Australian Debut Novel Among Nominees for Miles Franklin 2025 Award

A first of its kind novel in Australian publishing has made the shortlist for this year’s Miles Franklin award, along with two first-time nominees, two previously shortlisted authors and two-time winner Michelle de Kretser.

Winnie Dunn’s debut Dirt Poor Islanders, which draws on her own experiences of growing up as Tongan-Australian, has been nominated for the prestigious award, along with Chinese Postman by Brian Castro; Compassion by Burruberongal author Julie Janson; Ghost Cities by Siang Lu; Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser and Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane.

The shortlist, the judging panel said, celebrated writing that refuses to compromise. “Each of these works vitalises the form of the novel and invents new languages for the Australian experience,” they said in a statement.

The subjects across the shortlist also reflect the breadth of the Australian experiences. Castro’s Chinese Postman is about an elderly Chinese migrant reflecting on his life; Theory & Practice by de Kretser is set in the academic scene in the 1980s; Lu’s Ghost Cities blends current-day Sydney and Chinese mythology; Compassion is a fictionalised account of one of Indigenous author Janson’s ancestors, and the short stories in McFarlane’s Highway 13 are loosely pegged to a serial killer based on Ivan Milat.

According to the source: The Sydney Morning Herald.