This year’s Miles Franklin longllist was announced in an unusual - but thoroughly contemporary - way.
The covers of the nine longlisted books were revealed, one by one, on Twitter, in what Crikey literary blogger Bethanie Blanchard labeled ‘a slow literary striptease’.
The most striking thing, perhaps, about this year’s list?
Eight out of ten of the writers are women - perhaps fitting in the year that The Stella Prize, Australia’s first prize for Australian women’s writing, will first be awarded.
And quite a turnaround from the ‘sausagefests’ of 2011 and 2009. (Last year’s longlist was an equal affair - and of course a woman, Anna Funder, won the main prize, for All That I Am.)
This year’s longlisted books are:
Floundering by Romy Ash (Text Publishing)
Lola Bensky by Lily Brett (Hamish Hamilton)
Street to Street by Brian Castro (Giramondo)
Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser (Allen & Unwin)
The Beloved by Annah Faulkner (Picador)
The Daughers of Mars by Thomas Keneally (Vintage)
The Mountain by Drusilla Modjeska (Vintage)
The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman (Vintage)
Mateship with Birds by Carrie Tiffany (Picador)
Red Dirt Talking by Jacqueline Wright (Fremantle Press)
Congratulations to all the longlisted authors.
The shortlist will be announced on 30 April; the winner will be announced on 19 June.