Novel of grief and trauma wins top literary award
A novel that explores a mother’s steps to support her incarcerated son while attempting to make sense of his horrific crime has taken out Australia’s pre-eminent literary prize.
Author Amanda Lohrey: "Australian literature is not an add on, a mere diversion, a sideshow to the main game. It sits at the heart of our national culture." Photo: Richard Bugg
Tasmanian author Amanda Lohrey was yesterday named winner of the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award for her seventh novel, The Labyrinth.
Lohrey beat Booker Prize-winner Aravind Adiga (Amnesty), Robbie Arnott (The Rain Heron), Daniel Davis Wood (At the Edge of the Solid World), Andrew Pippos (Lucky’s) and Madeleine Watts (The Inland Sea) to win the $60,000 prize.
The annual award for a novel of “the highest literary merit” that presents “Australian life in any of its phases” was established in 1957 further to the will of writer Stella Miles Franklin (My Brilliant Career).
Past winners include Thea Astley, Peter Carey, Michelle de Kretser, Elizabeth Jolley, Patrick White and Tim Winton.
Chair of the five-person judging panel and Mitchell Librarian at the State Library of NSW, Richard Neville, said that Lohrey’s “elegiac” novel was “soaked in sadness”.
“It is a beautifully-written reflection on the conflicts between parents and children, men and women, and the value and purpose of creative work,” he said.
Accepting the award, Lohrey noted: “It’s a tremendous honour to be associated with the remarkable Stella Miles Franklin, one of the great Australian mavericks.
“Awards like the Miles Franklin are so valuable because in attracting public attention they help Australian literature to flourish, and to compete with imported books.
“Australian literature is not an add-on, a mere diversion, a sideshow to the main game. It sits at the heart of our national culture.”
The Labyrinth is narrated by its protagonist, Erica Marsden. Her artist son has been jailed for homicidal negligence after setting fire to his studio and causing the death of five neighbours in what was described as “a monstrous act of egotism” by a judge who presided over his subsequent trial.
Relocating to a small coastal community not far from the steel and concrete complex in which her violent, seemingly unfathomable son is being held, Erica recalls the words of her late father: “The cure for many ills is to build something.”
Reckoning with her own past while making timid inroads with her new neighbours, she feels the urge to construct a labyrinth – the idea of which has long bewitched her – next to the beach shack she has purchased.
“The maze is a challenge to the brain (how smart are you?), the labyrinth to the heart (will you surrender?),” Erica meditates.
“The labyrinth is a model of reversible destiny.”
The novel, which deals with intergenerational trauma, the burden of grief and the use and misuse of art, is a case of third-time-lucky for the novelist, short story writer and essayist, who was shortlisted for Camille’s Bread in 1996 and longlisted for The Philosopher’s Doll in 2005.
Camille’s Bread also won the 1996 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal and the 1996 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction. Meanwhile, Lohrey’s short story collection Reading Madame Bovary picked up two gongs at the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards in 2011.
In 2012 Lohrey was named recipient of the Patrick White Literary Award, which confers the annual prize on a writer who has produced a significant body of work but whose contribution to Australian letters may not have been sufficiently recognised. – AAP
Read a guide to all the 2021 Miles Franklin shortlisted books on The Conversation.
