Guardian
Sofie Laguna (above) has been awarded the 2015 Miles Franklin literary award, Australia’s most prestigious books prize, for her novel The Eye of the Sheep.
Shortlisted in 2009 for her debut adult novel, One Foot Wrong, Laguna took top honours this year for her story of a family struggling to cope with their young son who has learning difficulties. The book is published by Allen and Unwin.
The $60,000 prize was announced at a ceremony in Melbourne on Tuesday night. Named after Stella “Miles” Franklin , author of My Brilliant Career, the award was established in 1954 with a bequest from her will. A tearful Laguna thanked the “visionary and generous” writer in her winner’s speech.
“The Eye of the Sheep is an extraordinary novel about love and anger, and how sometimes there is little between them,” said Richard Neville, state librarian of New South Wales and chair of the Miles Franklin judging panel.
Neville said the book’s power lay in the “raw, high-energy and coruscating language” that its central character uses to describe his world.
“Jimmy Flick is a character who sees everything, but his manic x-ray perceptions don’t correspond with the way others see his world. His older brother understands him some of the time, and his mother almost all of the time, but other people, including his violent father, just see him as difficult,” said Neville.
Ed: Incredibly the Tasmanian writer ( Richard Flanagan ) adjudged world’s best in English – for the first time this year The Man Booker Prize was opened to all writers in English – has never won the Miles Franklin … despite years of entering novels; perhaps the most surprising his lack of ‘success’ with Gould’s Book of Fish for which he won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (2002) …
