The Latest Breaking News from Miles Franklin

A handmade sash, plastic red carpet and matching custom T-shirts featured in the literary prize winner’s home award ceremony

Melbourne author Jennifer Down has won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, one of the most prestigious prizes in Australian literature, for her third book, Bodies of Light.

This year’s Miles Franklin shortlist is lyrical in voice, complex in form, and perhaps a little more hopeful than usual. The threads of shared concern across the volumes leave me wondering whether there is something in the zeitgeist.

The shortlist for Australia’s top literary award includes an epic novel about a life shaped by trauma, and a pregnant teen’s letter to the baby she may never get to raise.

A self-published novel by Michael Winkler joins Alice Pung, Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Michelle de Kretser and Jennifer Down to compete for $60,000

Exclusive: The Dogs by John Hughes withdrawn from $60,000 prize after novelist admits he used parts of nonfiction work of Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich ‘without realising’

Nathan Hobby’s The Red Witch: A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard takes on the challenging task of sorting out the complicated details of Prichard’s life as a child, sibling, governess, teacher, friend, lover, wife, mother, aunt, grandmother, traveller, celebrity, journalist, poet, novelist, short-story writer, social activist, public speaker and communist.

For its 10th anniversary, the Stella Prize has been won by young First Nations poet Evelyn Araluen — in the first year that poetry has been eligible.

Since its inception in 2012, the $50,000 Stella Prize has changed the lives of Australian women and non-binary authors like Charlotte Wood and Jess Hill – placing their stories at the centre of national conversation.

Now in its tenth year, the Stella Prize – founded as a reaction to the under-representation of women in Australian literary culture – has been a force for change. As conversations about representation continue to evolve, the prize does too.