The Age Book of the Year Awards

This year’s Miles Franklin shortlist takes us from Sydney’s criminal underclass in the 1930s and the quiet waters of rural Tasmania in the 1940s to shopping for design objects in contemporary Japan. Its styles range from the sparse, economical prose of the experimental novella to an intricately plotted page-turner. And the six shortlisted writers include a debut novelist and a Miles Franklin veteran; just one is male-identifying.

Iris by Fiona Kelly McGregor

• McGregor is the most experienced writer on the shortlist: Iris is her eighth book and her accolades include a Steele Rudd Award and an Age Book of the Year (Indelible Ink).
• McGregor knows Sydney well – especially its convoluted history of colonialism, repression and disobedience.
• Her inspired decision to fictionalise the real-life Iris Webber (1906-1953) was no doubt influenced by the extraordinary archives of the Sydney Police photographs (1912-1948).
• Read more:
  In Iris, Fiona Kelly McGregor recreates the criminal underworld of Depression-era Sydney

Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au

• Jessica Au’s novel was much anticipated: its manuscript won the inaugural international $US10,000 The Novel Prize, trumping 1500 entries.
• It’s a credit to Au that she lets the reader sit with this at the conclusion: nothing feels artificially resolved.
• Read more:
  The responsibilities of being: Jessica Au's precise, poetic meditation on mothers and daughters

Limberlost by Robbie Arnott

• Robbie Arnott is the only one of these authors to have been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin before – for his second novel, The Rain Heron (2020), which won The Age Book of the Year award.
• Arnott is also the only male-identifying author on this shortlist and masculinity is a central theme.
• Read more:
  Robbie Arnott's eco-fiction uses myth and metaphor to depict a wounded world

Hopeless Kingdom by Kgshak Akec

• Kgshak Akec, a creative writing student at Deakin University, is the youngest writer on this shortlist, at 26.
• Akec’s debut is inspired by her family’s migration from South Sudan to Australia via Egypt, during the early 2000s.
• The book brims with authentic, memorable characters and relationships between family and friends that are complex and subtly complicated.

The Lovers by Yumna Kassab

• This novella’s limited dramatic narrative scale permits the author a sophisticated attention to the poetics of representation: perhaps the book’s key achievement.
• Amir and Jamila, the lovers of the title, unite almost exclusively at nighttime.
• She artfully employs stories within stories: tiny parables that frame or commentate on the larger story of the lovers and their fate.
• Read more:
  Colonial and nationalist myths are recast in Yumna Kassab's Australiana

Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran

• Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens is mostly set in a Western Sydney nursing home, run by and for a Sri Lankan Tamil community.
• Shankari Chandran says the novel was inspired and informed by regular visits to her grandmother.
• “As she was walking, she’d be talking, and telling us stories about her life, of her childhood, of her marriage, her migration.” Chandran is a mid-career author whose achievements are gradually accumulating.
• Her debut novel, Song of the Sun God, was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and shortlisted for Sri Lanka’s Fairway National Literary Award.