Miles Franklin Award Winner 2025

The winner of the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia's most prestigious literary award, was announced on 24 July 2025. This year the award and its $60,000 prize went to Siang Lu for his novel, Ghost Cities.

Ghost Cities is set across multiple timelines. In modern Sydney, Xiang Lu is fired from his job as a translator at the Chinese Consulate. He doesn't speak the language and had been relying on Google Translate to do his work. He begins posting online as #BadChinese and is contacted by filmmaker Baby Bao who takes him to a film set in the fictional ghost city of Port Man Tao. Bao has populated the city with actors who inhabit a dystopian world, peppered with ancient Chinese myths. In a parallel narrative, in ancient China, a paranoid Emperor clings to power. 

The judges said "Siang Lu’s Ghost Cities is at once a grand farce and a haunting meditation on diaspora. Sitting within a tradition in Australian writing that explores failed expatriation and cultural fraud, Lu’s novel is also something strikingly new. In Ghost Cities, the Sino-Australian imaginary appears as a labyrinthine film-set, where it is never quite clear who is performing and who is directing. Shimmering with satire and wisdom, and with an absurdist bravura, Ghost Cities is a genuine landmark in Australian literature.”

Brisbane based author Siang Lu actually completed the novel a decade ago but had a hard time getting it published. I bet there are a lot of publishers regretting their decision to reject his manuscript! His previous novel The Whitewash (2023) won the Abia Audiobook of the year. 

I have not read this novel, and am not entirely sure it is for me. But the premise sounds intriguing, especially the part about Xiang's 'translation' work.