Thursday, January 28, 2021
Literary Reviews
  • Home
  • OUR BOOK SHOP
    • Erotic Novels
    • BEST SELLING BOOKS
    • Science Fiction Books
    • Business and Management
    • Computing and IT
    • Cooking
    • Education
    • Religion & Spirituality
    • Self Help
    • Teens & Young Adults
  • Literary Review
  • Literature
  • Book Writing
  • Kindle Publishing
  • Romantic
  • Science Fiction
  • Cooking
  • MORE
    • Erotic
    • Mysteries, Thrillers
    • Literary Themes
    • Business and Management
    • Literary Agents
    • Literary Devices
    • New Books
    • Self Help
    • Teens & Young Adults Novels
    • Computing and IT
    • Education
    • Religion & Spirituality Novels
No Result
View All Result
Literary Reviews
Home Literary Themes

Miles Franklin Literary Award won by Wiradjuri author Tara June Winch for her novel The Yield

admin by admin
July 17, 2020
in Literary Themes
0
Miles Franklin Literary Award won by Wiradjuri author Tara June Winch for her novel The Yield
0
SHARES
2
VIEWS
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

Related posts

The Literary Fiction to Look Out for in 2021

The Literary Fiction to Look Out for in 2021

January 27, 2021
Gary Bateman returns to the literary limelight with the release of ‘Reflections in the Mirror’

Gary Bateman returns to the literary limelight with the release of ‘Reflections in the Mirror’

January 27, 2021


Wiradjuri author Tara June Winch has won the Miles Franklin Literary Award — Australia’s most prestigious writing prize, and one of its richest at $60,000 — for her novel The Yield.

Key facts about the award

  • The Miles Franklin Award was first awarded in 1957
  • It was established in the will of author Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin (author of My Brilliant Career)
  • It distinguishes a novel “of the highest literary merit” which presents “Australian life in any of its phases”
  • Past winners include Patrick White, Ruth Park, Thea Astley, Tim Winton, Peter Carey and David Ireland
  • The 2019 judging panel is chaired by State Library of NSW’s Mitchell Librarian Richard Neville, and comprised of author and literary critic Dr Bernadette Brennan, journalist Murray Waldren, author and book critic Dr Melinda Harvey, and bookseller Lindy Jones.

Winch is the fourth Indigenous Australian author to win the prize, following last year’s winner Melissa Lucashenko (for Too Much Lip), Kim Scott (who shared the prize in 2000 for Benang and won again in 2011 with That Deadman Dance) and Alexis Wright (for Carpentaria, 2007).

Speaking to the ABC from France, where she has lived since 2011, the author said, “It feels wrong to win the big ones, and these types of awards should be split down the longlist when we’re in such economically unstable times.”

Also shortlisted:

  • The White Girl by Tony Birch
  • Exploded View by Carrie Tiffany
  • No One by John Hughes
  • Islands by Peggy Frew
  • The Returns by Philip Salom

The Yield shares many themes in common with Lucashenko’s Miles Franklin-winning novel, including language, colonisation, dispossession, the environment and intergenerational trauma.

Both stories are about young women returning home for the funeral of a patriarch, to find their ancestral lands under threat from mining companies. Both novels feature a missing sister, whose absence haunts the protagonist.

Winch said: “It’s shocking that it [The Yield] won the year after Melissa [Lucashenko] — I just didn’t think it would. You know, the track record has been, oh, wait a few years between Indigenous authors to give them a prize.”

A call for respect

2020 is the first year in the Miles Franklin Literary Award’s history that two Indigenous authors have been shortlisted, and Winch said in her acceptance speech that she felt Tony Birch’s shortlisted novel The White Girl deserved to share the accolade with her.

Accepting the award, Winch urged “all of us to demand change, for the sake of our past, our present and our possible future”.

She talked about the meaning of respect.

“Yindyamarra is our [Wiradjuri] word for respect; it means to be equal in respectful ways; to be flowing back and forth between two shores; it means kindness, gentleness, respect.”

“I don’t see respect like this in the Australian vernacular. I see empty words that don’t go past the teeth.

“Because now, this year, we as Australians let the mining companies blow up sacred sites. We as Australians let First Nations children as young as 10 fill the prisons in the Northern Territory.

“We as Australians have not brought to justice one officer of the law in the deaths in custody of 430-something Indigenous men and women who have died in custody.

“We as Australians do not learn the true history of the so-called fair and lucky country we inhabit.”

Part of a national conversation

The Miles Franklin caps off an incredible run of success for Winch, who also took home three awards at this year’s NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, including Book of the Year.

Reflecting on the importance of winning these prizes as a platform for change, she said: “In some ways it’s like speaking into an echo chamber. Readers are on the bandwagon already, in a sense.

“But then they talk to their family and friends, hopefully, about these issues, and it adds to a groundswell of awakening and learning, and conversation.”

“It’s a tiny little piece of a wider and greater conversation that I think the country is having in the last few months.”

