So, Melissa Lucashenko is not literary in the way that Murnane, Wright or Kim Scott are, and she’s not satirical in the way that Marie Munkara is. Look no further than 2014 when Evie Wyld’s All The Birds Singing won ahead of Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book which may well be the great Australian novel of the century. The Miles Franklin sad to say has become a reward for story telling and mediocre writing. They were in too much of a hurry to get back to the latest Ian McEwan and Lionel Shriver. They were hip with right wing East Europeans back then – and only back-tracked when the right winger turned out to be an Anglo – and they’re hip with lippy Black women now.ĭid the judges who gave Lucashenko last year’s prize even read Gerald Murnane’s A Season on Earth? Of course they didn’t. I have no doubt it was given the award by ABC-quality middle of the road, politically correct judges for exactly the same reason as they awarded The Hand that Signed the Paper, to show how cool they were. But the year’s “novel of the highest literary merit”? What a joke. Once it got going somewhere after the halfway mark, it even had me interested. Miles Franklin Award: read the list of winners and weep.
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