I wasn’t going to mention the Miles Franklin Literary Award longlist announced earlier in the week (and already covered by Sue at Whispering Gums and Lisa at ANZLitLovers) because I had already decided I would give myself a year off from reading the shortlist in its entirety.
I’ve just come off the back of reading all the books on the Stella Prize shortlist and I’m fast running out of time to read everything on the Kerry Group Novel of the Year shortlist as I had planned. I’m feeling much more inclined to just read books on a whim and to whittle down my TBR via my TBR40 project and Cathy’s 20 Books of Summer challenge because I’ve got plenty of other stuff taking up all my free time at the moment.
Anyway, that all said, I realise some of you may want to know what’s on the list, so for the sake of putting it on the record, here are the 10 titles vying for the $60,000 prize:
- Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s The Lebs (Hachette Australia)
- Robbie Arnott’s Flames (Text Publishing)
- Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe (HarperCollins Publishers)
- Gregory Day’s A Sand Archive (Picador Australia)
- Lexi Freiman’s Inappropriation (Allen & Unwin)
- Rodney Hall’s A Stolen Season (Picador Australia)
- Gail Jones’ The Death of Noah Glass (Text Publishing)
- Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip (The University of Queensland Press)
- Jennifer Mills’ Dyschronia (Picador Australia)
- Tracy Sorensen’s The Lucky Galah (Picador Australia)
A good year for Picador Australia, by the looks of it, with four titles on the list!
Funnily enough, I have several of these books already on my TBR — The Lebs, Flames, Boy Swallows Universe and The Death of Noah Glass — so I may get around to reading them over the summer regardless. There’s a couple that are new-to-me names (Lexi Freiman and Gregory Day), so I may well hunt those out at some point purely out of interest.
The only one I have read is Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip because it was also on the Stella Prize shortlist.
The Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlist will be announced on 2 July and the winner named on 30 July. You can find out more via the official website.
Reading Matters 
Thanks for the link, kimbofo. I completely understand your wish to read according to whim. Sometimes you can start to feel driven by too many exterior agendas can’t you.
I do recommend you try to read the Dalton. And, I’ve never heard of Lexi Freiman either.
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Yes, it begins to feel a bit like too much hard work and begins to spoil the enjoyment of reading. I think the Dalton will be going on my 20 books of summer list; thanks for the recommendation!
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Thanks for posting the list, Kim. Much to my surprise, I enjoyed The Flames which is distinctly wackier than I’d usually plump for, also The Death of Noah Glass. Everything else is new to me.
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I was put off reading the Flames because it does sound a bit bonkers but everyone I know who has read it say it’s rather wonderful. Maybe it will be one of my 20 books of summer…
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It is! It ended up being one of my books of last year.
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I have Flames on my TBR as I was intrigued by a great review my Susan at A Life in Books.
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