A microcosm of Australia

The Yield follows a 30-something woman, August, as she returns home from overseas to her small town of Massacre Plains for the funeral of her grandfather, Albert.

Her family home is about to be demolished for a new tin mine and she’s trying to find a dictionary that “Poppy” Albert was writing before he died.

Listen to Tony Birch and Tara June Winch

The writers appeared on a panel at RN’s Big Weekend of Books.

Read more

The book refracts Winch’s vision of past, present and future Australia through three characters, or voices, in alternating chapters: August, her grandfather Albert Gondiwindi (through excerpts from his Wiradjuri-language dictionary), and a 19th-century missionary, Reverend Greenleaf (through his letters to the British Society of Ethnography in 1915).

In the book, 500 acres of land around the fictional town of Massacre Plains, situated on the fictional Murrumby River, stands in for the whole of Australia as Winch digs down into layers of history.

A personal story

The setting of The Yield is informed by the author’s own experience of her ancestral lands: Wiradjuri country in north-west New South Wales.

Although she grew up near Wollongong, saltwater country, the family travelled to visit relatives, particularly a property near Lightning Ridge.

She describes, as a young woman, having a “desire to understand how I related to a place that I had never grown up in”.

During the writing of The Yield, across almost a decade, she travelled frequently back to Wiradjuri country and much of the novel was written at Booranga Writers’ Retreat near Wagga Wagga in New South Wales.

“Sometimes I’d drive for hours and hours around, and drive on to people’s farms … Of course they thought I was mad, I’d say ‘I’m a writer, can I talk to you about farming?’ Because there’s so much farming in this book and I had no idea about farming.”

The author, a young woman with long brown hair and brown eyes, standing in front of a window.
The author is currently working on a novel set in the Swiss Alps.(Supplied)

She also undertook research from France, watching bird-watching videos on YouTube “just to listen to the bush”.

“Sometimes I’d call my Nana and get her to describe the air, stuff like that.”

Winch’s family also informed The Yield, as she told ABC RN’s Kate Evans in April: “Nana Elsie is my Nana. Poppy is a mix of my grandfather and the cheeky storytelling of my dad. He is also my own inner voice.”

Indigenous women

The Gondiwindis are a strong matriarchal family, with grandmother Elsie presiding over the household, and her daughters — August’s aunts — coming together to organise Poppy Albert’s funeral.

The warmth, resilience and humour of these women set the tone for the family.

“Strong females are often at the centre of our novels because Indigenous matriarchs often hold families and communities together,” says Winch.

“At the same time, their bodies are made void. Either by being ‘maternal and sexless’ or as ‘exotic sexual objects’.”

Winch says: “Reading Indigenous women’s own stories is vital to hearing a representation from the sea of unheard and ignored voices.

“That Jedda [August’s sister] is missing in the novel, yet the community and country don’t continue searching for her, speaks to the murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls globally.”

The balm of language

The seed of The Yield was sown back in 2004, when Winch was researching her debut novel, Swallow the Air. In the course of that, she revisited Wiradjuri country and took part in a language workshop — where she was given a copy of the Wiradjuri dictionary compiled by Uncle Stan Grant and Dr John Rudder.

The Yield by Tara June Winch book cover featuring a flock of brolgas dancing in the sky
Why are the brolgas dancing? There’s a story in that, in Tara June Winch’s The Yield.(Supplied: Penguin)
Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume.

She describes it as a profound moment: “It affected me so much when I discovered it [that language]. It felt like such a balm, and a repaired cultural link.”

“And I found it wasn’t just me who was affected: it’s such a great rehabilitation tool, it’s such a healing tool for those of the Stolen Generation, reconnecting back with their families and their land, where they were taken from.

“And I think it’s a really accessible, respectful way for all Australians to rectify the shameful sense of nationhood that we have.

“There’s a real discomfort in the way mainstream Australia relates to its black history … it’s never reached a communion, and I think language is a really effective, easy way to do it.”

Winch would like all Australians to learn their local Indigenous language, from early school years.

“It would change our future generations; there needs to be understanding and a sense of belonging — reciprocal belonging.”

Writing in lockdown

Winch lives in the countryside near Nantes, and describes a lockdown experience familiar to many Australians: working from home and juggling domestic life, writing, and parenting a teen who, she says, has had just six at-school days in the last six months.

The author was intending to be in Australia in May for the Sydney Writers Festival, which was subsequently cancelled.

“Emotionally, it hurt to be away from my family when there were plans to see them … but you just get on with it,” says Winch.

A new novel

Winch is currently working on her next novel, set in the Swiss Alps.

“It’s a really white setting, but it’s about race.”

She says she is looking forward to a more productive period of writing, going forward.

“This actually feels like the beginning of my career now.

Join the ABC Book Club

The colourful logo for the ABC Book Club, featuring flying books around text.

Do you love books? So do we! Join our Facebook group to talk books — with each other, with specialists from across the ABC and with your favourite authors.

