The six books on this year’s Miles Franklin shortlist vary in style, themes and the writers’ experience, with veteran novelists and debuts – including an international prize-winner and a 26-year-old.
Academic rigor, journalistic flair
Articles on autofiction
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Margeurite Duras’s fictionalised account of a teenage affair with a much older Chinese man has been criticised as a kind of retro-Orientalist Lolita. But that does her iconic novel an injustice.
Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel in 13 years blurs fact and fiction, mining his youth for material. The result is Joan Didion meets Brian De Palma.
Writing from lived experience often has legitimacy, but autofiction has fictional elements that trouble the autobiographical pact.
Annie Ernaux is the first French woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her autofiction masterpiece, The Years, has been called a modern In Search of Lost Time.
Sophie Cunningham’s novel about Leonard Woolf and the contemporary writer attempting to tell his story is wry and earnest – and yes, devastating when it needs to be.
One of the first contemporary personal narratives about living with HIV in the 21st century, Fever urgently interrogates the social meanings of HIV, and how they’ve evolved in the era of treatment.
Top contributors
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A.R. Chisholm Professor of French, The University of Melbourne
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Lecturer in Global Studies, Monash University
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Professor of Creative Writing, University of Technology Sydney
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Research Officer, Gender, Law and Drugs program, La Trobe University
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John Rowe Lecturer in Australian Literature, University of Sydney
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Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney
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PhD Candidate and Casual Academic, The University of Queensland
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Associate Professor in Creative Writing, School of Culture & Communication, The University of Melbourne
