Thriller muscles in on Miles Franklin

MELBOURNE author Peter Temple last night became the first thriller writer to take out the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Peter Temple accepts the Miles Franklin award at the NSW State Library. Photo: Renee Nowytarger

MELBOURNE author Peter Temple last night became the first thriller writer to take out the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Accepting the $42,000 award among a who's who of Australian publishing at a dinner at the State Library of NSW in Sydney, Temple said: "Shock is the word." He joked that Australia's first Nobel laureate, Patrick White, would find it "unthinkable" that a crime writer had won the prize.

Temple's award-winning novel, Truth, is set in Melbourne and centres on the head of a Victorian homicide squad investigating a series of crimes, including a murder in a luxurious apartment complex. As well as exploring the psychological complexities of the central character, the novel plays with notions of truth, and exposes the corruption of a police force under attack from the media, and corporate and political players.

Temple was born in South Africa and in the 1980s moved to Australia as a journalist.

He has written nine novels and become the nation's most decorated crime writer, winning the Ned Kelly Award for Crime Fiction five times and Britain's prestigious Duncan Lawrie Dagger for best crime novel in 2007. The Times has called him "one of the world's finest crime writers".

The Miles Franklin judges said Truth, a sequel to the Dagger-winning The Broken Shore, "takes a popular genre and transforms it into a radical literary experiment in realism and fiction". They added: "Truth is a stunning novel about contemporary Australian life, written with all the ambiguity and moral sophistication of the most memorable literature."

The other shortlisted novelists for this year's award were two-time winner Alex Miller (Lovesong); Brian Castro (The Bath Fugues); Craig Silvey (Jasper Jones); Deborah Forster (The Book of Emmett) and Sonya Hartnett (Butterfly).