The agony and the ecstasy: What it takes to win the Miles Franklin
When accepting the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award for Ghost Stories, a highly imaginative novel that draws on Chinese history to explore the absurdity of modern life, Brisbane author Siang Lu gave an honest appraisal of the struggles that are part and parcel of the literary world.
Eleven years ago in 2014 when my first short story was published in the journal Southerly – a story that, as it happens, was an excerpt of what was to be Ghost Cities – my friend Harry and I went to the Kinokuniya (Japanese bookseller), to look for it.
And we found it. Next to Homer and Borges and Marquez and John Milton. We folded our arms and we stood there, beaming, looking at the shelf, looking at each other, barely able to contain ourselves. My name wasn’t on the front cover of the journal but there it was – a book, in book form, with my words inside. On the shelf labelled “Literature”.
I’ll tell you all a secret. This book, Ghost Cities, was completed 10 years ago, in 2015. It was the same book then, give or take, as it is now. At the time, no literary agency in Australia wanted it.
All told, this book has been rejected more than 200 times, both in Australia and abroad, where I was represented for six years by an American agent. During that time this manuscript and two additional manuscripts I produced did not sell. Then we parted ways, with me still not a published author.
Six years. I was confused as to how it had not worked out for me. Unsure if I would continue.
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This book, and its difficult journey into being, taught me how to be a man
I used to print my rejections and Blu Tack them on the glass pane between my office and my bedroom. My youngest child, Madeleine, had just been born – she is nine now – and she would nap on that big bed while I worked and kept an eye on her.
The rejections kept piling up. Eventually, they grew so numerous that I could no longer see through the glass, into the bedroom where my daughter slept. This was a hard moment for me. Because, if things continued in this manner, and without a change in perspective, I would quite literally lose sight of the important thing.
This book, and its difficult journey into being, taught me how to be a man. Because I finally understood in that moment how to make sense of my failures. Not in retrospect, a decade later, delivered from the safety of the stage having won the big award, but only right in that moment, looking through the glass at my daughter, at myself, when I decided I would continue writing because to not write would be worse.
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We love to hear stories of failure, but only from people who have become successful. And I wish that that Siang from that moment back then could speak in front of you instead of me, because it would mean more, I think, to hear it from him, wholeheartedly, having learned the difficult wisdom – that one must accept failure, embrace failure, make a friend of it.
We are fools for art. But I am glad to have been a fool. To have persisted in my foolishness. Am still a fool today.
And if I am perfectly honest with you, I fear success more than I do failure. I have not figured out how to embrace success, how to be its friend. The Miles Franklin Literary Award is a gift that is so meaningful to me as to be currently beyond meaning, beyond words. I suspect it will take me the rest of my life to reckon with what it all has meant.
I want to thank my wife, Yuan, my family, the team at UQP, my publisher Aviva Tuffield, my agent and dear friend Brendan Fredericks, the Miles Franklin Literary Trust, the Copyright Agency, Perpetual, the judges Richard Neville, Jumana Bayeh, Mridula Chakraborty, Tony Hughes-d’Aeth and Hsu-Ming Teo, and all those who have been involved in organising this event.
I want to honour my fellow long listers and short listers: Melanie Cheng, Yumna Kassab, Raeden Richardson, Tim Winton, Brian Castro, Michelle de Kretser, Winnie Dunn, Julie Janson and Fiona McFarlane. It has been the honour of a lifetime to have been named among their cohort.
Finally, I did not lose sight of the important things. The art, the discipline, and my family who are with me tonight – my mother, my father, who, legend has it, came up with the title Ghost Cities, my wife Yuan and my children. To my son, James, to my daughter, Madeleine: be kind, be generous, never give up. I love you, and I am proud of you. Thank you.
Ghost Cities by Siang Lu, UQP, $32.99.