Peter Temple wins Miles Franklin Literary Award
Victorian writer Peter Temple has won the 2010 Miles Franklin Literary Award for his crime fiction novel Truth.
The sequel to the award winning The Broken Shore, Truth is a complex story of murder and betrayal set against a backdrop of the devastating Black Saturday bushfires.
On receiving the award, Temple said he was ‘… surprised and greatly honoured at joining such a list of illustrious names. Winning the Miles Franklin is the high point in an Australian writer’s career.’
The Miles Franklin is awarded annually to a book of the highest literary merit which presents Australian life in any of its phases. Truth is the first work of genre fiction to receive the prize since its inception in 1957. This is not just a first for Australia, but the first time a crime writer has won a major national literary prize for a novel in English.
Truth was completed while Peter Temple was in receipt of a Literature Board Fellowship, and the title was subsequently supported via the Literature Board’s Publishing and Promotion category. Temple said of the Fellowship that it enabled him to explore an unburdened way of writing he had not previously been able to achieve in the face of yearly deadlines, adding that Truth was '...the book [he'd] always wanted to write…’
Miles Franklin judge Morag Fraser called Truth: ‘writing tempered with fire.’
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