Peter Temple’s Truth wins Miles Franklin Literary Award 2010

Peter Temple was announced as the 2010 Miles Franklin Literary Award winner at a ceremony in Sydney last night, for his novel Truth (Text Publishing).

Temple’s publisher Michael Heyward told the Weekly Book Newsletter last night that Truth had ‘changed the possibility of the crime novel’. ‘Truth is a crime novel but also a novel about crime. It’s a contemporary tragedy,’ he said. Australian Literary Review editor Stephen Romei provided an entertaining live tweet-stream last night, too, revealing that Temple looked ‘genuinely stunned’ upon the announcement, and also ‘dropped the f word in his acceptance speech’. Wonderful. Temple said the judges ‘have to take the flack for giving the Miles Franklin to a crime writer and all I can say, my advice to them is cop it sweet. You’ve done the crime, you do the time.’ You can listen to and read Temple’s acceptance speech (or parts of it) through ABC AM’s report here.

Unfortunately I haven’t had the chance to read Temple’s work as yet. When I blogged briefly on this year’s shortlist over at LiteraryMinded, the commenters had a few things to say about ‘genre’ and ‘literary’ writing. mjlivi said: ‘I’ve not read any of the other short-listed books, which is pretty poor form, but based on The Broken Shore, I’d argue that Peter Temple deserves to be treated as a “literary” writer as much as a crime writer.’

One wonders what Bryce Courtenay might think of Peter Temple’s writing – does he think he could pull off a Peter Temple, like he thinks he can pull off a Peter Carey? Is Temple the perfect ‘in-between’ writer – beautiful writing, well-developed characters + plot? What do you think?

This genre/literary discussion does come up a lot at writers’ festivals, and has certainly done so at MWF. Often the writers want nothing to do with it – seeing it as marketing gaff (but perhaps only when they feel they’ve been misrepresented). Other writers embrace their genres, but might still hope for a wider audience for them (see my notes on the ‘Visions of the City’ session at MWF 2009). As someone who’s worked in a bookstore and edited a book trade magazine, I believe the categorisation can come in handy to help readers find books they will enjoy. But it can also be detrimental to readers who might benefit from expanding their horizons. But then is something like Truth, that bridges the supposed divide, the perfect kind of novel? For all kinds of readers?

There’s a good little review of the book at Bite the Book: PNPBookseller’s blog. Official Festival bookseller Readings have also released Truth at a special online price to celebrate its win. You can buy a copy for $27.95 (down from $32.95) here.