Source : the age
A former Australian diplomat shortlisted for the prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award has described his selection as “miraculous”, after his debut novel was plucked from literary obscurity to compete for the country’s top fiction prize.
Konrad Muller’s My Heart at Evening is his first novel and the first book published by new Tasmanian micro-press Evercreech Editions.
The shortlist for the $60,000 prize also includes Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Discipline, the first fiction work by the Australian-Palestinian academic whose presence at Sydney and Newcastle writers festival sparked fierce debates over free speech and political censorship. Her axing from Adelaide Writers’ Week triggered an authors’ walk out and the event’s cancellation. She then went on to win the People’s Choice Award at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards in February.
Judges said Discipline was both a “taut political thriller and a humane meditation on the way that Australia must continue to find ways of working through agonising conflicts that may seem far away but in which Australia and Australians are intimately entangled”.
Muller and Abdel-Fattah are part of a diverse group of four first-time nominees on this year’s six-name shortlist. Award judges said this year’s Miles Franklin shortlist showcases the capacity of the Australian novel to grapple with the most vexing and profound questions of our time.
“Grand and intimate, these novels sing the Australian experience into new shapes,” they said.
The field includes the first published novel of Steve MinOn, a former advertising copywriter and restaurateur, alongside second novels by Sean Wilson (You Must Remember This) and Omar Musa for Fierceland which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. Former Miles Franklin long-listee, Josephine Rowe is shortlisted for Little World.
To go from an unreleased manuscript to the shortlist for the $60,000 prize Muller says feels “doubly unbelievable” after a “long apprenticeship” of “writing a handful of books that never saw the light of day”.
Muller’s My Heart at Evening centres on events leading up to the 1832 suicide of Henry Hellyer, the surveyor-general of the Van Diemen’s Land Company. Muller stumbled onto the historical account of Hellyer’s death after moving to northern Tasmania where he took over a family vineyard in 2016.
After a decade working for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade – with postings to Cairo and Tel Aviv – he left the diplomatic service to balance his career with his partner’s work as a human rights lawyer.
Muller wrote his book in a sudden six-month burst of energy in 2022. Muller used a strict, physical writing routine inspired by Ernest Hemingway: waking up at 5am, drinking two coffees, and writing everything longhand with a pencil on foolscap paper while standing up, before typing it into a computer later that day.
“I once read that Hemingway used to write like that. I found that it also worked for me as a method; it aided fluency and fairly rapid composition,” Muller said.
Wilson’s second novel is an intimate look at dementia, prompted by his grandmother’s experiences. “When the person living with dementia reaches a certain point of cognitive decline, it becomes impossible for them to tell us what it’s like to be them, to be experiencing dementia,” he said.
“So, we’re locked out, and we have to rely on our instincts and imagination. That’s what makes it rich ground for story – we really need fiction to try to understand and empathise with a person who can’t tell us what it’s like to be them.”
Brisbane-based first-time novelist Steve MinOn said his only goal had been to be published. “This is just wild. In life, I tend to always find myself caught in that awkward place between fighting, crying or laughing. I never really know how to react, and so that may be why First Name Second Name became a strange mix of darkness and humour.
“The protagonist is a walking corpse, but in traditional Chinese mythology he would be known as a jiāngshī, or a ‘Chinese hopping vampire’.
“To the story, he represents what it’s like to be caught between two worlds, between life and the death, but also between his Scottish and Chinese heritage and between living up to the expectations of his parents and being true to his sexuality.”
The winner will be announced in Sydney on August 5.
