For those of you who are not from Australia or are not a big follower of literary awards, in Australia there are two main literary awards: The Miles Franklin Award and the Prime Minister's Literary Award.
The photo above is a photo of Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, the woman after whom the Miles Franklin Award is named. She is probably most famous for her novels My Brilliant Career and My Career Goes Bung. You can read my reviews of these books by clicking on their title.
The Miles Franklin Award was established in 1954 and is awarded to the best Australian novel of the year which is actually about Australian life.
On the other hand, there is the new Prime Minister's Literary Awards, which were established recently in 2008.
I always pay attention to The Miles Franklin Award each award and have also tried to see who is winning the Prime Minister's Literary Awards as well.
What I didn't realise was that there is some current discussion about the validity of the Prime Minister's Literary Awards, particularly in light of funding cuts to the more established Miles Franklin Awards. I found this discussion very interesting. An Australian author, Alex Miller, has been arguing that the Miles Franklin Award has slowly been losing its prestige over the years, with funding being reduced and authors taking the awards less and less seriously. He argues that more government funding should be spent on revitalising these awards, rather than establishing new awards all together.
I haven't really done enough research about the issue to hold a definite opinion I could back up in an argument, but from having read some newspaper articles about what Miller has to say, I can certainly see his point. If it is indeed that authors have stopped taking the Miles Franklin seriously, to the extent that they don't even attend to claim their prizes, that would be very sad and I would agree that more effort and maybe funding needs to be committed to this prize.
Here are the links the articles that I have referred to:
For those of you interested, here is the link to the Miles Franklin Award 2010 short list.
Originally posted 28 April 2010 Page Turners
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