In an engaging, though-provoking and moving conversation, Winnie Dunn, Julie Janson and Siang Lu - all shortlisted for the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award - discuss their nominated works, the ideas that shaped them, and the questions they raise about Australian life, literature and identity today, with writer and broadcaster Sunil Badami.

The Miles Franklin Literary Award is Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, awarded each year to a novel of the highest literary merit that presents Australian life in any of its phases.

This special episode of Fully Lit is presented by Copyright Agency Cultural Fund and Gleebooks, Sydney’s premier literary events program. Go to gleebooks.com.au to discover more great literary events featuring some of Australia’s best and best known authors.

Winnie Dunn is a Tongan-Australian writer from Mount Druitt. She is the general manager of Sweatshop Literacy Movement. Her debut novel is Dirt Poor Islanders, published by Hachette.

Julie Janson is a Burruberongal woman of the Darug Aboriginal nation NSW. She is a novelist, playwright, and poet. Her novel Compassion is published by Magabala Books.

Her career as a playwright resulted in ten productions at various theatres including Belvoir and Sydney Opera House. As a poet she is co-recipient of the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Poetry Prize 2016 and winner of the Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2019.

Her Indigenous crime novel Madukka the River Serpent was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2023. Benevolence, an Indigenous historical novel published by Magabala in 2020, and later published by Harper Collins in the USA and UK, was shortlisted for the Barbara Jefferis Award 2022 and the Voss Literary Prize. Her shortlisted novel Compassion is a sequel to Benevolence A gripping historical novel set in colonial NSW, charting resistance, survival, and legacy through the life of a Darug woman outlaw.

Siang Lu is the author of Ghost Cities, published by University of Queensland Press.

His first book The Whitewash won the ABIA Audiobook of the Year in 2023. Ghost Cities has been shortlisted for five literary awards, including the 2025 Russell Prize for Humour Writing, the VPLA John Clarke Humour Award, the Readings New Australian Fiction Prize and The University of Queensland Fiction Book Award and The Courier-Mail People’s Choice Queensland Book of the Year Award at the Queensland Literary Awards. In 2023 Siang was named one of the Top 40 Under 40 Asian-Australians at the Asian-Australian Leadership Awards.

Fully Lit is is a podcast by Impact Studios, a media production house based on Gadigal land at UTS, Sydney.

This episode was recorded at Gleebooks, at an event hosted by Sunil Badami.

Sound engineering by Simon Branthwaite.

Executive producer, Sarah Gilbert.

Writer, editor and producer Charle Malycon (Penguin Random House and Overland literary journal) and co-founder and director of Amplify bookstore, Jing Xuan Teo, join Alice Grundy to dissect the current state of the industry. What goes on behind the scenes? What is the work of publishing today and who is doing it? Our guests share their personal experiences in publishing and bookselling, taking the listener through the complex process of getting a book from manuscript to reader and highlighting the many hands that shape the reader’s experience.

Alice Grundy is Managing Editor of Australia Institute Press and a Research Manager at The Australia Institute. She worked in book publishing for over a decade before researching a PhD on editing and publishing history, the first half of which was published as a minigraph by Cambridge University Press.

Charle Malycon (Shh-arl, she//her) is an editor, writer and critic. She is a fulltime editor at one of Australia’s largest publishing houses and has poetry, monologues, short stories and literary reviews published in ABR, Meanjin, Overland, UTS Writers’ Anthology, UTS Central and Voices for Woman. She has an MA Creative Writing, a BA Communications and is a professional member of IPEd, APA and ASA.

Jing Xuan Teo is a freelance marketer and co-founder of Amplify Bookstore, Australia's first antiracist bookstore specialising in books by BIPOC authors. Her focus is on strategic content creation, community building and supporting marginalised authors throughout the publishing process.

Readings

Author and bookseller Laura Elizabeth Woollett reading from her essay, ‘Paying to Play’, at the Sydney Review of Books.

Anita Heiss, Wiradjuri woman, author and editor at large at Bundyi, a First Nations imprint at Simon & Schuster, shares her insights into the Australian publishing industry with Alice Grundy, managing editor at Australia Institute Press. They take a close look at the way First Nations writing has affected and been affected by the prevailing practices in the industry, from author-editor relationships to marketing. What would sovereign publishing look like for First Nations writers in Australia?

Alice Grundy is Managing Editor of Australia Institute Press and a Research Manager at The Australia Institute. She worked in book publishing for over a decade before researching a PhD on editing and publishing history, the first half of which was published as a minigraph by Cambridge University Press.

Anita Heiss is an internationally published, award-winning author of 25 books across genres. She is a proud member of the Wiradyuri Nation of central NSW, an Ambassador for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation and Professor of Communications at the University of Queensland.

Her adult fiction includes Manhattan Dreaming, Paris Dreaming and Tiddas which she adapted for the stage. Her novel Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms was shortlisted for the QLD Literary Awards and longlisted for the Dublin International Literary Prize. Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray won the 2022 NSW Premier’s Literary Prize for Indigenous Writing, was shortlisted for the 2021 HNSA ARA Historical Novel (Adult Category) and longlisted for the 2022 Stella Prize.

