‘An outsider in the mud’: local literary legend shortlisted for $60,000 Miles Franklin prize
This year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlist includes the latest novel from a celebrated Adelaide writer.
Brian Castro has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award for his latest novel, Chinese Postman, alongside two-time winner Michelle de Kretser and three first-time finalists.
It’s not Castro’s first Miles Franklin rodeo; Chinese Postman is his fourth novel to be shortlisted over a three-decade period, with Double-Wolf (1991), The Garden Book (2005) and The Bath Fugues (2009) also making the cut alongside several longlisted titles.
The Hong Kong-born, Adelaide-based author and University of Adelaide academic has received plenty of flowers over his long career, including the Vogel Award for his 1983 debut Birds of Passage, the Victorian Premier’s Award for Fiction and New South Wales Book of the Year for 2003’s Shanghai Dancing. In 2014 he was also recognised with the Patrick White Literary Award, and in 2018 took out the poetry category of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards for Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria.
In an email to InReview, Castro was relaxed about his chances of taking home the $60,000 prize this year.
“Unsurprisingly, this is my fourth shortlisting and I’ve never won,” Castro told InReview. “So I guess I’m used to disappointment! I think it was John Cleese who famously said he could take despair, but it was hope that was the killer. So I’m not hoping at all, just running as an outsider in the mud!”
Michelle de Kretser is considered a front-runner for this year’s Miles Franklin, after previously winning the top prize for The Life to Come in 2018 and Questions of Travel in 2013. This year she’s been recognised for Theory & Practice, a Virginia Woolf-inspired coming of age story set in 1980s St Kilda, that gently subverts reader expectations by blurring fiction, non-fiction, and authorial personas. It took out the Stella Prize last month.
Other shortlisted entries include three first-time finalists: Dirt Poor Islanders, the debut novel by Tongan Australian author Winnie Dunn, Ghost Cities by Siang Lu, and Compassion by Burruberongal author Julie Janson. Fiona McFarlane has also been shortlisted for a second time with short story collection Highway 13, following the shortlisting of her 2014 novel The Night Guest. Each shortlisted author receives a $5,000 prize.
The longlist, announced in May, included Tim Winton’s latest novel, Juice, and The Burrow by Adelaide-born Melanie Cheng.
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In a recent review of Chinese Postman, InReview, contributor Heather Taylor Johnson called the book a “literary treatise on aging, memory and a life well lived”:
“There are no chapters in Chinese Postman — in fact the story progresses through a series of very small sections or fragments. Open the book to any random page and you’ll find that the style proves aesthetically beautiful and clean, but more than that, the structure mimics memory itself. One image slides into the next, despite the images initially being unconnected. It’s as if Castro is telling us from a place of newfangled discovery, Look what a life is! Isn’t it glorious!”
The winner of the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award will be announced on July 24 2025
2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlist
Chinese Postman by Brian Castro (Giramondo Publishing)
Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser (Text Publishing)
Dirt Poor Islanders by Winnie Dunn (Hachette Australia)
Compassion by Julie Janson (Magabala Books)
Ghost Cities by Siang Lu (University of Queensland Press)
Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane (Allen & Unwin)