Over the past two years the Miles Franklin shortlists have showcased the most diverse groups of writers in the prize’s history
The six books on the Miles Franklin shortlist: Only Sound Remains by Hossein Asgari, Wall by Jen Craig, Anam by André Dao, The Bell of the World by Gregory Day, Hospital by Sanya Rushdi and Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright.The six books on the Miles Franklin shortlist: Only Sound Remains by Hossein Asgari, Wall by Jen Craig, Anam by André Dao, The Bell of the World by Gregory Day, Hospital by Sanya Rushdi and Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright.
From the reader’s perspective, Anam feels like a memoir of the Vietnamese diaspora. The narrator – a slightly fictionalised Dao – interrogates his family history, including his paternal grandfather’s decade-long detention without trial by the Vietnamese government, from 1978, three years after the war ended.
Day is a poet and musician, and his prose style leans to the lyrical. The work explicitly explores the sound and meaning, with multiple and repeated references to the “velar nasal” . This is tied to Day’s question of how to understand this continent. After all, “if you were going to embark on putting together a truly Australian alphabet it most likely wouldn’t start with the Roman A”.
The prose is spare and measured, and at 125 pages, this is the shortest entry on the shortlist. While this is published as fiction, Hospital recalls Australian mental health memoirs like Kate Richard’s Madness: A Memoir and Sam Twyford-Moore’s The Rapids: Ways of looking at Mania.The narrator, Saeed, lives in Adelaide, unable to return to his birthplace in Iran after publishing his novel. His father, Ismael, a retired teacher of Persian literature, unexpectedly visits.
Praiseworthy won the 2024 Stella prize and surely has the shortest odds to win the Miles. In Australia, it has already received the gold medal from the Australian literary society and the Queensland literary award for fiction. Abroad, Praiseworthy won Edinburgh’sIn Wall, Jen Craig explores the weight of familial obligations and the impossibility of meeting them. Anorexia and other disorders repeatedly feature.
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