The Trust Company and the 2013 judging panel have announced an all-female shortlist for this year's Miles Franklin Literary Award.
Richard Neville, Mitchell Librarian, State Library of New South Wales spoke on the five novels on behalf of the jury, saying:
"The five novels in the 2013 Miles Franklin Shortlist are at a surface level all about family - the searching for their comfort, the crises when they fail, escaping their pervasive grasp, or the despair when they do not seem possible - but more deeply these books write about the intersection of people's lives with national, indeed international, stories and ideas. Each approaches their subject from very different perspectives, but all deliver complex, engrossing narratives which persist long after the books are closed!"
Australia's oldest literary awards will announce the winner on Wednesday June 19 in Canberra at the National library of Australia. The winner will receive $60,000 for the novel judged to be of the highest literary merit. All the shortlisted authors will also receive $5,000 from the Copyright Agency's Cultural Fund, a long term partner of the Mile Franklin Literary Award.
The Trust Company's 2013 mission for the awards is to engage the audience by producing exclusive reviews of longlist novels and creating the Miles of Reading Challenge site on the official Miles Franklin Twitter account.
The shorlist authours for this years Miles Franklin Literary Award are:
Romy Ash - Floundering
Anah Faulkner - The Beloved
Michelle de Kretser - Questions of Travel
Drusilla Modjeska - The Mountain
Carrie Tiffany - Mateship with Birds
