Siang Lu has been named the 2025 winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award for his bold and unique novel, Ghost Cities!
The winner of the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award
Ghost Cities
Siang Lu
Ghost Cities – inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China – follows multiple narratives, including one in which a young man named Xiang is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney's Chinese Consulate after it is discovered he doesn't speak a word of Chinese and has been relying entirely on Google Translate for his work.
How is his relocation to one such ghost city connected to a parallel odyssey in which an ancient Emperor creates a thousand doubles of Himself? Or where a horny mountain gains sentience? Or a tale in which every book in the known Empire is destroyed – then recreated, page by page and book by book – all in the name of love and art?
The 2025 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.'
Ghost Cities is Lu's second novel, and this was his first time being shortlisted for the Miles Franklin. On winning the award, Lu said:
Established through the will of My Brilliant Career author, Stella Miles Franklin, for the 'advancement, improvement and betterment of Australian literature,' the Miles Franklin Literary Award recognises a novel of 'the highest literary merit' that presents 'Australian life in any of its phases.' Lu will receive $60,000 in prize money as the 2025 winner.
You can read more about the Miles Franklin Literary Award here, or revist the other wonderful books on the 2025 shortlist.
