Miles Franklin Literary Award 2004

2004 Winner - "The Great Fire" by Shirley Hazzard

On Thursday 24 June at a gala dinner presentation at the State Library of New South Wales, Cate Blanchett announced Shirley Hazzard as the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2004 winner.

Ms Hazzard who has current commitments in Italy, was not able to attend the evening celebrations.  However, in her video message, Ms Hazzard said that she was so glad, and so grateful. 

“I’ve been proud to be short-listed in the company of writers whose work I hold in high regard.  I wish with all my heart I could be present. 

I’ve been thinking about Miles Franklin, who used a man’s name, in accord with the exigencies of her time – but was no more a man than was Henry Handel Richardson, or George Eliot, or those three Bell brothers, whose true and sisterly name was Brontë.  Some things do change for the better, over the long literary haul, and the changes of cultural Australia in my lifetime are staggering,” Ms Hazzard said.

The Miles Franklin Literary Award 2004 was the first Australian award Shirley Hazzard had won.  In 2004, The Great Fire was her first novel in twenty-three years.

Commenting on the winner's novel, the Judging Panel wrote:
"Moving from postwar Japan, to Hong Kong, England and eventually New Zealand, Shirley Hazzard’s long-awaited new novel approaches the epic in its range of scenes and characters, though running to only 300 pages. At its heart is the growing love between an English war hero and a young Australian girl, providing one glimmer of hope in a world full of burnt survivors and uncaring victors. Hazzard surrounds her central figures with dozens of others, all perfectly evoked in a few words, as are the sights, sounds and smells of their lives.

Complex and utterly engrossing, The Great Fire is a reminder of why, in a digital age, the novel still matters."

About Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard was born in Sydney, Australia in 1932, and in early years travelled the world with her parents due to their diplomatic postings. After graduating from the Queenwood School in 1946, she was engaged by British Intelligence in Hong Kong, where, in 1947-48, she was involved in monitoring the civil war in China. Thereafter, she lived in New Zealand and in Europe; in the United States, where she worked for the United Nations Secretariat in New York; and in Italy. In 1963, she married the writer Francis Steegmuller, who died in 1994.

Her first work of fiction, Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories, was published in 1963, to be followed by The Evening of the Holiday (1966), People in Glass Houses (1967), The Bay of Noon (1970), and Defeat of an Ideal: A Study of the Self-Destruction of the United Nations (1973). Her next work of fiction, The Transit of Venus (1980), was published to great acclaim and given the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction the following year. Countenance of Truth (1990) was a controversial critique of the United Nations. Among the honors Ms. Hazzard has received are the first prize O’Henry Short Story Award in 1976, the National Institute of the Arts and Letters Literary Award (1966), and the Boyer Lectureship in Australia (1984 and 1988). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1999 Virago published Greene on Capri, Ms. Hazzard’s chronicle of the literary culture of Capri, to wide acclaim. She currently divides her time between New York and southern Italy.

About The Great Fire

The Great Fire is Shirley Hazzard's first novel since The Transit of Venus, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981. The conflagration of her title is the Second World War. In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again.
 
Some will fulfil their destinies, others will falter. At the centre of the story, a brave and brilliant soldier finds that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. His counterpart, a young girl living in Occupied Japan and tending her dying brother, falls in love, and in the process discovers herself.
 
This is a great writer's sweeping story of men and women struggling to reclaim their lives in the aftermath of world conflict.

About the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2004

44 books were submitted for the 2004 Award.

To view information about the six novels shortlisted for the 2004 Award, please enter here.

Judges for the 2004 Award were Dr Kerryn Goldsworthy, David Marr, Mark Rubbo, Professor Elizabeth Webby, and the State Librarian of NSW, Dagmar Schmidmaier.

On the 50th Anniversary of Miles Franklin’s death, Australia’s most prestigious literary award, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, 2004 prize money was $42,000 – making it our richest literary prize in Australia.
 
Australian copyright management company, Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) committed to be the sole financial supporter for promoting the Miles Franklin - a first in the history of this esteemed literary institution.