Literary awards news related to fiction, poetry and drama produced in Australia or commonly seen as belonging in the Australian literature category are listed here. This includes many British and worldwide awards that also consider Australian literary works.
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Alexis Wright wins 2007 Miles Franklin Literary Award
Date: July 7, 2007 | Discussion: 1 Comment
Alexis Wright has won the 2007 Miles Franklin Literary Award for her novel Carpentaria. The award, which celebrated its 50th year, was established by the Australian author Miles Franklin to annually award the best ‘published novel or play portraying Australian life in any of its phases’.
Carpentaria
by Alexis Wright
Carpentaria is Alexis Wright’s second novel, an epic set in the Gulf country of northwestern Queensland. The novel’s portrait of life in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance centres on the powerful Phantom family, leader of the Westend Pricklebush people, and its battles with old Joseph Midnight’s renegade Eastend mob on the one hand, and the white officials of Uptown and the neighbouring Gurfurrit mine on the other. Wright’s storytelling is operatic and surreal: a blend of myth and scripture, politics and farce. The novel teems with extraordinary characters – the outcast saviour Elias Smith, the religious zealot Mozzie Fishman, the murderous mayor Bruiser, the moth-ridden Captain Nicoli Finn, the activist Will Phantom, and above all, the rulers of the family, the queen of the rubbish-dump and the fish-embalming king of time, Angel Day and Normal Phantom – figures of such an intense imagining, they stand like giants in this storm-swept world….
You can read more about Carpentaria at Amazon.com.
