The 2024 longlist for the Miles Franklin Literary Award has been announced! The Miles Franklin Literary Award celebrates novels of the highest literary merit that tell stories about Australian life, shining a light on some of the country’s most talented writers. The winner receives $60,000.

Below are the ten longlisted titles:

• Only Sound Remains by Hossein Asgari
• Wall by Jen Craig
• Strangers at the Port by Lauren Aimee Curtis
• Anam by André Dao
• The Bell of the World by Gregory Day
• Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko
• The Sitter by Angela O'Keeffe
• Hospital by Sanya Rushdi
• Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
• Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright

According to the judging panel, 'The 2024 longlist engages profoundly with the historical, cultural, philosophical, artistic and environmental concerns of present-day Australia, spanning a breadth of narrative forms and literary styles. The list includes powerful stories of the legacies of colonisation and dispossession, and the strength, richness and humour of First Nation responses. 

Historical novels explore hitherto untold and unexpected stories of First Nations contact with settler-colonials as well as the multinational, multicultural roots of present-day Australian society. There are elegiac explorations of the diverse historical, political, economic, environmental, and ecological drivers of immigration. Some contemporary novels engage experimentally with ekphrastic responses to international poetry, music, art and artists. Others provide insightful portraits of individual and imaginative responses to mental health and present some highly unusual, and thought-provoking, vignettes of life during the pandemic. 

The tyranny of distance often ascribed to Australian literature is challenged by these novels that span generations and geo-political spaces.'

This year's Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlist will be announced in June. Find out more information on the award here, as well as some of the previous winners.