Miles Franklin Award makes history with 2025 winner, Siang Lu
'I had never allowed myself to think that this was possible, could be possible or was even a remote possibility,' the Brisbane-based author says.
'When I heard I was longlisted I was overjoyed and also scared, but the joy was 'wow, I didn't expect that' … then, when I heard I was shortlisted, it was that magnified. So I can't even properly describe how I feel right now, other than that it's the same feeling but so much bigger that I can't even see it.'
Ghost Cities is about a young Chinese-Australian man who works at the Chinese consulate as a translator. But it subsequently turns out that he is, in fact, monolingual and has been relying on Google Translate.
The 39-year-old author says he grew up like that character, speaking only English. Lu's family emigrated from Malaysia to Brisbane in the 1990s when he was four. He studied law and journalism at university ('law very badly', he says) and the one class he loved was creative writing. There were signs earlier, which his dad recently reminded him about.
'He told me that when I was in high school, maybe [age] 13 or 14, I went to a writer's camp and the writers had clearly done their job of instilling passion and excitement... According to my dad, and it's become family lore, I came home and said I wanted to be a writer.'
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Lu's wife Yuan is also Chinese. While he had been to China before, when they got together he travelled there more frequently, to visit her family.
'It's always been in the back of my mind that I wasn't approaching my culture in the correct way. I first had to embrace the fact that I am of multiple cultures, and that's not an easy thing … for someone growing up in a dominant culture where everything you see on TV or read is from the white perspective,' he says. 'It sort of makes you want to be white and I had to reconcile with that in my writing. I was foregrounding white characters without knowing why.
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