Sofie Laguna has won the 2015 Miles Franklin Literary Award for her novel The Eye of the Sheep, about a poor family struggling to cope with a “different and difficult” child.
The Melbourne-based author, whose first adult novel One Foot Wrong was long-listed for the award in 2009, will receive $60,000 in prize money.
Judging panel spokesperson Richard Neville described The Eye of the Sheep, published by Allen & Unwin, as “an extraordinary novel about love and anger, and how sometimes there is little between them”.
The central character is Jimmy Flick, who is not like other kids.
“Jimmy Flick is a character who sees everything, but his manic X-ray perceptions don’t correspond with the way others see his world,” Neville said.
“His older brother understands him some of the time, and his mother almost all of the time, but other people, including his violent father, just see him as difficult.
“Weathering successive waves of domestic violence, Jimmy navigates his way through the shoals of alcohol-abuse, illness and tragedy that swamp his parents, and ultimately reaches the possibility of equanimity.”
He said the power of the novel lay in the “raw, high-energy and coruscating language” with which Laguna described Jimmy’s world.
Laguna started out studying law, but then turned to acting and writing, and has penned plays and numerous children’s books as well as her adult novels.
Female authors dominated this year’s shortlist for the Miles Franklin, which is open to novels strongly presenting “Australian life in any of its phases”. The list also featured Sonya Hartnett’s Golden Boys, Joan London’s The Golden Age, Christine Piper’s After Darkness and Craig Sherborne’s Tree Palace.
Laguna is the fourth woman in a row to win the award, following controversy over all-male shortlists in 2009 and 2011 which sparked the establishment of the female-only Stella Prize. Previous winners have been Evie Wyld, All the Birds Singing (2014), Michelle de Kretser, Questions of Travel (2013), and Anna Funder, All That I Am (2012).
