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The Miles Franklin: One Prize to Rule Them All?

JA April 28

The shortlist for this year’s Miles Franklin Award was released last week, with the following six novels making the cut:

• Lovesong, Alex Miller (Allen & Unwin) 


• The Bath Fugues, Brian Castro (Giramondo) 


• Jasper Jones, Craig Silvey (Allen & Unwin)

• The Book of Emmett, Deborah Forster (Random House)

• 
Truth, Peter Temple (Text) 


• Butterfly, Sonya Hartnett (Penguin)

Thoughts on the shortlist, as always, ranged far and wide, yet it was Alex Miller’s comments that very same morning that seemed to generate the most publicity of the day. Speaking from Sydney, the two-time winner laid down the gauntlet to the Prime Minister (who he referred to as ‘Rudd the Dud’) and Peter Garrett for forsaking the Award:

If (Rudd) had an arts minister with a sensible attitude, comparable with his concern for other things, instead of starting something called the Prime Minister’s Award, which gets no publicity and will probably disappear when someone else becomes prime minister, why didn't they give more money to the Miles Franklin?

He also added that he felt that the Miles Franklin was ‘in danger of slipping away’ and that Australia would no longer have a ‘premier literary prize to talk about to the rest of the world’. Miller suggested that the money for the PM’s Literary Awards of $100 000 should be reallocated to the Miles, giving it a much-needed boost and making it the most expensive prize in Australia.

The Miles is no stranger to controversy, but it seems to be getting mentions for all the wrong reasons of late. In 2009, the judges released an all-male shortlist almost, it seemed, without a second thought for some great writing done by Australian women that year (Spike covered this here). The criteria ‘Australian life in all its phases’ has been problematic since (and maybe before) Frank Moorhouse’s exclusion in 1994 for Grand Days. This has always been a major sticking point for me and I’ve written before about the difficulty of proclaiming any book the ‘great Australian novel’ or making broad statements about ‘national identity’.

I certainly agree with Miller that active and innovative support of the arts is lacklustre. Earlier this year, for example, the Australia-Asia Literary Award fell with a resounding thud and the promotion of the Prime Minister’s Prize in 2009 was low key, to say the least (Stephen Conte won for The Zookeepers War in 2008, but who even knows who last year’s winner was?). But I can’t help thinking that the problem won’t be solved by pumping all our cultural esteem and money into one overarching prize, especially not one as flawed as the Miles.

For one, unlike say the Man Booker or the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Miles Franklin has a very clear cultural mandate – it is a statement, if you will, about how we perceive Australian life. Such specificity is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if risks are taken, however it is an exercise in subjective opinion.

Indeed, this is true of all literary prizes (as Sam Cooney wrote on Spike). Louise Adler pointed out in the Age a while back that:

Literary prizes are always the stuff of personal preferences; they are arbitrary, unfair and subjective. The judges bring partisanship, predilection and indigestion to their deliberations. Why pretend that literary judgements are anything more than a matter of individual taste, shaped by a knowledge of the literary culture, tempered by robust conversation with equally educated but idiosyncratic judges?”

If this is so, then perhaps diversity is more of a strength than a weakness. At the moment, we have a wide array of prizes, including various Premiers Awards, the Age Book of the Year Award, the Vogel, the Patrick White Award, the David Unaipon Award, the Melbourne Prize for Literature and so on. All of these have slightly different slants, yet all are vying for attention in some way. The creation of new prizes and the rise of others may inevitably mean that we lack a ‘premier’ prize to hold up to the international spotlight, but what we will have in lieu is more of a conversation than a statement – a discussion between judging panels about what does and doesn’t make a deserving winner. This, in turn, may help make room for lesser-known novels to sneak in. As Angela Meyer pointed out on Crikey and the Fancy Goods blog, ‘if Miller’s advice was taken and other awards were encapsulated into the Miles Franklin, would other, worthy books miss out on shortlists and winnings, due to the criteria?’

 

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