected from the winners of the Award’s other categories.

Other recipients include Fiona McFarlane, who won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction with Highway 13, and Emma Lord, who took out the Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature prize for her debut novel Anomaly. The full list of 2025 winners can be seen here.

Winnie Dunn, Jumaana Abdu, Katerina Gibson, named Best Young Australian Novelists for 2025

19 May 2025

Winnie Dunn, Jumaana Abdu, and Katerina Gibson, have been named the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelists for 2025.

Gibson also won the prize in 2023. Meanwhile Adbu’s novel Translations, has been shortlisted in this year’s Stella Prize, while Dunn’s novel Dirt Poor Islanders, was included on the longlist for the 2025 Miles Franklin award, which was announced last week.

The 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award longlist

17 May 2025

Ten novels have been included on the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award longlist, which was published on Thursday 15 May 2025.

Chinese Postman, by Brian Castro
The Burrow, by Melanie Cheng
Theory & Practice, by Michelle de Kretser
Dirt Poor Islanders, by Winnie Dunn
Compassion, by Julie Janson
Politica, by Yumna Kassab
Ghost Cities, by Siang Lu
Highway 13, by Fiona McFarlane
The Degenerates, by Raeden Richardson
Juice, by Tim Winton

Australia’s oldest literary award, the Miles Franklin honours novels “of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases“. The shortlist will be announced next month on Wednesday 25 June, with the winner being named a month later on Thursday 24 July.

Vortex by Rodney Hall wins The Age Book of the Year fiction prize

10 May 2025

Vortex, by Queensland based Australian author Rodney Hall, has won the fiction prize in The Age Book of the Year award for 2025.

The two times winner of the Miles Franklin literary award, says the basis for his latest novel were some pages for a book he started writing, but later gave up on, in 1971. It pays to hold onto those old manuscripts, even the ones you don’t like, or thought you didn’t.

Lech Blaine, also living in Queensland, won the non-fiction prize, with his memoir Australian Gospel.

The announcement of the winners coincided with the opening of this year’s Melbourne Writers Festival (MWF), on Thursday. The Age Book of the Year awards have a story worthy of a novel themselves. They were first presented in 1974, by The Age newspaper, for fiction and non-fiction writing. In 1993 a poetry award, the Dinny O’Hearn Prize was added.

In 1998, the awards became a feature of the MWF, until they were ceased all together in 2013. However, in 2021 the award was rebooted, but for fiction only. Then in 2022, an award for non-fiction was introduced (or should that be reintroduced?).

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