Tag Archives: Literary Minded

Miller and the Miles Franklin: Do we have too many awards?

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From today’s Crikey newsletter, former Bookseller+Publisher editor and literary blogger Angela Meyer writes:

Are there too many literary awards in Australia, and is our oldest one “slipping away”? If an Australian literary award was provided increased funding and focus, would the Miles Franklin be the most relevant?

Every year the Miles Franklin Literary Award attracts some debate and controversy, but the award’s prestige is waning, noted Alex Miller — a two-time winner and shortlisted author in this year’s awards — at the shortlisting ceremony yesterday. Miller, as reported in The Australian, said Prime Minister “Rudd the Dud” and arts minister Peter Garrett should have invested in the nation’s oldest literary award, instead of creating the Prime Minister’s Literary Award in 2008 (worth $100,000, to the MF’s $42,000), which he said “gets no publicity and will probably disappear when someone else becomes prime minister”.

Miller’s main point is that there are too many literary awards, and so it’s inevitable that there will be less focus on each. Besides the Prime Minister’s awards, there are various state Premier’s awards, and many other trust, media, festival, company and privately funded awards. Many are relevant for their individual fields and genres (such as the CBCA awards for children’s and young adult literature) but dispersing funding around for fiction awards when one solid, prestigious and attention-focused literary award could be developed, is a good point. Would the public pay more attention?

If this was put into effect, though, is the Miles Franklin really the award for the job? Sure, it was established in 1957, and has been won by culturally important, and stimulating, authors and books. Patrick White’s Voss was the recipient of the first award, as Miller noted. But the Miles Franklin’s criteria is stricter than awards established since: “It is awarded for the novel of the year which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases”. This is what Miles Franklin included with her bequest. What “Australian life in any of its phases” means, exactly, is something that comes up often in discussion of the shortlisted books. Continue reading →

BOOK REVIEW: Miscellaneous Voices: Australian Blog Writing No. 1 (ed by Karen Andrews, Miscellaneous Press)

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Some would not agree that some of the best writing appears in blogs. Editor Karen Andrews throws down the gauntlet by introducing her anthology as ‘an experiment to see how this writing, these writers, stand up to the challenge of the page; or to put it another way, to put them in front of another audience which may be more page-loyal.’ It is impossible to list everything here; suffice to say bloggers (well-known and not so well-known) chosen for this first instalment embrace all manner of subjects from the sacred to the mundane including earthquakes, the GFC, food marketing, what makes a successful cultural blog, Bill Clinton, the death of a child, a bombing, lettuce, grandparents, triffids, writing the first draft of a novel, lists, Silverchair, a massacre in East Timor, writing for a living, ebooks, and mashups of ‘great books’. There are fragments, poems, short pieces and longer pieces. Tones are just as varied as subjects and can be hilarious, irreverent or elegiac. References, blog sources and bios are also included. So, for those who are not blog readers, exposure to this significant array of voices and delicious flavours may be quite revelatory and may well produce some steady converts.

Paula Grunseit is a freelance journalist, editor and reviewer. This review first appeared in the April issue of Bookseller+Publisher magazine.