“I can’t tell you how extraordinary it is for this to happen,” said author and 2017 Miles Franklin award-winner Josephine Wilson. “It’s not the sort of thing I ever imagined would happen to me.”
On Thursday night, Wilson was revealed as the 60th winner of Australia’s most high-profile literary prize for fiction for her novel, Extinctions, which was hailed by the judges as “compassionate and unapologetically intelligent”.
Wilson told Guardian Australia she was “absolutely thrilled” to receive the award, which comes with a $60,000 cash prize, but said she did not write with thought to any financial rewards.
“Writing takes a very long time and its labour far exceeds the returns, regardless of the prize money. You can’t really quantify that,” she said.
The Western Australian author said on the day she found out she spent most of the afternoon missing calls from one of the judges, convinced she was about to be told she had not been successful.
“Of course, one always has hopes,” Wilson said. “I hoped that my book would touch a chord and be read and appreciated beyond myself and my smaller community.”
Wilson describes Extinctions as a novel “trying to come to understand the emotional complexity of belonging”. The story follows retired engineer Frederick Lothian, an expert on concrete who, at 69, is a relatively young and reclusive resident of a retirement village. His life changes when he strikes up a friendship with his neighbour, Jan, and the secrets of his past confront him anew.
Wilson said writing the novel was a way for her to think through issues and ideas, including questioning the limits of personal responsibility and how much people are shaped by their environment and historical context.
The novel was also inspired partly by her own experience of adopting a child.
“I was also thinking a great deal about family and post-biological families, and do we need to give birth to love? The question of adoption was really very central to my thinking and reading around the book,” she said. “I was really engaged and thinking a lot about Australian history and the history of Indigenous adoption, fostering, and the Stolen Generation and what that meant. So I was really thinking about what a family means and what a family can be.”
The award, named for 20th century Australian writer Stella “Miles” Franklin, was established in 1957 to be given to a novel of “the highest literary merit” that shows “Australian life in any of its phases”. The judging panel this year included State Library of NSW librarian Richard Neville, Sydney bookseller Lindy Jones, critic Dr Melinda Harvey, columnist for the Australian, Murray Waldren, and Emeritus Professor Susan Sheridan.
This year, the Miles Franklin shortlist contained five first-time nominee authors, including: Last Days of Ava Langdon by Mark O’Flynn; Waiting by Philip Salom; An Isolated Incident by Emily Maguire; and Their Brilliant Careers by Ryan O’Neill.
“A book can have a very short shelf life,” Wilson said. This was especially true for books from smaller publishers, she said – Extinctions is published by UWA Publishing – so the recognition that accompanied being long- or short-listed for the prize was just as important.
“If you are insecure, which most writers I know are – you are stumbling around in the dark often with something you’re working on,” she said. “There’s all these unknowns and it takes an enormous strength to believe that something can come of it.
“We make decisions for writing which take us away from whatever work we might do that brings an income immediately, or we put aside the writing because we don’t have any faith that anything can come of it. So the Miles Franklin is enormously influential for writers for that reason. It gives us faith – and I think it gives the public more faith – in the books.”
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion