UQP titles longlisted for 2024 Miles Franklin Literary Award

We're thrilled to announce that two UQP titles have been longlisted for the 2024 Miles Franklin Literary Award:

Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko

The Sitter by Angela O'Keeffe

The Miles Franklin Literary Award is an annual literary prize awarded to 'a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases.' The Miles Franklin is Australia’s most prestigious literature prize, established through the will of My Brilliant Career author, Stella Miles Franklin.⁠

According to the judging panel,

“The 2024 longlist engages profoundly with the historical, cultural, philosophical, artistic and environmental concerns of present-day Australia, spanning a breadth of narrative forms and literary styles. The list includes powerful stories of the legacies of colonisation and dispossession, and the strength, richness and humour of First Nation responses.

Historical novels explore hitherto untold and unexpected stories of First Nations contact with settler-colonials as well as the multinational, multicultural roots of present-day Australian society. There are elegiac explorations of the diverse historical, political, economic, environmental, and ecological drivers of immigration. Some contemporary novels engage experimentally with ekphrastic responses to international poetry, music, art and artists. Others provide insightful portraits of individual and imaginative responses to mental health and present some highly unusual, and thought-provoking, vignettes of life during the pandemic.

The tyranny of distance often ascribed to Australian literature is challenged by these novels that span generations and geo-political spaces.”

The 2024 judges are Richard Neville, Mitchell Librarian of the State Library of NSW and Chair; literary scholar, A/Prof Jumana Bayeh; literary scholar and translator, Dr Mridula Nath Chakraborty; book critic, Dr James Ley; and author and literary scholar, Prof Hsu-Ming Teo.

The shortlist will be announced in June, with winners announced in July.