Josephine Wilson has been named the winner of this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award for her second novel, Extinctions!

Humorous and poignant, Extinctions is a story about all kinds of extinction – natural, racial, national and personal – and what we can do to prevent them.

The Miles Franklin judges say Extinctions is a ‘compassionate and unapologetically intelligent novel that explores ageing, adoption, grief and remorse, empathy and self-centredness’.

Award-winning author Charlotte Wood also praised this novel’s ‘cool intelligent wit and piercingly observant examination of ageing, time, interracial adoption, family, aesthetics and engineering’. She said: ‘Just when you think you know what this book is, it gives you the slip and surprises you again.’

First awarded in 1957, the Miles Franklin Literary Award is presented annually to a novel of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases. As the winner, Wilson will receive $60,000 in prize money.

You can find out more about the Miles Franklin Literary Award here.