Jennifer Down missed the decision telling her she’d gained the Miles Franklin. She was in a resort room on a Zoom name for work, and rang again later with no thought of the information ready for her. “I used to be fairly speechless,” she tells Guardian Australia. “I used to be so shocked.” We get that loads, the chair advised her dryly.
Our bodies of Mild is the Melbourne author’s second novel. Her debut and subsequent quick story assortment noticed her named greatest younger Australian novelist by the Sydney Morning Herald in 2017 and 2018, and he or she’s been awarded a number of fellowships. However the 31-year-old remains to be processing the “immeasurable influence” of the $60,000 prize – one of many nation’s richest literary awards – on her writing life. It goes deeper than e book gross sales and abroad readers, although each at the moment are probably.
“It’s the gold sticker factor,” she says. “At a foolish degree, it appears like an oddly grown-up factor to occur.”
This novel is very unsilly, chosen extensively as one in every of final 12 months’s greatest books, and critically lauded as Down coming into her personal. In asserting their shortlist, the Miles Franklin judges praised it for its “moral precision” and an “astonishing voice”.
It follows the harrowing lifetime of Maggie, who, taken into out-of-home and residential care aged 5 and subjected to an nearly insufferable sequence of abuses and disappointments, reinvents herself time and again. “A remarkably empathic e book” with “a wealth of lapidary element”, the critic Declan Fry wrote in his evaluate for the Guardian; “a meditation on what it means to expertise this vulnerability” – during which Down affords Maggie each dignity and resilience. This, Fry famous, “solicits the form of emotional funding that novels like Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life or Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain lobbied for.”
Each these books additionally cope with the bubbles and blooms of trauma; each are notoriously hard-going. All – together with Our bodies of Mild, regardless of Down’s rueful statement that “the right novel ought to be, like, now not than 200 pages” – are lengthy. Down, generally direct, generally drawing her most upsetting traces by means of inference, pulls no punches. But she’s additionally doing one thing gentler. “I'm uncomfortable with the thought of labor that capitalises on any individual’s struggling with a view to make an aesthetic level,” she says. “However I additionally settle for that it’s a very positive line to stroll.”
The aim, for her, is “writing as a form of witnessing, not writing to mine the depths of any individual else’s horror … carried out successfully, it’s fairly breathtaking.”
Down’s mother and father are welfare staff; the themes that made their method into this novel had been “actually dinner-table dialog”. Discussing how invisible these points appeared – and nonetheless appear – elsewhere in society animates her with frustration. “I bear in mind when 4 Corners uncovered the Don Dale detention centre,” she says. “The worst factor was nearly how stunned folks had been. After which we simply form of neglect about it, collectively. And it’s nonetheless happening.”
Down has emphasised that the experiences in her novel aren't her personal. She spent hours with parliamentary stories, Senate inquiries, care leaver testimony, police transcripts: analysis that, although she is fast to minimise her personal discomfort within the scheme of issues, should go away a mark. “Spending your whole free time studying about numerous methods during which the state has failed a few of its most susceptible younger folks, you begin to really feel a bit depressing and cynical,” she acknowledges. However the flipside comes when readers, with private information of the programs she’s written about, inform her the novel displays one thing true.
As an creator, Down is content material for folks to easily discover Our bodies of Mild to be story. “But when I used to be allowed to have one lofty ambition, it might be that individuals recognise that it’s a comparatively devoted illustration of a few of what goes on,” she says. “That regardless that elements are set into the 70s and 80s, numerous the issues of the system, systemic failures and episodes of abuse, they’re not historic. These institutional failings are nonetheless being perpetrated. And the extra we discuss it, the higher. It's important to preserve shining that little gentle on it. In any other case it’s too simple to look away.”
The Miles Franklin goes to a novel “of the best literary benefit [that] presents Australian life in any of its phases”. Down says she’s nonetheless untangling the idea of “Australian literature” from the colonial mission, and that the nation’s overwhelmingly white, middle-class arts and publishing industries typically have “an extended approach to go”, power defunding however.
“I believe there’s extra room on the desk,” she says. “I need to see extra writers with disabilities writing about lived expertise; I need to see extra younger writers; I need to see extra writers who don’t have a tertiary training.”
This 12 months’s shortlist and longlist, she believes – together with the primary self-published creator within the prize’s historical past – “communicate to the breadth and depth of storytelling rising in Australia in the meanwhile … It feels cool to be a part of that cohort.”
Within the studio she rents to jot down in, surrounded by “paper ephemera” – outdated photographs, notes, maps – which may discover its method into her work, Down is engaged on one other novel. “Which simply makes me really feel a bit sick to say,” she says. “I do have a way of, if I don’t strike whereas the iron is sizzling, it’s going to dribble out my ear or one thing.”
Our bodies of Mild by Jennifer Down is printed by Textual content
This text was amended on 20 July 2022, to appropriate a reference to the Miles Franklin prize being Australia’s richest literary award.
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