Read more

“I’m not going to have that span of a decade of not producing a book, because I’ve got a teenager now who doesn’t want me around as much, so I’ve got some time. I’ve got a writing desk, which I didn’t have for a decade. All these things make a difference. Being financially stable.”

Winch knows about financial precarity; when her first novel was published, aged 22, she had been waiting tables and washing dishes.

“I’ve said before, the years I was my least creative were the years I was my least financially stable. However if there is ever a person that knows how to be poor, it is the writer, we can make money stretch.”

Tags: AuthorAwardFranklinJuneliteraryMilesTaraWinchWiradjuriwonyield
Previous Post

The Best Dirty Films On Netflix UK

Next Post

My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU Climax! DVD/Blu-ray to Come with Sequel Novel

Next Post
My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU Climax! DVD/Blu-ray to Come with Sequel Novel

My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU Climax! DVD/Blu-ray to Come with Sequel Novel

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

RECOMMENDED NEWS

Selena Gomez To Front Quarantine Cooking Series For HBO Max – Deadline

Selena Gomez To Front Quarantine Cooking Series For HBO Max – Deadline

7 months ago
Enabling remote whole-body control with 5G edge computing

Enabling remote whole-body control with 5G edge computing

4 months ago
Tata Literature Live: Chomsky-Prashad discussion cancelled hours before event

Tata Literature Live: Chomsky-Prashad discussion cancelled hours before event

2 months ago
The Best Spices for Home Cooking, According to Chefs

The Best Spices for Home Cooking, According to Chefs

7 months ago

Products

  • Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century £12.04
  • Boy at the Top of the Mountain £6.18
  • Spelling Ages 5-6: KS1 English Home Learning and School Resources from the Publisher of Revision Practice Guides… £2.99
  • Humble Math – 100 Days of Telling the Time – Practice Reading Clocks: Ages 7-9, Reproducible Math Drills with Answers… £3.98
  • Her Best Friend's Daughter £0.79

BROWSE BY CATEGORIES

  • Book Writing
  • Business and Management
  • Computing and IT
  • Cooking Books
  • Education
  • Erotic
  • Kindle Publishing
  • Literary Agents
  • Literary Devices
  • Literary Review
  • Literary Themes
  • Literature
  • Mysteries, Thrillers & Suspense
  • New Books
  • Religion & Spirituality
  • Romantic Novels
  • Science Fiction
  • Self Help

RELATED PRODUCTS

  • Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical (Ancient World) £25.54
  • Compute-IT: Student's Book 3 - Computing for KS3 £15.34
  • Gus (Bar 28 Book 1) £2.99
  • Computers For Seniors For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech)) £13.57
  • Science Encyclopedia: Atom Smashing, Food Chemistry, Animals, Space, and More! (National Geographic Kids) £15.61

PRODUCT CATEGORIES

  • Best Selling Books
  • Erotic
  • Science Fiction Books
  • Cooking
  • Business and Management
  • Education
  • Computing and IT
  • Religion & Spirituality
  • Teens & Young Adults
  • Self Help
  • Mysteries, Thrillers & Suspense
  • Romance Books
Literary Reviews

Follow us on social media:

Recent News

  • 10 Best Romantic Dramas Of The 1990s (Ranked By Metacritic)
  • The Literary Fiction to Look Out for in 2021
  • Ava Gardner | The Spectator Australia

Category

  • Book Writing
  • Business and Management
  • Computing and IT
  • Cooking Books
  • Education
  • Erotic
  • Kindle Publishing
  • Literary Agents
  • Literary Devices
  • Literary Review
  • Literary Themes
  • Literature
  • Mysteries, Thrillers & Suspense
  • New Books
  • Religion & Spirituality
  • Romantic Novels
  • Science Fiction
  • Self Help

Recent News

10 Best Romantic Dramas Of The 1990s (Ranked By Metacritic)

10 Best Romantic Dramas Of The 1990s (Ranked By Metacritic)

January 27, 2021
The Literary Fiction to Look Out for in 2021

The Literary Fiction to Look Out for in 2021

January 27, 2021
  • Home
  • OUR BOOK SHOP
  • Literary Review
  • Literature
  • Book Writing
  • Kindle Publishing
  • Romantic
  • Science Fiction
  • Cooking
  • MORE

© 2020 literaryreviews

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • OUR BOOK SHOP
    • Erotic Novels
    • BEST SELLING BOOKS
    • Science Fiction Books
    • Business and Management
    • Computing and IT
    • Cooking
    • Education
    • Religion & Spirituality
    • Self Help
    • Teens & Young Adults
  • Literary Review
  • Literature
  • Book Writing
  • Kindle Publishing
  • Romantic
  • Science Fiction
  • Cooking
  • MORE
    • Erotic
    • Mysteries, Thrillers
    • Literary Themes
    • Business and Management
    • Literary Agents
    • Literary Devices
    • New Books
    • Self Help
    • Teens & Young Adults Novels
    • Computing and IT
    • Education
    • Religion & Spirituality Novels

© 2020 literaryreviews

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Fill the forms bellow to register

All fields are required. Log In

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In