Miles Franklin 2022: shortlist revealed for Australia’s prestigious literary prize

A self-published ebook has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin for the primary time within the award’s 65-year historical past, with Michael Winkler’s cult hit Grimmish clearing the ultimate hurdle earlier than Australia’s most prestigious literary prize is introduced on 20 July.

Announced on Thursday night, Grimmish joins Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s The Other Half of You, Michelle de Kretser’s Scary Monsters, Jennifer Down’s Bodies of Light and Alice Pung’s One Hundred Days to compete for the $60,000 prize.

Winkler’s “exploded nonfiction novel” Grimmish was referred to as “wearisome” and “repellant” by the publishers he approached, in accordance with the creator’s interview with Guardian Australia final week: “Everyone said there was no way they could sell it.”

But the ebook – an experimental, meta, kind-of-biography of the boxer Joe Grim, which opens with a faux-review and disputes itself all through – discovered its solution to readers via indie bookshops, exultant critics and phrase of mouth. It additionally gained reward from writers together with Helen Garner, Murray Bail and JM Coetzee.

In their feedback accompanying the Miles Franklin shortlist, the judges described it as an “unusual novel that is by turns playful, funny, heartfelt and deeply reflective … Daring and hilarious, Grimmish is a uniquely witty and original contribution to Australian literature.”

Also shortlisted is Michelle de Kretser’s Scary Monsters, a ebook that’s truly two books, with a unique cowl on all sides that you may learn in both order. De Kretser is one in all Australia’s most celebrated authors, and gained the Miles Franklin in 2013 (Questions of Travel) and 2018 (The Life to Come). The judges described Scary Monsters, her seventh novel, as “a witty, meticulously witnessed and boldly imaginative work that rages against racism, ageism and misogyny”.

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Michael Mohammed Ahmed’s the Other Half of You is the third instalment of an auto-fictional collection exploring the lifetime of a younger Muslim boy in western Sydney named Bani Adam. In The Other Half of You, which follows on from the Miles Franklin-shortlisted The Lebs and Ahmed’s first novel The Tribe, Bani is now a person; the ebook takes the type of his “body bruising, soul-searing confessional letter to a child”, in accordance with the judges, who hailed it as “the howl of an Australian voice striving to be heard”.

Jennifer Down’s Bodies of Light tells the devastating story of a life on the fringes, beginning with a five-year-old lady’s harrowing journey via the state care system. The ebook is instructed via an “astonishing voice that reinvents itself from age six to sixty”, the judges mentioned. “With ethical precision, Down insists that we do not look away from the destructive consequences of … decades spent in the shadows of institutionalised neglect, socially sanctioned loneliness, unforgivable poverty and the attendant abuse.”

Rounding out the shortlist is One Hundred Days by Alice Pung, who was awarded an Order of Australia for companies to literature this 12 months. The novel follows a 16-year-old lady who turns into pregnant, and is locked into her housing fee flat by her Philippines-born Chinese mom for 100 days earlier than the delivery – a postpartum confinement custom in lots of cultures, which could be learn as each an act of affection or an act of emotional abuse.

“Within this story, mothering practices transcend the ordinary and intimate, becoming instead an epic site of intergenerational cultural struggle between mother and daughter,” the judges mentioned. “Pung has gifted us with a novel of national significance, by making visible the stories of those deemed powerless, and vividly patterning the mosaic of Australian literature.”

The Miles Franklin is judged by a panel together with literary critics Bernadette Brennan and James Ley, literary scholar Mridula Nath Chakraborty and creator and editor Elfie Shiosaki. The panel is chaired by Richard Neville, the Mitchell Librarian on the State Library of NSW, who praised the shortlist for its “range of dynamic and diverse voices that address the experience of pain, intergenerational trauma and intergenerational dialogue with compassion, exceptional craft and rigorous unsentimentality”.

Earlier this month, the Miles Franklin prize pulled The Dogs by John Hughes from its 2022 longlist, after Hughes apologised for plagiarising components of it from a Nobel laureate “without realising”, as uncovered in a Guardian Australia investigation. More situations of obvious plagiarism have been subsequently discovered, together with from The Great Gatsby, Anna Karenina and All Quiet on the Western Front. Hughes has denied he’s a plagiarist.

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