Miles Franklin Award Winner 2023

The winner of the 2023 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia's most prestigious literary award, was announced on 25 July 2023. This year the award and its $60,000 prize went to Shankari Shandran for her novel, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens.

Set in the Cinnamon Gardens nursing home in Western Sydney, which serves as a refuge for residents. Many of the residents hail from Sri Lanka and were traumatised by the Sri Lankan Civil War. When a local councillor lodges a complaint against the owners of the nursing home, accusing them of racism, tensions boil over and anti-immigrant sentiments surface. 

The judges said "It treads carefully on contested historical claims, reminding us that horrors forgotten are horrors bound to be repeated, and that reclamation and retelling of history cannot be undertaken without listening to the story-tellers among us.”

Author Shakari Chandran is a lawyer of Tamil heritage, based in Sydney. Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens is her third novel.

I have not read Chai Time, and to be honest it hasn't really been on my radar. There were other titles on the longlist that I was more interested in. But, I have found that the Miles Franklin Award has exposed me to some great writers. I particularly enjoyed Bodies of Light by 2022 winner Jennifer Down. 

Revisiting The Professor

It has taken me an unusually long time to make my way through Charlotte Bronte's The Professor (1857) and almost gave up at several points through the tale. But I have been determined to undertake the #BigBronteReadalong2023 and after my disappointment with Shirley (1849), I hoped that I would be able to find the magic of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) to make my reading worthwhile. 

The Professor is narrated by William Crimsworth, as he tries to establish a career path. Not wanting to join the clergy, as preferred by some in his family, William wishes to work in trade. His elder brother Edward has become highly successful in this field and offers William a position as a clerk in his business. The brothers do not get along, and Edward treats William poorly. William leaves the Yorkshire mill and travels to Brussels to take up a position teaching at a boy's boarding school. After establishing his reputation as a teacher, he is recruited by Mademoiselle Reuter who runs the adjoining girls' school. William falls for Reuter, but soon learns he is in a love triangle. He then turns his romantic attentions to Frances, a teacher that he tutors. 

Charlotte Bronte studied and taught in Brussels in 1842, and used this experience as a foundation for her novel. She later revives these ideas for her novel Villette (1853).

The Professor was Charlotte Bronte's first novel, but she was unable to secure publication until after her death and the success of her other books. Dry and dull, The Professor is lacking the passion, intrigue, and self-exploration of Jane Eyre. It also lacks the compelling characters of Shirley - as challenged as I was with that novel, at least there were characters one could root for. This is a mundane tale, narrated by a boring man, and without any characters to care for, I disengaged. It feels very much like an early draft which would have best been left in a drawer. 

Revisiting Nineteen Eighty-Four

Two books I have been looking forward to reading this year are Anna Funder's Wifedom (published July 2023), about George Orwell's wife Eileen, and Sandra Newman's Julia (published October 2023) which retells Orwell's Nineteen Eight-Four (1949) from the perspective of the female character. I have pre-ordered both, and with Wifedom on its way to my mailbox, I thought it would be wise to re-read Nineteen Eighty-Four. 

I first read George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in the 1980s when I was too young to fully comprehend the tale. I re-read it in the early 1990s when I was studying political science and had a better understanding of totalitarianism. By the time I read it again in the early 2000s, the internet age was upon us, so tele-screens and the cult of personality added deeper meaning to the novel. Now, in 2023 I have re-read it as an adult who has travelled the world and seen the consequences of oppressive regimes and the novel's impact is even more chilling, especially in the Trumpian post-truth era. This time I was also more keenly aware of the character of Julia as I deliberately read with her in mind.

The plot is well-known. In a dystopian world ravaged by perpetual war, the globe is shaped by three totalitarian super-states. In London (part of Oceania) Winston Smith is an Outer Party member who works at the Ministry of Truth. His job is to rewrite historical records and destroy the past. Spies are everywhere, with ever-observant telescreens keeping people in line. Winston becomes a 'thought-criminal', purchasing a diary to secretly record his thoughts about the regime. He then commences a covert affair with Julia, a young co-worker, putting both of them at risk. The couple meet O'Brien who purports to be part of The Brotherhood, a counter-revolutionary, but they are uncertain whether he can be trusted.

Nineteen Eight-Four is riddled with phrases that have become common parlance. Its themes of nationalism, surveillance, classism, and censorship resonate and are terrifying given the current state of the world.

I often read dystopian / speculative fiction and have written extensively about my enjoyment of this genre. Nineteen Eighty-Four is among my favourite novels, one that gives the reader something new on each re-read. On this occasion, I listened to the audio book performed by Stephen Fry as I read along, which really enhanced my experience of the novel. No doubt, in another decade I will read it once more.