ABC Arts
Tara June Winch at Booranga Writers’ Retreat near Wagga Wagga in New South Wales, where she wrote much of The Yield.(Supplied: Bryan Charlton
Wiradjuri author Tara June who has won the 2020 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
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.”
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.
