Named after the author of
My Brilliant Career and established by her bequest, the annual Miles Franklin Literary Award is one of Australia’s most prestigious, valuable and popular fiction prizes.
So what does it take to call yourself a Miles Franklin winner? We’ve crunched the data on every winner since the first in 1957, ahead of the announcement of this year’s award on Thursday afternoon.
Be a man
Twice as many men have won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, with men writing 41 of the winning novels and women writing 21 of them. However, the tide may be turning. Eight of the 21 women on the list have won in the past nine years.
How to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award: analysing 64 years of data
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How to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award: analysing 64 years of data
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How to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award: analysing 64 years of data
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Review: Eve Langley and The Pea Pickers by Helen Vines (Monash University Publishing)
When your subject is a mid-century, gender-ambiguous author who lived under other names and wasn’t always honest about basic points of identification, writing a biography is a huge challenge. But Helen Vines’ Eve Langley and The Pea Pickers builds a substantial picture of this elusive author. Eve (left) and June Langley, 1920s. Courtesy of Monash University Publishing
I first came to Langley’s work through her 1940 poem Native-Born as part of my research on dead kangaroos in Australian literature.
Langley had been absent from my educational curriculum, dominated by her male contemporaries Kenneth Slessor, Nevil Shute and the school-boy squabbles of the Ern Malley affair and the more influential Patrick White and Randolph Stow. This wasn’t unusual in the 80s and 90s. Now, it is hard to justify any more than a sprinkling of them in an English course.