Newcomers make Miles Franklin longlist

The Miles Franklin Literary Award longlist is made up of nine authors who have never been shortlisted for it before.

Author Kirsten Tranter has made the Miles Franklin longlist for her novel Hold.

The Miles Franklin Literary Award has already set one record for this year: the longlist, announced yesterday, is made up of nine authors who have never been shortlisted for the nation’s most important book prize.

Each of them is less well-known, in the public mind at least, than previous winners such as Thomas Keneally, Thea Astley, Peter Carey, Tim Winton or Michelle de Kretser.

Only two have been longlisted before: Kirsten Tranter and Inga Simpson, in contention in 2011 and 2015 respectively for their novels Legacy and Nest.

Tranter made the longlist for the $60,000 award for Hold. Simpson is in the running for Where the Trees Were.

The other contenders are Steven Amsterdam’s The Easy Way Out; Emily Maguire’s An Isolated Incident; Mark O’Flynn’s The Last Days of Ava Langdon; Ryan O’Neill’s debut, Their Brilliant Careers; Josephine Rowe’s A Loving, Faithful Animal; Philip Salom’s Waiting; and Josephine Wilson’s Extinctions.

Amsterdam’s novel is centred on voluntary euthanasia, Maguire’s on the murder of a young woman, Rowe’s and Wilson’s on families, trauma, loss and grief. Salom and O’Flynn, both acclaimed poets, write about Australian writers, invented, semi-imagined and semi-real.

“This year’s longlist, unusually, is nearly all contemporary and urban,” State Library of NSW Mitchell librarian Richard Neville said on behalf of the judges. “It’s a reflective one, as novelists grapple with the creation and remembrance of history, the contests of urban re­la­tionships, and domestic com­plexity, trauma and insight from the proximity of mortality.

“The diversity of these voices suggests the depth and strength of Australian writing and its resistance to easy categorisation. Each of these novels brings a distinct voice to the Australian experience which refuses conven­tional description.”

Miles Franklin longlists have been made public since 2005. In that time, a previously shortlisted writer has made the cut every year, from Steven Carroll in 2005 to Charlotte Wood last year.

Of course, being shortlisted previously is no guarantee of success. In 2005, for example, the award went to Andrew McGahan for The White Earth. He’d not been shortlisted before. In 2014, Richard Flanagan made the shortlist for the fifth time for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which won the Man Booker Prize. The Miles Franklin went to English-Australian writer Evie Wyld for her second novel All the Birds, Singing. Flanagan is still waiting.

The last debut novelist to win the award was Anna Funder in 2012 for All That I Am. The longlist that year included previous winners Alex Miller, Frank Moorhouse and Carroll.

There were no noticeable omissions from the longlist, open to books published last year. This year’s Stella Prize winner, Heather Rose’s The Museum of Modern Love, does not have an Australian setting or characters. Nor does Hannah Kent’s The Good People.

The shortlist will be announced on June 18 and the winner revealed in September.