‘Recognition is good, but it doesn’t pay the bills’, Gabrielle Wang. Photo: Shutterstock.
This year’s Miles Franklin award-winner has recently been announced, with the winner Shankari Chandran, taking home the pot of gold, worth $60,000, with the other five authors on the short list awarded $5000 each.
‘While I very much appreciated the encouragement, it was (obviously) much better when that same manuscript previously won the Victorian Premier’s Unpublished Manuscript Award. Those funds allowed me to finish the book. Would I have been able to complete the manuscript if the prize had been divided among the winner and shortlist? It’s a good question.
Thuy On is the former Reviews and Literary Editor of ArtsHub and an arts journalist, critic and poet who’s written for a range of publications including The Guardian, The Saturday Paper, Sydney Review of Books, The Australian, The Age/SMH and Australian Book Review. She was the Books Editor of The Big Issue for 8 years and a former Melbourne theatre critic correspondent for The Australian.
She has three collections of poetry published by the University of Western Australian Press (UWAP): Turbulence (2020), Decadence (2022) and Essence (2025).
Threads: @thuy_on123 Instagram: poemsbythuy
