Who is Siang Lu, whose novel ‘Ghost Cities' just won Australia's biggest literary award

Indian Express

24-07-2025

Chinese Malaysian Australian author Siang Lu has won the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award – Australia's most prestigious literary prize – for his absurdist novel Ghost Cities, which masterfully weaves together parallel stories.
'I am honoured beyond belief, and beyond words,' Lu said after winning the prestigious award. 'I didn't dare dream of this. It didn't seem possible.' Lu receives AUD $60,000 (approx ₹33.6 lakh) in prize money as part of the award.
The win was not exactly a surprise. Ghost Cities had already been shortlisted for six major awards and Lu was being compared to literary giants such as Haruki Murakami, Gabriel García Márquez, and even Kevin Kwan. Its publisher, University of Queensland Press, called it 'a profound and highly imaginative novel' that 'cleverly draws on Chinese history to explore the absurdity of modern life and work.' The judges called it 'a genuine landmark in Australian literature.'
Lu's novel unfolds across multiple timelines and realities: in one strand, a young man named Xiang is fired from his job at the Chinese consulate in Sydney after it is discovered he doesn't speak a word of Chinese and has been relying entirely on Google Translate. He relocates to a mysterious, uninhabited megacity, one of China's infamous 'ghost cities,' and from there the narrative explodes into a kaleidoscope of myth and mirage.
How is Xiang's quiet exile connected to a long-dead Emperor who creates a thousand doubles of himself? Or to a mountain that gains sentience and a libido? Or to a chess-playing automaton that harbours a deadly secret? In Lu's world, everything is metaphor and everything is literal.
Lu first caught readers' attention with The Whitewash, his 2022 debut about the unraveling of a fictional Hollywood film meant to 'smash the bamboo ceiling.' That novel, styled as a mock oral history, satirised the politics of representation in the entertainment industry, and won the ABIA Audiobook of the Year with its pioneering cast of majority Asian-Australian actors.
Where The Whitewash tackled race and pop culture, Ghost Cities zooms out to empire, language, and time. It is, as author Nick Earls put it, 'a stunning piece of writing. It's quite a feat to create one labyrinth in a book… but somehow Siang Lu creates two… and makes them act as mirrors to each other.'
The novel has exploding libraries, shape-shifting doubles, and government functionaries who cannot speak the languages of their own bureaucracy. And there's Xiang, a kind of anti-hero, wandering through ghost cities that might be metaphors, or might just be real.
Lu, who splits his time between Brisbane and Kuala Lumpur, does not court the solemnity that often clings to literary success. When his publisher made him start an author Instagram, he went rogue, launching #sillybookstagram, a feed full of Photoshopped book covers that deface his friends' work with pure nonsense. 'Why waste time write book when Silly PhotoShop do trick?' he writes, tongue firmly in cheek.
A post shared by Siang Lu (@sianglu_author)
Author Alice Pung put it best: 'The inventiveness, the genius of it all – it is like the lovechild of Viet Thanh Nguyen crossed with Gabriel Garcia Marquez crossed with Kevin Kwan. It is nuts, and deep, and moving, and also funny.'
Lu also co-created The Beige Index, a digital project critiquing racial representation in film and media.
Alongside fellow shortlist authors – Brian Castro (Chinese Postman), Michelle de Kretser (Theory and Practice), Winnie Dunn (Dirt Poor Islanders), Julie Janson (Compassion) and Fiona McFarlane (Highway 13) – he represents a new wave of writers reshaping the national canon.
A post shared by Miles Franklin Literary Award (@milesfranklinliteraryaward)
This year's judging panel—Richard Neville, Jumana Bayeh, Mridula Nath Chakraborty, Tony Hughes-d'Aeth, and Hsu-Ming Teo—described Lu's novel as 'sitting within a tradition in Australian writing that explores failed expatriation and cultural fraud' while also being 'strikingly new.'
'In Ghost Cities, the Sino-Australian imaginary appears as a labyrinthine film-set,' the judges wrote, 'where it is never quite clear who is performing and who is directing.'
Jane Magor, speaking on behalf of award trustee Perpetual, said Lu's win 'redefines what Australian literature can be….Our stories are ever-changing…. And the literary tradition Miles Franklin envisioned continues to grow in daring and unexpected ways.'
The Miles Franklin Literary Award, established in 1957, was set up to honour a work of 'highest literary merit' that presents 'Australian life in any of its phases.'
Aishwarya Khosla is a journalist currently serving as Deputy Copy Editor at The Indian Express. Her writings examine the interplay of culture, identity, and politics.
She began her career at the Hindustan Times, where she covered books, theatre, culture, and the Punjabi diaspora. Her editorial expertise spans the Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Punjab and Online desks.
She was the recipient of the The Nehru Fellowship in Politics and Elections, where she studied political campaigns, policy research, political strategy and communications for a year.
She pens The Indian Express newsletter, Meanwhile, Back Home.
Write to her at [e-mail] or [e-mail]. You can follow her on Instagram: @ink_and_ideology, and X: @KhoslaAishwarya. ... Read More