Haunting tale of ghost cities wins 2025 Miles Franklin award for Siang Lu

Siang Lu set his Miles Franklin award-winning novel in China’s creepy ghost cities. His win reflects an ongoing evolution for the Miles Franklin, which was once for books set only, or at least mainly, in Australia.

Writer Siang Lu has won the 2025 Miles Franklin Award. ‘Ghost Cities is a genuine landmark in Australian literature, reflecting the evolving spirit of Australian life,’ say the judges. Picture: Miles Franklin Literary Award / Perpetual

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Chinese-Malaysian-Australian writer Siang Lu has won the 2025 Miles Franklin literary award for a novel set against the backdrop of China’s creepy ghost cities.

Lu’s book, Ghost Cities (UQP), follows multiple narratives, including one in which “a young man named Xiang is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney’s Chinese consulate after it is discovered he doesn’t speak a word of Chinese and has been relying entirely on Google Translate for his work”.

Xiang gets relocated to one of China’s haunting “ghost cities”, which feature thousands of empty skyscrapers, in which nobody has ever lived.

Ghost Cities by Siang Lu has won the 2025 Miles Franklin literary prize.

The book was described by judges at a ceremony at the State Library of NSW on Thursday as “strikingly new”.

One of The Australian’s literary critics, Samuel Bernard, praised its “bustling storyline” in his review earlier this year, noting with amusement the “horny mountain that gains sentience (and) ancient emperor who creates a thousand doubles of himself.”

Lu told The Australian it was “such a joy even to be shortlisted for the Miles Franklin”, which comes with a cheque for $60,000, “because that is huge recognition, saying this book is worthy, so to even get to that point was amazing. To win just feels surreal.”

The decision to grant the prize to Lu reflects an ongoing evolution in the thinking of judges of the Miles Franklin, which was once for books set only, or at least mainly, in Australia.

The woman who provided the money for the prize, Stella Miles Franklin, author of My Brilliant Career (1901), wanted it to go to a novel that “presents Australian life in any of its phases.”

Judges have historically been strict in their interpretation of those words, creating enormous controversy in 1994 when Grand Days, by one of Australia’s most celebrated writers, Frank Moorhouse, was deemed ineligible on the grounds that too much of the action centred around fictional Australian expat Edith Campbell Berry took place in Geneva.

Moorhouse was incredibly distressed, arguing that Edith’s story – a brilliant young woman from country Australia seeks a diplomatic career abroad – was an Australian story. He was thrilled to win the Miles Franklin for the second book in the “Edith” trilogy, Dark Palace, in 2001.

In a statement about Ghost Cities, the judges for the Miles Franklin, which is administered by Perpetual, said: “Ghost Cities is a genuine landmark in Australian literature, reflecting the evolving spirit of Australian life … it redefines what Australian literature can be … sitting within a tradition in Australian writing that explores failed expatriation and cultural fraud.”

Lu’s migrant experience is complex: he was born in Malaysia to two Chinese parents who were also Malaysian-born, his grandparents having been displaced by World War II.

He came to Australia at the age of four, settling in Brisbane. “I am an Australian by citizenship, and I’m very comfortable here, but I did want to write about that feeling that many people have, of not quite belonging here, there or anywhere,” he told The Australian.

“I fully admit that when I walk around in, say, Malaysia, or the Chinese-speaking parts of Malaysia, or in China itself, I look like a local, and people often expect me to speak the language, and I don’t.

“That is not the fault of my parents, I should say. It’s my fault, entirely. I wanted so much to be fully assimilated into Australian culture, and it’s quite a common story for second-generation migrants, as they grow up in Australia, to reject parts of the culture that they’ve come from, in order to embrace Australian life.”

He said he visited China for the first time in 1993, saying it was a “transformative experience because my family took me to the ancestral village. And I couldn’t shake this feeling, even then, that I was looking at a more ancient bow of my family tree.”

He has long been fascinated by “ghost cities”, which were built for an expanding economy and population in China, yet stand empty. The Australian has reported extensively on the haunting spaces. One recent report said the empty buildings could hold “the entire population of Brazil”.

Ghost Cities has previously been shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal, the Russell Prize for Humour Writing, the VPLA John Clarke Humour Award, the Readings New Australian Fiction Prize, the University of Queensland Fiction Book Award and The ­Courier-Mail People’s Choice Queensland Book of the Year at the Queensland Literary Awards.

The 2025 judging panel for the Miles Franklin comprised Richard Neville, Mitchell Librarian at the State Library of NSW and Chair; literary scholar Jumana Bayeh; literary scholar and translator Mridula Nath Chakraborty; literary scholar and author Tony Hughes-d’Aeth; and author and literary scholar Hsu-Ming Teo.