Jennifer Down missed the call telling her she had won the Miles Franklin. He was in a hotel room on a Zoom call to work and called later with no idea of the news waiting for him. “I was pretty speechless,” he tells Guardian Australia. “I was so surprised.” We understand that a lot, the chair said dryly.
Bodies of Light is the Melbourne writer’s second novel. Her debut and subsequent collection of short stories saw her nominated for Best Young Australian Novelist by the Sydney Morning Herald in 2017 and 2018, and she has received several scholarships. But the 31-year-old is still processing the “immeasurable impact” of the $ 60,000 award, one of the country’s richest literary awards, on her life as a writer. It goes beyond book sales and overseas readers, although both are now likely.
“It’s the gold sticker,” he says. “On a silly level, something strangely adult seems to be happening.”
This novel is intensely absurd, widely selected as one of the best books of last year, and praised by critics as Down as it approaches. In announcing his list, Miles Franklin judges have praised him for his “ethical precision” and “amazing voice.”
It follows the creepy life of Maggie, who, fostered in a residential and out-of-home center at age five and subjected to an almost unbearable sequence of abuse and disappointment, reinvents herself over and over again. “A remarkably empathetic book” with “a lot of lapidary details,” critic Declan Fry wrote in his review for The Guardian; “a meditation on what it means to experience this vulnerability,” in which Down offers Maggie both dignity and resilience. This, Fry noted, “calls for the kind of emotional investment by which they pressed novels like Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life or Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain.”
Both books also deal with the bubbles and flowers of trauma; both are notoriously harsh. All of them – including Bodies of Light, despite Down’s sad observation that “the perfect novel should be no more than 200 pages long” – are long. Down, sometimes straight, sometimes drawing his most annoying lines by inference, he doesn’t punch. However, it is also doing something softer. “I feel uncomfortable with the idea of a job that capitalizes on someone’s suffering to make an aesthetic point,” he says. “But I also accept that walking is a very fine line.”
The goal, for her, is “to write as a kind of witness, not to write to undermine the depths of another person’s horror … done effectively, it’s pretty impressive.”
Down’s parents are welfare workers; the themes that made their way into this novel were “literally table conversation.” Discussing how invisible these problems seemed – and still seem – in other parts of society is frustrating. “I remember when Four Corners exposed the Don Dale Detention Center,” he says. “The worst thing was almost the surprise that people were in. And then we forget, collectively. And it still continues.”
Down has stressed that the experiences of his novel are not his own. He spent hours with parliamentary reports, Senate consultations, testimonies of people leaving care, police transcripts – investigations that, while he hurries to minimize his own discomfort in the scheme of things, must leave their mark. “By spending all your free time reading about various ways in which the state has failed some of its most vulnerable young people, you begin to feel a little miserable and cynical,” he admits. But the other side comes when readers, with a personal knowledge of the systems he has written about, tell him that the novel reflects something certain.
As an author, Down is happy for people to simply find Bodies of Light a good story. “But if I were allowed to have high ambition, it would be for people to recognize that it’s a relatively faithful representation of something of what’s going on,” he says. “That even though the parts are set in the 70s and 80s, many of the system’s problems, systemic failures and episodes of abuse are not historic. These institutional shortcomings are still being perpetrated. And the more we talk about them, the better. “You just have to be more discriminating with the help you render toward other people.”
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Miles Franklin goes to a novel “of the highest literary merit [that] presents Australian life in any of its phases ”. Down says he is still untangling the concept of “Australian literature” from the colonial project, and that the country’s overwhelmingly white publishing and middle-class arts industries generally have “a long way to go,” despite chronic underfunding.
“I think there’s more space on the table,” he says. “I want to see more writers with disabilities write about the lived experience; I want to see more young writers; I want to see more writers who do not have higher education.
This year’s final and long list, he believes, including the first self-published author in the award’s history, “speaks to the breadth and depth of the narrative that is emerging in Australia right now … It feels great to be a part of ‘this cohort “.
In the studio he rents to write, surrounded by “ephemeral papers” – old photos, notes, maps – that could find their way into his work, Down is working on another novel. “Which just makes me feel a little sick to say,” he says. “I get the feeling that if I don’t hit while the iron is hot, my ear or something will come out.”
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Jennifer Down’s Bodies of Light is published by Text
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This article was amended on 20 July 2022 to correct a reference to the Miles Franklin Prize as the richest literary prize in Australia.