Miles Franklin Award makes history with 2025 winner, Siang Lu

Siang Lu has won the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award for his novel Ghost Cities, becoming the first male Asian writer to take out the coveted $60,000 literary prize.

Siang Lu, winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award for 2025.Credit: Sitthixay Ditthavong

“I had never allowed myself to think that this was possible, could be possible or was even a remote possibility,” the Brisbane-based author says.

“When I heard I was longlisted I was overjoyed and also scared, but the joy was ‘wow, I didn’t expect that’ … then, when I heard I was shortlisted, it was that magnified. So I can’t even properly describe how I feel right now, other than that it’s the same feeling but so much bigger that I can’t even see it.”

Ghost Cities is about a young Chinese-Australian man who works at a Chinese consulate as a translator. But it subsequently turns out that he is, in fact, monolingual and has been relying on Google Translate.

The 39-year-old author says he grew up like that character, speaking only English. Lu’s family emigrated from Malaysia to Brisbane in the 1990s when he was four. He studied law and journalism at university (“law very badly”, he says) and the one class he loved was creative writing. There were signs earlier, which his father recently reminded him about.

“He told me that when I was in high school, maybe [age] 13 or 14, I went to a writer’s camp and the writers had clearly done their job of instilling passion and excitement ... According to my dad, and it’s become family lore, I came home and said I wanted to be a writer.”

Lu’s wife, Yuan, is also Chinese. While he had been to China before, when they got together he travelled there more frequently to visit her family.

“It’s always been in the back of my mind that I wasn’t approaching my culture in the correct way. I first had to embrace the fact that I am of multiple cultures, and that’s not an easy thing … for someone growing up in a dominant culture where everything you see on TV or read is from the white perspective,” he says. “It sort of makes you want to be white, and I had to reconcile with that in my writing. I was foregrounding white characters without knowing why.

“It took that emotional maturity of understanding that I should be proud to have two cultures, three as is the case with Malaysia as well. I have two kids, who are 11 and nine … and it’s been a real joy to lead by example in saying that they should and they must be proud of their multiple cultures. That was something I really needed to reconcile in myself before I could start writing Ghost Cities properly.”

Ghost Cities by Siang Lu

Feeling like an outsider, growing up in Brisbane, humour was a tool he used to help him fit in – “100 per cent a defence mechanism”.

“A lifetime’s worth of feeling defensive is going to make you strive for a lot of jokes,” he says, later adding “the line between comedy and tragedy is very, very thin”.

Speaking to him recently about his first novel, The Whitewash – inspired by the whitewashing of Asian cinema – an interviewer suggested it was an angry book. He was about to respond saying it’s not, but then stopped. “I realised it is an angry book, it’s just that I’ve shot it through with humour,” he says. “You can sneak a lot by a reader’s defences if you’re making them laugh in the first place.”

While delighted to win the Miles Franklin, Lu admits one aspect of it is challenging. “I am a very shy person. I’m a public person only reluctantly, and that’s because I want to write books more than I want to hide. Being in the spotlight is very difficult for me,” he says.

“That doesn’t take away from the tremendous joy and the overwhelming excitement, but it does complicate the matter.”

Shortlisted for this year’s award were Winnie Dunn’s debut, Dirt Poor Islanders; Chinese Postman by Brian Castro; Compassion by Burruberongal author Julie Janson; Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser, who has won twice; and Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane.

On receiving the award, Lu said it was a huge honour to have been included among this list of writers. He thanked his publisher, Aviva Tuffield, and the team at UQ, and said the novel wouldn’t exist without the belief and support of his agent and friend Brendan Fredericks.

This year’s judges were Richard Neville, Jumana Bayeh, Mridula Nath Chakraborty, Tony Hughes-d’Aeth and Hsu-Ming Teo. They described the book as “a grand farce and a haunting meditation on diaspora”, adding it was “a genuine landmark in Australian literature”.

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