In 2023, Anita released a children’s book Bidhi Galing (Big Rain) illustrated by Samantha Campbell, and became Publisher of her own imprint, Bundyi Publishing (Simon & Schuster).

In 2024, she released the historical novel Dirrayawadha (Rise Up).

Anita’s latest novel is Red Dust Running.

Further reading

‘Dhuuluu-Yala (To Talk Straight): Publishing Aboriginal Literature,’

Dirrayawadha

Don't Take Your Love To Town

My Place

'Just How White is the Book Industry?'

'Unliterary History: Toni Morrison, The Black Book, and 'Real Black Publishing'

Award-winning poets Bella Li and Ellen Van Neerven join fellow poet Lisa Gorton for a discussion on poetry, responsibility and poetry’s place in Australian public life. With readings from each poet's work, along with other poems from Australia and beyond, our panelists explore the balance between poetry as a private practice and its public impact, attending to the ways in which poetry can unsettle language, shaping and reshaping our sense of history.

Lisa Gorton writes poetry, fiction and essays. Her awards include the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal, the Prime Minister's Prize for Fiction, the NSW Premier's People's Choice Award for Fiction, the Victorian Premier's Prize for Poetry, and the Wesley Michel Wright Poetry Prize. Lisa studied at the universities of Melbourne and Oxford, with a Masters in Renaissance Literature and a Doctorate on John Donne's poetry and prose. She has contributed poems to Izabela Pluta's artist's book Figures of Slippage and Oscillation (Perimeter Press) and to exhibitions such as This is a Poem at Buxton Contemporary Art Museum. Lisa's fifth and most recent poetry collection is the limited-edition chapbook Mirror Landscape (Life Before Man, 2024), written with the support of a Creative Australia BR Whiting residency in Rome.

Bella Li is the author of Argosy (Vagabond Press, 2017), Lost Lake (Vagabond Press, 2018), and Theory of Colours (Vagabond Press, 2021). Her work has won the Victorian and NSW Premier's awards for poetry and an ABDA award for book design, and has featured in exhibitions, catalogues, and programs of the National Gallery of Victoria, Heide Museum of Modern Art, and the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Recent work can be found in HEAT, Debris Magazine, The Saturday Paper, and Australian Poetry Journal.

Ellen van Neerven is an award-winning writer of Mununjali Yugambeh and Dutch heritage. Ellen’s first book, Heat and Light, was the recipient of the David Unaipon Award, the Dobbie Literary Award and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Indigenous Writers’ Prize. They are the author of two poetry collections: Comfort Food, which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize; and Throat, which won the Kenneth Slessor Prize, the Multicultural NSW Award and Book of the Year in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Their latest book, Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity, won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-fiction in 2024.

Readings

‘Argosy’ read by author, Bella Li

‘Constitute’ read by author, Ellen van Neerven

‘Personal Score’ excerpt read its author, Ellen van Neerven

‘An American Lyric’ from

How can poetry act upon the world? Hear John Kinsella hold up a bulldozer with a poem, and take a tour through his life as a reader, poet and activist as he and Lisa Gorton delve into the people and poets who influenced him. They discuss the challenges and responsibilities of being a poet, reflecting on the growing threats to our ecosystems and long-postponed colonial reckonings. In this context, what can poetry do, and what are the possibilities and limitations of a future Australian poet laureate?

Lisa Gorton writes poetry, fiction and essays. Her awards include the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal, the Prime Minister's Prize for Fiction, the NSW Premier's People's Choice Award for Fiction, the Victorian Premier's Prize for Poetry, and the Wesley Michel Wright Poetry Prize. Lisa studied at the universities of Melbourne and Oxford, with a Masters in Renaissance Literature and a Doctorate on John Donne's poetry and prose. She has contributed poems to Izabela Pluta's artist's book Figures of Slippage and Oscillation (Perimeter Press) and to exhibitions such as This is a Poem at Buxton Contemporary Art Museum. Lisa's fifth and most recent poetry collection is the limited-edition chapbook Mirror Landscape (Life Before Man, 2024), written with the support of a Creative Australia BR Whiting residency in Rome.

John Kinsella is the author of over forty books. His many awards include the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, the John Bray Poetry Award, the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award for Poetry (three times). His latest books are the three volumes of his collected poems, The Ascension of Sheep (UWAP, 2022), Harsh Hakea (UWAP, 2023) and Spirals (UWAP, 2024), and the story collection Beam of Light (Transit Lounge, 2024). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Emeritus Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University, Western Australia. He lives on Ballardong Noongar land at ‘Jam Tree Gully’ in the Western Australian Wheatbelt. In 2007 he received the Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement in poetry and in 2024 he was inducted into the Western Australian Writers Hall of Fame.

