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. 

Guests

Winnie Dunn is a Tongan-Australian writer from Mount Druitt. She is the general manager of Sweatshop Literacy Movement. Her debut novel is DirtPoorIslanders, 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 MadukkatheRiverSerpent 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 GhostCities, published by University of Queensland Press.  

His first book TheWhitewash won the ABIA Audiobook of the Year in 2023. GhostCities 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. 

Credits

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.