Miles Franklin award shortlist: nod proves self-publishing not so grim

A self-published book has, for the first time, made it on to the shortlist for the $60,000 Miles Franklin literary award.

Author Michael Winkler in the Miles Franklin Room at the State Library of NSW. Picture: Britta Campion

Self-published authors rejoice! A self-published book has, for the first time, made it on to the shortlist for one of the nation’s most prestigious prizes, the $60,000 Miles Franklin literary award.

Grimmish, by Melbourne writer Michael Winkler, is based on the true story of boxer Joe Grim. It’s wild in style, starting with a fictional review of itself. Nobel laureate JM Coetzee described it as “the strangest book you are likely to read this year” and Helen Garner has said: “Grimmish meets a need I didn’t even know I had.”

Yet Winkler could not find a publisher. “I wrote the book over a number of years and … sent it to an agent, Martin Shaw, who was very enthusiastic, and he hawked it around … and we got knocked back by every publisher we approached,” he told The Australian on Thursday.

“It was disappointing, obviously … I didn’t want to self-publish, because it’s a hard road … but there seemed to be something in this book, and I wanted to honour the work by putting it out there.

“To have this acknowledgment … is wonderful, not only for me, but for the many, many people who self-publish.”

The Australian is a champion of self-published books, reviewing them alongside traditional books.

As Winkler says, “there are so many reasons why you might not be able to get a bite from a publisher”. The Miles Franklin judges have been accepting self-published books since inception, but this is the first time one has made the shortlist, or even the longlist.

“My great good fortune was to work with (designer) Peter Long because if I was going to put it out there, I wanted it to look classy,” Winkler said. He had 500 copies printed. “All of them are sold. I approached a lot of bookshops, and only a small number wanted to stock it. Blarney Books in Port Fairy (Victoria) were champions. I sold some others through Twitter and social media.”

Winkler knew it would help to get an endorsement from a literary heavyweight, but says: “I didn’t know anyone. So I sent it to Coetzee and he wrote a really lovely response, and then I was all bashful, writing back, saying ‘can I use that as a blurb?’. And he authorised the one sentence, a funny sentence. And Helen Garner, she was so generous, too.”

The first editions – now very likely collectables! – were published under the fictional Westbourne Books, a company that doesn’t really exist – “It’s just the street I live on,” says Winkler – but with 500 sold, he was able to get a small publisher, Puncher & Wattman, to take him on this year. It has published another 500 copies.

The other books in contention for the Miles Franklin are:

The Other Half of You by Michael Mohammed Ahmad (Hachette Australia); Scary Monsters by Michelle de Kretser (Allen & Unwin); Bodies of Light by Jennifer Down (Text Publishing), and; One Hundred Days by Alice Pung (Black Inc. Books)

The judges admired Grimmish’s tale of “a terrible boxer who somehow managed to sustain a professional career in the early 20th century solely on the basis of his ability to take a savage beating without falling over”.

They said Winkler had “crafted an equally unusual novel that is by turns playful, funny, heartfelt and deeply reflective … Winkler approaches his subject with a keen eye for life’s absurdity, grotesquerie and tragedy”.