2006 MILES FRANKLIN LITERARY AWARD: Shortlist

AUSTRALIANS are doing it for themselves. Australian fiction never had it so good. Kate Grenville recently won the 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize for her novel, The Secret River (2005). First-time novelist Carrie Tiffany has also been shortlisted for the 2006 Orange Prize for her novel, Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living (2005). And both of them have been shortlisted for the 2006 Miles Franklin Literary Award, the premier award in the Australian literary landscape. Grenville was last shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 1995 for her novel, Dark Places (1995). Tiffany has also been shortlisted for the 2006 Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards.

The Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia’s premier annual literary prize, is an accolade for novels that focus on Australia and its unique identity. This year’s novels have plots firmly rooted in Australia’s early history, focusing on early settlement in New South Wales and life on the continent during the two world wars. “They are all profound evocations of this place we live in,” one of the judges of the award, Morag Fraser, said of the shortlisted novels. “They are not historical novels, but they do mine things that we thought we knew about the country, but [after reading them] we realise we didn’t really.”

Five novels have been shortlisted for the 2006 Miles Franklin Literary Award:

The Garden Book (Giramondo) / Brian Castro
The Secret River (Text Publishing) / Kate Grenville
The Ballad of Desmond Kale (Vintage/Random House Australia) / Roger McDonald
Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living (Picador/Pan Macmillan Australia) / Carrie Tiffany
The Wing of Night (Viking/Penguin Australia) / Brenda Walker

The winner of the 2006 Miles Franklin Literary Award will be announced on June 22, 2006