Miles Franklin Award Winner

Miles Franklin Literary Award is an annual literary prize for the best Australian ‘published novel or play portraying Australian life in any of its phases’.

The award was established according to the will of Miles Franklin (1879 - 1954), author of the Australian classic My Brilliant Career (published in 1901), who bequeathed her estate to fund the award.

The 2007 award recipient is Alexis Wright for the novel Carpentaria

Commenting on the winner's novel, the Judging Panel wrote:

Carpentaria is a big novel in every sense. Richly imagined and stylistically ambitious, it takes all kinds of risks and pulls them off with the confidence and assurance of a novelist who has now discovered her true power."

Given the events of recent days in Australia it's a particularly interesting and perhaps poignent choice.