Sydney’s Writers’ Walk to become longer, celebrate other artists

Showing all posts about Miles Franklin

Sydney’s Writers’ Walk to become longer, celebrate other artists

3 November 2025

Located along the shoreline of inner Sydney suburb Circular Quay, Sydney’s Writer’s Walk commemorates well-known authors and playwrights, who are either Australian, or visited the country at some point, with circular plagues set into walkways in the area.

Local writers include Miles Franklin and Peter Carey, while the international cohort is made up of the likes of Rudyard Kipling, and Mark Twain, who were in Australia in 1891, and 1895, respectively.

The Walk was established in 1991, and in 2011 an additional eleven plagues were added, but plans are afoot to add to the Walk in the near future. This makes sense. A bevy of new Australian writers have emerged in the last decade and a half. Numerous notable authors, who were omitted originally, are also in the running for a spot, as are songwriters, who may also be included.

The Sydney’s Writer’s Walk is one of a number of such commemorative walkways in the Sydney area. Others include the Australian Film Walk of Fame, located in Randwick, and the Australian Surfing Walk of Fame, at the beach suburb of Maroubra.

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.

Netflix adapting My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin into a TV series

27 June 2025

Talking of Miles Franklin, the late Australian author, not the literary award named in her honour, Netflix is filming an adaptation of her 1901 novel, My Brilliant Career.

Principal photography is currently underway in parts of South Australia, with Melbourne born Australian actor Philippa Northeast in the role of Sybylla Melvyn. Here’s the novel’s synopsis:

Trapped on her parents’ outback farm, Sybylla simultaneously loves bush life and hates the physical burdens it imposes. She longs for a more refined lifestyle – to read, to think, to sing – but most of all to do great things. Suddenly her life is transformed when she is whisked away to live on her grandmother’s gracious property. There Sybylla falls under the eye of the rich and handsome Harry Beecham. Soon she finds herself choosing between everything a conventional life offers and her own plans for a ‘brilliant career’.

Anna Chancellor portrays Sybylla’s grandmother, and Christopher Chung has been cast as Harry Beecham. At this stage, word has it the show will screen either later this year, or in early 2026.

While you’re waiting for the TV show, track down and watch Gillian Armstrong’s 1979 film adaptation of My Brilliant Career, which starred Judy Davis and Sam Niell as Sybylla and Harry respectively.

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.

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.

Miles Franklin Undercover, a new biography of the Australian author, by Kerrie Davies

14 April 2025

Miles Franklin Undercover, by NSW North Coast based university lecturer and author Kerrie Davies, traces Franklin’s life in the years following the 1901 publication of her iconic novel, My Brilliant Career. Spoiler: things were not too brilliant:

But fame can be deceptive. In reality, the book earned her a pittance. The family farm was sold, her new novels were rejected, and she was broke. Just two years after her debut, Miles disappeared.

On the subject of Miles Franklin, the annual Australian literary award named for her, can’t be too far away from publishing the longlist for the 2025 award. That, I’m guessing, is maybe in a month’s time?

Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright wins 2024 Miles Franklin Literary Award

2 August 2024

As called/guessed by yours truly, Praiseworthy, the 2023 novel by Waanyi/Gulf of Carpentaria based Australian author Alexis Wright, has won the 2024 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Praiseworthy has cleaned up on the awards circuit since publication, also winning the other major Australian literary award, the Stellar Prize.

Wright also won the Miles Franklin in 2007, with Carpentaria. In winning this year, she joins an elite band of Australian writers to win the esteemed prize multiple times, including Thea Astley, Tim Winton, Patrick White, Michelle de Kretser, Kim Scott, and Thomas Keneally.

The 2024 Miles Franklin shortlist for Australian fiction

2 July 2024

The shortlist for the 2024 Miles Franklin literary award for works of Australian fiction, was announced earlier today. Of the ten novels named on the longlist in May, the following six titles have been included today:

Only Sound Remains, by Hossein Asgari
Wall, by Jen Craig
Anam, by André Dao
The Bell of the World, by Gregory Day
Hospital, by Sanya Rushdi
Praiseworthy, by Alexis Wright

Each author will receive five-thousand dollars for making the cut. Kate Evans, writing for ABC News, describes this year’s shortlist as one of the most culturally diverse, and notes that should a woman author win this year, that will be eight times in a row a woman has won.

My money would be on Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy, which has been doing well on the award’s circuit. The 2024 winner will be unveiled on Thursday 1 August 2024.

The 2024 Miles Franklin longlist for Australian novel writing

16 May 2024

Well this is exciting, the longlist for the 2024 Miles Franklin literary award for Australian novel writing, has been published. Not sure how I missed the official announcement, but I went searching for a date the longlist would be unveiled, and instead found the longlist itself:

Only Sound Remains, by Hossein Asgari
Wall, by Jen Craig
Strangers at the Port, by Lauren Aimee Curtis
Anam, by André Dao
The Bell of the World, by Gregory Day
Edenglassie, by Melissa Lucashenko
The Sitter, by Angela O’Keefe
Hospital, by Sanya Rushdi
Stone Yard Devotional, by Charlotte Wood
Praiseworthy, by Alexis Wright

Praiseworthy, which won the 2024 Stella Prize, and Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, are notable inclusions. I loved Wood’s 2019 novel, The Weekend, and I guess a few other people also, as the film option was sold a couple of years ago, and a stage adaptation was also made.

I can’t — as yet — find a date the shortlist will be announced. Come to that, I couldn’t even find a date the longlist would be published, I just seemed to stumble upon it last night. I can’t figure out why they need to be so elusive about these things. The Miles Franklin is after all one of the highlights of the Australian literary calendar.

The Conversion, a new book by Amanda Lohrey, past Miles Franklin winner

6 September 2023

The Conversion by Amanda Lohrey, book cover

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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