Five first-time nominees – including a debut novelist – are among the six authors shortlisted for the 2023 Miles Franklin award, Australia’s highest literary honour.
Announced on Tuesday, the six books up for the $60,000 prize are Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow, Robbie Arnott’s Limberlost, Yumna Kassab’s The Lovers, Fiona Kelly McGregor’s Iris, Shankari Chandran’s Chai Time at the Cinnamon Gardens and Kgshak Akec’s Hopeless Kingdom.
First awarded in 1957, the Miles Franklin is given to a novel “of the highest literary merit which presents Australian life in any of its phases”.
The slipperiness of time is a core theme in each of the books. All six works on the shortlist “delve deeply into the archives and memory”, the judges observed in a joint statement.
Robbie Arnott is the only author who has been previously nominated, for his 2020 book The Rain Heron, an ecological fable about a shape-shifting bird. His latest novel Limberlost shares his previous work’s mythic overtones, following a 15-year-old boy over one summer in midcentury Tasmania.
A similar meditative quality permeates Jessica Au’s Cold Enough For Snow, which won both the $100,000 Victorian prize for literature and the $25,000 fiction category at the Victorian premier’s literary awards earlier this year and was the inaugural winner of the Novel prize, which guarantees publication in the UK, Ireland, US, Australia and New Zealand.
Au’s novella is a sparse, wintry tale of a mother and daughter’s brief visit to Japan, on a trip in which the daughter attempts to connect with her mother, with whom she has a fragile relationship.
Fiona Kelly McGregor has been nominated for her fourth book, Iris, a historical novel set in 1930s Sydney. Longlisted for the Stella prize, it follows the real-life figure Iris Webber, a lifelong miscreant and petty criminal. The novel “rehabilitates a once notorious denizen of the lower order,” the judges wrote, “admiring of the intelligence required for her to survive there”.
Twenty-six-year-old South Sudanese writer Kgshak Akec has made the shortlist with her “impressive and expansive debut”, Hopeless Kingdom, which draws from Akec’s experience to tell the story of an eight-year-old girl and her mother as they migrate from country to country before arriving in Geelong. The judges praised it as a “novel of national significance”.
Western Sydney author Yumna Kassab is nominated for her third novel, The Lovers, which mirrors the cadences of folklore to explore a couple’s relationship, which has been challenged by cultural and class barriers.
And rounding out the shortlist is Shankari Chandran’s third novel Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, following a diverse group of elderly Australians who live in a nursing home. Interspersed with flashbacks to the Sri Lankan civil war, Chandran’s novel deals with the “unaddressed trauma of the past”, said judges. “It treads carefully on contested historical claims, reminding us that horrors forgotten are horrors bound to be repeated.”
This year’s Miles Franklin judging panel is chaired by Richard Neville, the Mitchell Librarian at the State Library of New South Wales and also features literary critics Bernadette Brennan and James Ley, literary scholar Mridula Nath Chakraborty and author and editor Elfie Shiosaki.
Each shortlisted writer receives $5,000. The winner of the $60,000 prize will be announced on 25 July.
The 2023 Miles Franklin shortlist
Hopeless Kingdom by Kgshak Akec (UWA Publishing).
Limberlost by Robbie Arnott (Text Publishing).
Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au (Giramondo Publishing).
Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran (Ultimo Press).
The Lovers by Yumna Kassab (Ultimo Press).
Iris by Fiona Kelly McGregor (Pan Macmillan Australia).
