Franklin shortlist
Author’s latest honour
A LIFESYTLE founded on literary masterpieces has seen a Surf Coast author shortlisted for this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award.
Gregory Day’s novel A Sand Archive is one of six shortlisted for the award.
Day, who won the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal in 2006, has written five novels and three books of poetry.
“It’s something I’ve pursued since I was a teenager,” he said of writing.
A Sand Archive follows a young writer as he stumbles across a manual from a minor player in the Great Ocean Road’s history, engineer FB Herschell.
Day said his lifestyle revolved around writing and he was often inspired by his dreams.
“This one is set here and set in France, so the juxtaposition is of how a guy from here who’s working on sand dune stabilisation ends up researching in France,” he said. “It’s looking at the landscape here and the character of the people here in relation to history.”
The literary award recognises a mix of emerging and established writers.
The nominees include Rodney Hall for A Stolen Season, Gail Jones for The Death of Noah Glass and Melissa Lucashenko for her novel Too Much Lip.
First-time nominees include Michael Mohammed Ahmad, whose novel The Lebs won the Multicultural NSW Award at the 2019 NSW Premier’s Awards, and Jennifer Mills, an award-winning writer of novels, short stories and poems.
Each of the short-listed authors receives $5000 from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. The winner, to be announced on July 30, will receive $60,000 in prizemoney.
The prize is awarded each year to a novel “which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases’’.