Lu wins Miles Franklin; new NSW ‘lit hub’; LitUp pilot participants
Headlining the news this week, Siang Lu won the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award for his latest novel, Ghost Cities (UQP). (We at B+P also deeply appreciate his ongoing collection of Siang-ed covers.)
Elsewhere in the industry, there were some more big announcements this week. The Sydney Writers’ Festival and State Library of NSW unveiled plans for a new ‘literature hub’ to ‘rival the Wheeler Centre’. Some staff changes have also been announced: new board members at Booksellers Aotearoa New Zealand include outgoing BookPeople CEO Robbie Egan as an independent director; while Anna Stelter has been appointed to S&S Australia operations director; and Bella Suckling has been promoted to associate agent at the Annabel Barker Agency.
OzAsia Festival has received a boost through the Creative Australia International Engagement Fund, with Adelaide Festival Centre among the most recent funding recipients announced by the organisation, set to receive $30,000 for a project centring the festival’s work with Asian Australian writers; many literary folks also feature in the list of funded arts projects for individuals and groups, receiving grants of up to $50,000.
Meanwhile, thinktank A New Approach has released a new position paper, ‘Imagine 2035’, on the future of arts and culture in Australia; while Australia Reads is looking to the more immediate future, revealing the pilot participants for the LitUp live literature initiative, which begins next year.
While the Miles Franklin (understandably) dominated headlines this week, industry folks were also in the awards limelight this week, with the APA announcing nine recipients of the 2025 George Robertson Award. Also honoured this week is Emma Rafferty, who won the 2025 Rosanne Fitzgibbon Editorial Award for her work on 17 Years Later (JP Pomare, Hachette Australia).
Several other authors also won prizes this week, including Susanna Elliffe, who won the 2025 NZSA Laura Solomon Cuba Press Prize; and Serena Moss, who won the 2025 Furphy Literary Award. Several writers also received accolades at the recent CYA Writers and Illustrators conference.
In shortlist and longlist news this week, the Queensland Writers Centre announced shortlists for two Varuna fellowships, and the Shalom Collective announced shortlists for the 2025 Australian Jewish Writer Awards.
In features this week, Christmas is just around the corner (on the publishing calendar at least): check out our list of fiction and poetry and food and wine highlights from publishers around the country in the lead-up to the busy summer season. Keep an eye on your inbox over the next two weeks for general nonfiction, biography and memoir, and young reader round-ups.
And, in festival news, there are two month-long celebrations to look forward to. The We Read Auckland | Ka Pānui Tātou i Tāmaki Makaurau announced its full program, ahead of the events next month; and Red Room Poetry Month kicks off today.
Several local acquisitions were announced this week, including a number of kids’ books: A&U acquired a new picture book, Valerie: Australia’s Bravest Sausage Dog, by Lucinda Gifford; Larrikin House acquired Grave Robbing and Other Curious Activities, a middle-grade novel by Joel McKerrow; and Riveted Press announced two new acquisitions, an as-yet-unnamed junior fiction trilogy from Anne Farrell and The Prime Minister Problem, a debut middle-grade novel by Brenton Cullen. Meanwhile, Melbourne-based film company Princess Pictures announced an upcoming adaptation of Tanya Scott’s crime novel Stillwater (A&U) as a feature film.
Overseas, the Booker Prize 2025 longlist was announced, with 13 books chosen from 153 entries. Hachette UK and US announced mid-year results, with increases in both markets, and HarperCollins announced the acquisition of the manga publishing operations of entertainment company Crunchyroll in France and Germany.
In other links we read this week, Alice Grundy has written for the Conversation about what Sydney’s new (aforementioned) literature hub might mean for the city, bookstores and writers; local author Jessica Stanley is in the Cut talking about Consider Yourself Kissed (Text); and ANU professors Tom Griffiths and Mark McKenna have written for Inside Story on how the Australian Dictionary of Biography (now available freely online, previously published in print by ANU Press) and the Australian National Dictionary (most recently published in print by Oxford University Press) are ‘threatened by university cuts’, with cuts to the former and abolishment of the latter said to be proposed.
Further afield, the Bookseller reported on burnout among people of colour in junior roles ‘from being forced to act as experts’; the Debut Award for Writers Over 50 2025 shortlist was revealed; while in the Yale Review, Susan Choi examined new novel The Fact-Checker (Austin Kelley, S&S) against her own experience as a fact-checker for the New Yorker in the 90s.
Category: This week’s news
