Perpetual, the trustee of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, has unveiled this year’s longlist, featuring 10 novels. The selected works include two former winners and two past short-listees. The winner of the award will receive $60,000.
The 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award longlist is:
- Chinese Postman by Brian Castro
- The Burrow by Melanie Cheng
- Theory & Practice by Michelle de Krester
- Dirt Poor Islanders by Winnie Dunn
- Compassion by Julie Janson
- Politica by Yumna Kassab
- Ghost Cities by Siang Lu
- Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane
- The Degenerates by Raeden Richardson
- Juice by Tim Winton
According to the judging panel, “The limits of novelistic expression continue to be challenged in Australian letters. This year’s field of Australian novels judged for the Miles Franklin Literary Award encompassed a sometimes dizzying variety of writing. From political fables to picaresque counter-histories, from taut COVID parables to heart-warming family chronicles, Australian life in all its multiplicity is on display in these novels.
“The novels enlarge our sense of what it is to be Australian as a diasporic nation with an ancient and living human history. Pulsing through these works are the memories and imaginaries of medieval China, modern India, Moana Pasifika and the Indigenous experience of colonisation. Settings shifted from Sydney’s outer suburbs to Melbourne’s inner city, from the Adelaide Hills to the state forests of the Southern Highlands,” the judges continued.
“The novels also straddle the phases of life, depicting the experience of young children and the existential crises of ageing. Writers were unwilling to take the form of the novel for granted and showed a restlessness and inventiveness that opened up our reading in startling ways. Duelling timelines, unexplained discontinuities, temporal uncertainty, and absurdist comedy all worked through these novels to strip the patina from everyday life. There was also a marked singularity in the voices of narration. More than anything, it was the authenticity of these voices, with all their ticks and textures, that spoke to us judges.”
The winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award last year was Alexis Wright for Praiseworthy. This year’s winner will be announced in July.
