Winton's Fourth Miles Franklin

Tim Winton has won Australia's Miles Franklin Award - for the fourth time! (The first, when he was just 24 years old.)

Breath, a novel about surfing, was described by the judges as :

... a searing document about masculinity, about risk, and about young people's desire to push the limits.

(You can also hear Winton reading extracts from the novel.)

He delivered his acceptance speech via video link and launched a passionate defence of Australian writers and literary culture which is likely to be under threat if proposed changes to copyright are made law. (For more on the issue of parallel importation, see this piece by Peter Carey.)

Winton beat off some very strong competition :

Murray Bail - The Pages
Richard Flanagan - Waiting
Louis Nowra - Ice
Christos Tsiolkas - The Slap

all of which you can find out more about in Jasons Stegers's neatly named Five Males and a Miles in The Age.

Booker Post-Mortemising

The post-mortemising of the Man Booker longlist has been playing out on the book pages and on the Booker bulletin boards, and these are so far the biggest controversies.

There were howls of protest of course for the novels readers feel should have been listed but weren't - the loudest for The Spare Room by Helen Garner (none more so than Canongate publisher Jamie Byng), and Tim Winton's Breath.

Then, over and over there's the same protest about Tom Rob Smith's Child 44 : "But it's a thriller!!"

"So what?" is my response, all that matters is that it measures up in terms of the quality of writing.

I wouldn't say this is the first thriller on the Booker longlist, as Brian Moore's 1990 shortlisted Lies of Silence fits the bill very nicely ... except that it wasn't called a thriller, because to call it a thriller would be to pander to the masses who aren't up to litfic.

I argued against such snobbish pigeon-holing here and I'm already grateful to Child 44 for widening the conversation.

Update 9/8/08 :

Scott Pack's post on this year's Booker kerfuffle is well worth reading.