Readings

'Paradise Lost' by John Milton, excerpt read by John Kinsella

'Bulldozer' read by its author, John Kinsella

'Indexing' read by its author, John Kinsella

Further reading:

An essay by Sarah Holland-Batt about an Australian Poet Laureate

John Kinsella’s thoughts about the same.

If you're enjoying this podcast, here's a podcast we think you'll like too!

The Secret Life of Books is made by Sophie Gee, an academic and a writer, and Jonty Claypole, broadcaster and producer.

Sophie and Jonty tell the story behind the story of the literary classics that everyone wants to read, feels they should read or has already read and loved.

They reveal the secret histories, hidden players and big ideas behind the great books.

They show how they came into being, why they matter, and how they changed the world.

And try to have a bit of fun along the way.

https://shows.acast.com/secret-life-of-books

Who gets to critique First Nations literature — and how should it be taught?

Novelist Melanie Saward and critic Ben Etherington join writer and academic Graham Akhurst to dive into the complex world of reading, teaching, and evaluating First Nations writing.

From the classroom to the review page, they explore the responsibilities that come with critiquing Indigenous stories — and what’s at stake when they’re misread or misunderstood.

Plus, a powerful intervention from the archive by Alexis Wright.

Graham Akhurst is a Kokomini writer and the author of Borderland (UWAP). He is the Director of the Centre for the Advancement of Indigenous Knowledges at UTS and a Senior Lecturer in Indigenous Australian Studies and Creative Writing. As a Fulbright Scholar, Graham took his love for writing to New York City, where he studied for an MFA in Fiction at Hunter College. He is a board member of Varuna: The National Writers’ House, and the Sydney Review of Books. He lives with his wife on Gadigal Country in Sydney and enjoys walking Centennial Park with a good audiobook.

Melanie Saward is a Bigambul and Wakka Wakka woman, author, academic, and publishing all-rounder.

Ben Etherington is Associate Professor in English at Western Sydney University. His current research, which is supported by an Australian Research Council grant, is on the poetics of anglophone Caribbean Creole verse between the abolition of slavery and decolonization. He is also collaborating with the Sydney-based Jamaican writer Sienna Brown on a podcast series about the history of Caribbean people in Australia. Ben has previously worked with Alexis Wright on feature on the Gangalidda activist and leader Clarence Walden and has been a regular contributor to the Sydney Review of Books, especially writing on criticism.

Archival recordings

Alexis Wright, recorded by Ben Etherington for his students. With thanks to Alexis Wright.

Further reading

Jeanine Leane’s essay, ‘Cultural Rigour’, from the Sydney Review of Books.

Fully Lit is presented by Anna Funder.

The podcast series is produced, edited and sound designed by Regina Botros.

Sound engineering by Simon Branthwaite.

Executive producers are James Jiang and Sarah Gilbert.

Fully Lit is a co-production between UTS Impact Studios and the Sydney Review of Books, with support from the UTS Writing and Publishing Program.

What does it really take to read and review First Nations writing with integrity?

Wiradjuri poet and critic Jeanine Leane joins Graham Akhurst for a powerful conversation that turns the spotlight on the critics themselves. With sharp insight and deep cultural knowledge, Jeanine unpacks the idea of “cultural rigour” — and why it’s essential for anyone engaging with Black writing in Australia.

Whether you're a reader, reviewer, or writer, this episode challenges you to rethink what it means to read responsibly — and to listen deeply.

Graham Akhurst is a Kokomini writer and the author of Borderland (UWAP). He is the Director of the Centre for the Advancement of Indigenous Knowledges at UTS and a Senior Lecturer in Indigenous Australian Studies and Creative Writing. As a Fulbright Scholar, Graham took his love for writing to New York City, where he studied for an MFA in Fiction at Hunter College. He is a board member of Varuna: The National Writers’ House, and the Sydney Review of Books. He lives with his wife on Gadigal Country in Sydney and enjoys walking Centennial Park with a good audiobook.

Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri writer, teacher and academic from southwest New South Wales. After a longer teaching career, she completed a doctorate in Australian literature and Aboriginal representation and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Australian Centre for Indigenous History at the Australian National University. She is the recipient of two Discovery Indigenous Awards through the Australian Research Council, ‘The David Unaipon Award: Shaping the literary and history of Aboriginal Writing in Australia’ (2014-2017) and; 'Indigenous Storytelling and the Living Archive of Aboriginal Knowledge' (2020 -2024).

Jeanine has published widely in the area of Aboriginal literature, writing otherness and creative non-fiction. Jeanine was the recipient of the University of Canberra Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Poetry Prize, and she has won the Oodgeroo Noonucal Prize for Poetry twice (2017 & 2019). Her second volume of poetry, Walk Back Over was released in 2018 by Cordite Press. In 2020 Jeanine edited Guwayu – for all times – a First Nations collection commissioned by Red Room Poetry and published by Magabala Books.

'The Past' read by its author, Oodgeroo Noonuccal

'We Are Going' read by its author, Oodgeroo Noonuccal

'History' read by its author, Jeanine Leane