The Miles Franklin Literary Award is Australia’s most prestigious Australian literature prize. Established through the will of My Brilliant Career author, Miles Franklin, the prize is awarded each year to a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases.
First presented in 1957, the Award helps to support authors and to foster uniquely Australian literature. Miles Franklin believed that “Without indigenous literature, people can remain alien in their own soil.” She also had first-hand experience of struggling to make a living as a writer and was the beneficiary of two literary prizes herself.
Perpetual, as trustee of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and The Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund are proud to be a part of this literary legacy.
About The Diary of Katy Yehonala
The author, Robert Barclay is proud to represent the amazingly talented authors of Australia and equally proud to be nominated for the Miles Franklin, the country’s most cherished Australian literature award.
His novel, The Diary of Katy Yehonala is a story of love embracing three generations of amazing women who faced their personal demons and stood strong and proud against the challenges tumultuous times threw against them. The storyteller is May-ling, later to become Katy Yehonala and lives, eventually, in Melbourne. Katy, her mother, and Clara, each have their destinies forged by those times. Their extraordinary lives mirror their homeland’s rocky coming of age.
The three women, are, in a way, “universal women,” struggling to cast aside their cultural millstones, each to travel the world along their separate paths like modern-day Marco Polo’s, eventually to honour their love of family and the humanity they share.
Robert Barclay is an Australian author of some of the best Australian literature including murder mystery fiction books. His Australian multicultural novels and murder mystery books follow the lives of Katy Yehonala and her daughter, Clara, his strong female protagonists, as they confront the evils of society.