Lu awarded 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award
Siang Lu has won the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award, worth $60,000, for his novel Ghost Cities (UQP).
Lu is an author based in both Brisbane, Australia, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, who previously wrote The Whitewash (UQP). He is co-creator of The Beige Index and creator of #sillybookstagram on Instagram.
Lu said, ‘I am honoured beyond belief, and beyond words. I didn’t dare dream of this. It didn’t seem possible. My most heartfelt thanks to Perpetual as trustee for the Miles Franklin Literary Award estate, the Copyright Agency, my publisher Aviva Tuffield and the wonderful team at UQP, and my agent Brendan Fredericks.’
Ghost Cities was chosen from a longlist of 10, followed by a shortlist of six by the judges: State Library of NSW librarian Richard Neville (chair) and literary scholars Jumana Bayeh, Mridula Nath Chakraborty, Tony Hughes-d’Aeth and Hsu-Ming Teo.
The judges called Ghost Cities ‘a bold and satirical reimagining of Australian storytelling’.
‘Siang Lu’s Ghost Cities is at once a grand farce and a haunting meditation on diaspora. Sitting within a tradition in Australian writing that explores failed expatriation and cultural fraud, Lu’s novel is also something strikingly new. In Ghost Cities, the Sino-Australian imaginary appears as a labyrinthine film-set, where it is never quite clear who is performing and who is directing. Shimmering with satire and wisdom, and with an absurdist bravura, Ghost Cities is a genuine landmark in Australian literature,’ the judges said.
Ghost Cities was previously shortlisted for the Russell Prize for Humour Writing, the John Clarke Prize for Humour Writing in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, the Age Book of the Year, and the ALS Gold Medal.
The Miles Franklin Literary Award was established through the will of My Brilliant Career author, Stella Miles Franklin, for the ‘advancement, improvement and betterment of Australian literature’ and recognises a novel of ‘the highest literary merit’ that presents ‘Australian life in any of its phases.’ The award was announced at a ceremony in Sydney on 24 July 2025.
The winner of last year’s award was Alexis Wright for her novel Praiseworthy (Giramondo).
Category: Awards Local news
