Michelle happy to win award for novel on burning issues
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The author with her award-winning book
Sri Lankan- born Australian author Michelle de Kretser has won her second Miles Franklin Literary Award this year for her novel The Life to Come, presented at the Melbourne Writers Festival last Sunday.
Established in 1957, through the will and bequest of My Brilliant Career author Stella Maria Miles Franklin, the award highlights a novel “of the highest literary merit” which presents “Australian life in any of its phases”.
Michelle is the third woman after Thea Astley (four times) and Jessica Anderson (twice) to win the $60,000 annual prize more than once.
“I am so pleased that in this past week, which saw a lurch to the right in Australian politics, that this book has won the Miles Franklin and that a first-generation Asian immigrant has won the award,” the Sydney-based author told AAP.
“That sends a very good message to the majority of Australians who refuse the politics of race and hatred.”
Her first win was for her fourth novel Questions of Travel, which was also awarded the 2013 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards for fiction, and shortlisted for the 2014 International IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award.
The Life to Come is de Kretser’s sixth book, which follows a loosely linked group of characters across Sydney, Sri Lanka and Paris.
Pippa, a struggling Australian writer who longs for success, is the connecting factor to the rest of the characters: Celeste, who tries to convince herself that her feelings for her married lover in Paris are reciprocated, Ash whose life and relationship are affected as he tries to blot out the memory of a tragedy from his childhood in Sri Lanka, and Christabel, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who struggles to find balance in her new life in Sydney.
In the author’s own words, it is an exploration of our flawed perceptions of other people and the way our understanding of the world shifts over time and according to changes in context.
In her acceptance speech de Kretser called out “disgraceful” politicians about the treatment of refugees on Nauru and Manus Island. She read out the names of asylum seekers who had died there in the past five years, saying “we have not forgotten, we will not forget”.
“It was important to just write about some of those issues of race, migration and asylum seeking in the novel [because] they are ongoing matters of importance to Australia and the world,” the author adds.