Ten outstanding novels recognised in prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award 2025 longlist

Perpetual, the trustee of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, has unveiled this year’s longlist, featuring ten remarkable novels that offer a kaleidoscopic portrayal of Australian life in all its diversity. The selected works, which include two former winners and two past short-listees, celebrate the talent and creativity of authors from across the nation and set the stage for an exciting journey toward the prestigious award.  

The Award celebrates novels of the highest literary merit that tell stories about Australian life. The winner will receive $60,000.

The 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award longlist is:

According to the judging panel, “The limits of novelistic expression continue to be challenged in Australian letters. This year’s field of Australian novels judged for the Miles Franklin Literary Award encompassed a sometimes dizzying variety of writing. From political fables to picaresque counter-histories, from taut Covid parables to heart-warming family chronicles, Australian life in all its multiplicity is on display in these novels. The novels enlarge our sense of what it is to be Australian as a diasporic nation with an ancient and living human history. Pulsing through these works are the memories and imaginaries of medieval China, modern India, Moana Pasifika and the Indigenous experience of colonisation. Settings shifted from Sydney’s outer suburbs to Melbourne’s inner city, from the Adelaide Hills to the state forests of the Southern Highlands.

The novels also straddle the phases of life, depicting the experience of young children and the existential crises of aging. Writers were unwilling to take the form of the novel for granted and showed a restlessness and inventiveness that opened up our reading in startling ways. Duelling timelines, unexplained discontinuities, temporal uncertainty, and absurdist comedy all worked through these novels to strip the patina from everyday life. There was also a marked singularity in the voices of narration. More than anything, it was the authenticity of these voices, with all their ticks and textures, that spoke to us judges.”

The 2025 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; literary scholar and author Prof Tony Hughes-d’Aeth; and author and literary scholar, Prof Hsu-Ming Teo.

Last year, the Miles Franklin Literary Award was awarded to Alexis Wright for her novel, Praiseworthy (2024).

For further information about the Miles Franklin Literary Award: http://www.milesfranklin.com.au/