This year’s Miles Franklin shortlist features an Australian first

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 novel Dirt Poor Islanders has been shortlisted for this year’s Miles Franklin prize.Credit: Steven Siewert

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.

Dunn’s debut Dirt Poor Islanders is the first Tongan-Australian novel published in Australia. She was “very shocked” to have been nominated, she said. “I’m still … reeling from it! It’s amazing and I feel really lucky.”

Dunn, who grew up in western Sydney’s Mount Druitt, challenges reductive and popular racist representations of the Tongan-Australian community in her novel, the judges said.

The six books shortlisted for this year’s Miles Franklin prize celebrate writing that “refuses to compromise”.

“Dirt Poor Islanders is a tender and arresting story of a young protagonist … whose life in Western Sydney is framed by her experience as a Tongan Australian,” the panel said.

The 29-year-old had always wanted to be a writer, and after university, honed her skills at Sydney’s Sweatshop Literacy Movement in Sydney, an organisation that provides research, training and mentoring for emerging and established writers from Indigenous and non-English-speaking backgrounds, where she is now general manager.

She was partly driven to write her semi-autobiographical novel because she had rarely seen herself, or her community, reflected in mainstream culture.

“The only real representation of Tongan-Australians in mainstream media is Chris Lilley’s Summer Heights High and Jonah from Tonga as a kind of brown-faced minstrel,” she said.

Despite Australia’s multiculturalism, and Tonga being one of our closest neighbours, Pasifika culture doesn’t get much creative representation, Dunn said.

“We only make up less than one per cent of the population, but we are very visible in terms of football, manual labour and in art, such as rap group Onefour, so we do add to the cultural face of Australia. Being nominated for the Miles Franklin is a real boost to my community.”

Each of the shortlisted authors receives a $5000 prize, and the winner, who will be announced on July 24, receives $60,000.

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