I posted my personal shortlist for the Miles Franklin Literary Award here a couple of days ago (see earlier post), which consisted of:

Lily Brett Lola Bensky

Brian Castro Street to Street

Carrie Tiffany Mateship with Birds

The official list came out yesterday and it’s rather different to mine (one out of three ain’t bad):

Romy Ash Floundering

Annah Faulkner  The Beloved

Michelle de Kretser Questions of Travel

Drusilla Modjeska The Mountain

Carrie Tiffany Mateship with Birds

All the talk yesterday was about the all-female list (the first time this has happened) and what it all means in the context of the new Stella Prize for Australian women’s writing. The Stella Prize may well have concentrated the minds of the Miles Franklin judges and administrators — and if so, that’s terrific and a win for both prizes. Certainly, the Miles Franklin people are making the most of having an all-female shortlist. But I’m wary of drawing conclusions based on one year’s results: a single shortlist cannot change the past nor predict the future. My wariness stands even if, as I think is extremely likely, Carrie Tiffany wins both the Stella and the MIles Franklin for Mateship of Birds: to me, it’s a novel that stands out from the crowd and it deserves to win the Miles Franklin. It hardly sets a precedent that we won’t be able to tell the two prizes apart in years to come, especially since the Miles Franklin must observe the ‘Australian life in any of its phases’ dictum (eg, Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites, set in 19C Iceland, will be eligible for the Stella but not for the Miles Franklin) and because the Stella isn’t confined to novels only as the Miles Franklin is (technically, plays if no novels measure up).

In predicting that Carrie Tiffany will win the Miles Franklin, I don’t mean to dismiss the other novels. But this is what makes prizes interesting: that different readers will favour different books, will have their favourites. In his article in today’s The Australian (see here), Stephen Romei quotes Richard Neville, one of the judges, as saying, ‘We were aware of the gender debate of course, and in a sense we were damned if we did and damned if we didn’t, but in the end the literature chose itself.’ I understand what Neville’s getting at – that they went with their choices based on merit, irrespective of the politics of the moment, and fair enough too – but books don’t choose themselves: readers choose them and, in this instance, judges choose them. If ‘literature chose itself’, we wouldn’t need judges or awards. I don’t think that the judges ‘got it wrong’ (in the sense of there only being one way to, say, change a tyre) because their shortlist didn’t include Lily Brett and Brian Castro. I think we have different tastes and that we saw different qualities in each of the books: we chose differently. That’s a good thing, and those arguments about the competing merits of books and stories are worth having.

While the Miles Franklin Literary Award does seem to be in the midst of a carefully constructed makeover — it’s a work in progress about which I’ll write more another day — I’m wary of the inference that, because of the Stella Prize, the judges might be ‘in’ on some PR ploy or even that they are using the shortlist to overtly respond to pressure, real or perceived (which is I guess what Neville was responding to with his ‘the literature chose itself’ comment so it’s really only the way he said it that I don’t like). I’m pretty sure, for example, that the fine literary scholar Susan Sheridan — now one of the Miles Franklin judges — needs no help to understand the rich and storied but under-recognised contribution that Australian women writers have made to our cultural landscape — including the Miles Franklin Award’s serious under-recognition of women novelists over the decades.

Incidentally, Susan Sheridan’s recent book Nine Lives: Postwar Women Writers Making Their Mark (UQP) is well worth reading. Brenda Walker reviewed it in Australian Book Review, (February 2011, here).

The Miles Franklin Literary Award winner will be announced on June 19 in Canberra.

The Miles Franklin Literary Award’s 2013 shortlist will be announced in a few days time, on 30 April. Here’s the official longlist:

Romy Ash Floundering

Lily Brett Lola Bensky

Brian Castro Street to Street

Michelle de Kretser Questions of Travel

Annah Faulkner The Beloved

Tom Keneally The Daughters of Mars

Drusilla Modjeska The Mountain

M.L. Stedman The Light Between Oceans

Carrie Tiffany Mateship with Birds

Jacqueline Wright Red Dirt Talking

Mainly for the fun of it, I thought I’d name my personal shortlist ahead of the real thing. This isn’t an exercise in trying to guess which books the judges will name but my personal favourites from amongst the 10 longlisted books.

Deciding upon any longlist/shortlist is a subjective act. There’s no systematic or clinical way to measure whether, say, M.L Stedman ‘deserves’ shortlisting more than Tom Keneally. All readers of fiction are human beings. All judges too. It’s hardly news to say that it is  inevitable —and a good thing — that different readers will react differently to the same book (I, for one, couldn’t stomach Life of Pi).

Anwyay, my personal Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlist is:

Lily Brett Lola Bensky

Brian Castro Street to Street *

Carrie Tiffany Mateship with Birds

Although I liked different things about Brett, Castro and Tiffany’s novels, I experienced a similar reaction as I read them: I felt — and ‘felt’ is the word — an intangible sensation, like an elongated sharp intake of breath. Yes, I found myself entrapped within the worlds the writers created, both when I was actually reading and when I was forced to put a book down and get on with real life for a while. Yes, the stories convinced and transfixed and unsettled me from start to finish, and left me a little awed and, at times, more than a little envious. But none of that really captures the sensation I’m trying to evoke, that indefinable ‘extra’.

To have that heightened reaction to three out of ten novels seems to me a bloody good strike rate, certainly better than what I would usually expect. I enjoyed the other seven longlisted novels to varying degrees but none of them quite grabbed me in the way that Brett, Castro and Tiffany’s books did. Romy Ash’s Floundering came closest, and the end of Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel is brilliant. But again, that’s one of the main reasons that I find competitions/awards of this sort so interesting: because different books will transfix different readers. And because disagreement about a book’s qualities is something worth savouring and nurturing.

* I know Brian Castro, and once worked for him at the University of Adelaide. That said, I enjoyed Street to Street more than any of the previous books of his that I have read, except (maybe) Shanghai Dancing.

My pull-a-name-out-of-the-hat prediction that Gillian Mears would win the 2012 Miles Franklin Literary Award last night was, well, wrong. Congratulations to Anna Funder for her win. Her novel, All That I Am, brilliantly captures resistance and resistors to Nazism. It is also, through the character of Ruth, living in Sydney, a fine examination of old age. It’s a book about big themes but the politics are wonderfully unforced and it’s an intimate novel too.

What a difficult year for the judges. Gillian Mears’s Foals Bread and Frank Moorhouse’s Cold Light, both on the shortlist, are stellar works, and might easily have won. Tony Birch (Blood) and Favel Parrett (Past the Shallows), both also shortlisted, wrote terrific books, but in Funder, Mears and Moorhouse, we have three novels in one year that deserve a ranking amongst the finest Australian writing. 2012 produced a solid – if very long – longlist too (see it here), indicating that 2011 was a stellar year for Oz Lit.

I have been critical of some elements – only some – of the Miles Franklin Literary Award in Australian Book Review (June 2011 and June 2012) so it’s worth noting that the official Miles website – see here - is starting to shape up well as more content goes up.

The Miles Franklin Literary Award winner is announced tonight. I can’t pick between Anna Funder, Gillian Mears and Frank Moorhouse – either re who I think I will win or who I think should win. I’ll go … Gillian Mears.