‘Too Much Lip’ wins Miles Franklin Literary Award
Melissa Lucashenko has won the Miles Franklin Literary Award for her darkly funny novel Too Much Lip (UQP), about a woman who returns to her hometown after an armed robbery gone awry to farewell her dying father. The judges said Too Much Lip is ‘driven by personal experience, historical injustice, anger and what in Indigenous vernacular could be described as “deadly Blak” humour’.
Behrouz Boochani’s memoir No Friend but the Mountains (Picador)—an account of the Iranian refugee’s incarceration on Manus Island by the Australian government—has won the National Biography Award. The judges praised Boochani’s book for its ‘poetic and epic writing’, calling it ‘profoundly important, an astonishing act of witness and testament to the lifesaving power of writing as resistance’.
The shortlist for the the Colin Roderick Award for Australian writing has been announced. The shortlisted titles are: Sun Music: New & Selected Poems (Judith Beveridge, Giramondo), Boy Swallows Universe (Trent Dalton, Fourth Estate), The True Colour of the Sea (Robert Drewe, Hamish Hamilton), The Death of Noah Glass (Gail Jones, Text) and Dinner with the Dissidents (John Tesarsch, Affirm Press).
The shortlist for the Most Underrated Book Award (MUBA)—which aims to ‘uncover and celebrate the hidden gems of Australian publishing’—has been announced. The shortlisted titles are: Brontide (Sue McPherson, Magabala), Antidote to a Curse (James Cristina, Transit Lounge) and Songwoman (Ilka Tampke, Text).
Several Australian authors are in the running for UK prizes. Chris Hammer’s novel Scrublands (Allen & Unwin) has been shortlisted for the UK Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) Dagger Awards and Heather Morris’ The Tattooist of Auschwitz (Echo) has been shortlisted for the Glass Bell Award for contemporary fiction.
Also announced in the past month:
- The winners of the Romance Writers of Australia Romantic Book of the Year awards
- The shortlists for the Davitt Awards for crime books by Australian women
- The longlists for the Ned Kelly Awards for Australian crime writing.
Category: Think Australian awards
