Miles Franklin Award 2017 shortlist announced

The five authors short-listed for the $60,000 Miles Franklin Literary Award have been announced.

Authors, from left, Mark O'Flynn, Ryan O'Neill, Josephine Wilson, Philip Salom and Emily Maguire. Picture: Aaron Francis

When eccentric novelist Ava Langdon, the heroine of Mark O’Flynn’s novel, leaves her manuscript in a Katoomba cafe, her frantic response is one any writer will understand.

After a waitress tells her that people forget to take um­brellas and jackets all the time and “one woman even left her baby here”, Ava retorts: “Well, you can always have another baby.” “I absolutely sympathise with that,” O’Flynn said yesterday after his novel, The Last Days of Ava Langdon, was shortlisted for the $60,000 Miles Franklin Literary Award. “I once accidentally deleted 30,000 words and was horrified, mortified.” O’Flynn, who has two adult children, is on an intriguing shortlist for the nation’s most important book prize. Not one of the five authors has been in contention before. “It’s gobsmacking,” O’Flynn said of his inclusion.

The other authors are Ryan O’Neill, who pinched the title of Miles Franklin’s most famous book for his satirical novel about Australian writers, Their Brilliant Careers, Emily Maguire for An Isolated Incident, Josephine Wilson for Extinctions and Philip Salom for Waiting.

“None of these novels draws on familiar tropes of Australian literature,” State Library of NSW Mitchell Librarian Richard Nev­ille said on behalf of the judges, “yet each brings a distinctive pitch of truth and insight into the Australian experience. (They) explore the restorative power of love, the pernicious influence of the past on the present, the tragedy of the present avoiding the past, the challenge of unconventional identities, the interweaving of lives across communities, the devastation of grief, and the war zone that is the media, masculinity and a small country town.”

Both O’Flynn and Salom are better known as poets. “I write about 50 per cent poetry and 50 per cent prose,” O’Flynn said. “I don’t define myself one way or another. I am a writer, and it’s all about words.”

That is true of the spirited Ava Langdon, who is based on Australian writer Eve Langley, known for her 1942 novel The Pea Pickers. Like Eva, Ava dresses like a man and uses Oscar Wilde as an alternative name. When Langley died in Katoomba in 1974, she left at least 10 unpublished novels.

When Ava goes to the post office to send off her manuscript, her wardrobe includes pinstriped trousers, a pith helmet and a yellow cravat “at her throat like a bloodthirsty budgerigar”.

She carries a machete. When she asks the postmaster to look for mail under the name Oscar Wilde, “his eyebrows raised to the heavens like a couple of leeches smelling blood in the vicinity”. O’Flynn’s day job is teaching basic literacy to inmates at the Lithgow Correctional Centre. “It’s a perversely inspiring job for a writer,” he said.

The Miles Franklin winner will be announced on September 7.

THE FIVE FINALISTS 2017:

• An Isolated Incident by Emily Maguire (Pac Macmillan Australia)

Explores two women, a murder and the media’s coverage of the death.

• The Last Days Of Ava Langdon by Mark O’Flynn (University of Queensland Press)

About a misunderstood outsider who refuses to concede to societal expectations.

• Their Brilliant Careers by Ryan O’Neill (Black Inc)

A satire of 15 biographies of imagined Australian writers whose lives fit in real literary history.

• Waiting by Philip Salom (Puncher & Wattmann)

Odd couples who are both waiting for their lives to change.

• Extinctions by Josephine Wilson (UWA Publishing)

A novel which explores ageing, adoption, grief, remorse to rescue.