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Miles Franklin Award won by debut novel about a big Australian challenge

This author used his own family story, in his debut novel, to win Australia's top literary gong.

This author used his own family story, in his debut novel, to win Australia's top literary gong. Photo: Transit Lounge

Brutal and yet beautiful. Readings’ St Kilda bookseller A.S Patric’s haunting debut novel Black Rock White City scooped Australia’s premier literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award, at Friday’s opening of the Melbourne Writers Festival.

A haunting evocation of the lives left behind by new arrivals to Australia when civil war shatters their home country, Black Rock White City is a strange and unusual novel that grapples with the major moral dilemma of our time: the refugee crisis. It mesmerises with its emotional complexity and then leaves you bereft once the final page is turned.

Set in Melbourne’s Bayside suburbs, Jovan and Suzana’s marriage is collapsing, haunted by their sacrifices as Serbian refugees, including the loss of their young children in a war-torn tragedy that hangs heavy over all.

While their lives are a mess, she cleans house and he cleans the local hospital.

But strange things are afoot as the mysterious Dr Graffito leaves a macabre message scrawled on the hospital walls that Jovan, once a poet, must scour from existence.

Black Rock White City is much harder to remove from your mind. Rich with complicated characters, it’s a tale of heartfelt family drama, of class, of multiculturalism and also a dark and twisted thriller of sorts.

Patric’s poetic manipulation of language sings, deftly switching from a melancholic beauty found in all the small things, to horror and back again in a heartbeat. Christos Tsiolkas, author of Barracuda and The Slap, dubs it, “bold, mature and compassionate,” on the cover, and it’s well deserved praise.

Patric, whose parents migrated from Serbia in the ‘70s, says the idea behind the book was to, “represent parts of Australian culture that hadn’t been really represented in Australian literature, the working class immigrants from various parts of the world that have come to contribute their lives as well as their energies to Australian culture and society.”

He also said that if he won, he’d feel that he had been brought into the literary conversation Australia is having with itself.

Mission accomplished. His name will be on the tip of every Australian literary lover’s tongue in this now. It’s a wonderful success for his first novel and for small, independent publishing house Transit Lounge.

miles franklin award

The novel garnered high praise from Christos Tsiolkas. Photo: Transit Lounge

The judging panel acknowledged on the night that Black Rock White City was a, “powerful and raw,” account of the migrant experience in Australia that “envelops the reader in one of the great issues of our time.”

The shortlist included Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things, Myfanwy Jones’ Leap, Peggy Frew’s Hope Farm and Lucy Treloar’s Salt Creek.

Patric takes home the $60,000 annual prize established by the will of My Brilliant Career author [Stella] Miles Franklin. It is Australia’s most prestigious literary award.

First awarded in 1957 its remit is to reward the hard work of Australian novelists and foster a vibrant literary culture.

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