The Miles Franklin Literary Award Shortlist 2017

The Miles Franklin Literary Award is Australia’s most prestigious literature prize and it reaches its 60 years mark this year.

This year the award shortlist has been decided. You can go to our library catalogue to reserve a copy for yourself.

An isolated incident by Emily Maguire – a psychological thriller about everyday violence, the media’s obsession with pretty dead girls, the grip of grief and the myth of closure, and the difficulties of knowing the difference between a ghost and a memory, between a monster and a man.

The Last Days of Ava Langdon by Mark O’Flynn – Poetic, poignant, and at times bitingly funny, The Last Days of Ava Langdon takes us into the mind of a true maverick.

Their brilliant career by Ryan O’Neill – a hilarious novel in the guise of sixteen biographies of (invented) Australian writers.

Waiting by Philip Salom – Big is a hefty cross-dresser and Little is little. Both are long used to the routines of boarding house life in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, but Little, with the prospect of an inheritance, is worrying Big with by indulging in dreams of home ownership. Little’s cousin, Angus, is a solitary man who designs lake-scapes for city councils, and fireproof houses for the bushfire zone. A handy man, he meets Jasmin – an academic who races in her ideas as much as in her runners. Her head is set on publishing semiotics books on semiotics, her heart is turned towards her stalled personal life. All four are waiting, for something, if not someone.

Extinctions by Josephine Wilson – Humorous, poignant and galvanising by turns, Extinctions is a novel about all kinds of extinction – natural, racial, national and personal – and what we can do to prevent them.