Gerald Murnane's fortunes in the literary stakes have been as fickle as that of some of the horses he backs on the turf. His novels have never been long or shortlisted for a major award and when he did win the Patrick White award for an under-appreciated writer none of his books was in print.
Since then, however, much has changed: titles have been republished, international interest has grown, and he has written more novels, stories, essays and memoir. The 79-year-old is perennially tipped as the next Australian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Gerald Murnane: "I have never regarded my books as being mainstream or popular"
And now what he says is his last novel, Border Districts, has been shortlisted for this year's Miles Franklin award, Australia's most significant literary prize, which is worth $60,000 to the winner. He is joined on the list by two former winners of the prize – Michelle de Kretser (The Life to Come) and Kim Scott (Taboo) – and Felicity Castagna (No More Boats), Eva Hornung (The Last Garden), and Catherine McKinnon (Storyland).
Murnane is not miffed about his experience with awards as "I have never regarded my books as being mainstream or popular". But as a serious student of the form, he concedes that in this six-horse race he is "in with a chance".
Border Districts was prompted by a dream. "I don't rely on dreams very much, I don't remember them more than the average person, but I did have a dream about coloured glass and then fell to thinking about the place of coloured glass in my life."
But Murnane sat on the book, which reflects the experience and internal landscape of a man who, like Murnane, has turned his back on city life for a tiny town in western Victoria, for a few years while his previous novel, A Million Windows, and his memoir of the turf, Something for the Pain, was published. A collection of poetry will be published next year, as will a four-part novel that he wrote many years ago.
Felicity Castagna was shortlisted for a very different sort of novel, No More Boats, which is set around the time of the Tampa crisis and located firmly in the western suburbs of Sydney and mixes the personal and the political.
"I don't really think you can fully explore politics without exploring what it means to the individual human life, and fiction is the perfect form for that," Castagna said.
"I wanted to ask questions about what happens when we cut off our past. The main character, Antonio, cuts himself off from his own story of migration and the trauma of the experience of migrating. But also to ask how the trauma of separating yourself from your past and actively suppressing it can come out later in your life in your relationships with other people and in your understanding of the world."
The winner of the Miles Franklin will be announced on August 26.