Women on top at Miles Franklin - The Australian

London-based Australian author ML Stedman, who has been named in the longlist for the Miles Franklin Literary Award for The Light Between Oceans. Pic supplied Source: Supplied

TWO years after the Miles Franklin Literary Award was derided as a "sausagefest" for its all-male shortlist, the longlist for the 2013 prize is dominated by women.

Eight of the ten longlisted titles for the $60,000 prize are by female authors: Romy Ash for Floundering, Lily Brett for Lola Bensky, Michelle de Kretser for Questions of Travel, Annah Faulkner for The Beloved, Drusilla Modjeska for The Mountain, ML Stedman for The Light Between Oceans, Carrie Tiffany for Mateship with Birds and Jacqueline Wright for Red Dirt Talking.

The two male writers in contention are veterans of the Australian literary scene: two-time Miles Franklin winner and Booker Prize recipient Tom Keneally, for The Daughters of Mars, and Brian Castro for Street to Street, his fifth shortlisting for Australia’s most important book prize.

In a surprise innovation, the longlist was unveiled this morning on Twitter, one book at a time, a process some likened to a “literary striptease". The shortlist will be announced on April 30 in more formal surroundings at the State Library of NSW and the winner will be declared at an event at the National Library in Canberra on June 19.

After all-make shortlists in 2009 and 2011 the Miles Franklin faced accusations of male bias, and this in part led to the creation of the Stella Prize for Australian women’s literature, which announced its shortlist last week. Two of the Stella shortlistees are on the Miles Franklin longlist: de Kretser and Tiffany. Stedman last night won the Indie Book of the Year award for her novel.

The 2012 Miles Franklin winner was Anna Funder for All That I Am.

Speaking on behalf of the judging panel, State Library of NSW Mitchell Librarian Richard Neville said: "This year we have seen one of the highest number of entries indicating the robust strength of new fiction. From those 73 books the judges have selected ten outstanding novels for this year's longlist.

"These range from conventional to multiple narratives, with settings as diverse as a lonely lighthouse, battlefield hospitals on the Western Front, colonial Papua New Guinea, the dusty outback and the inner city. The list provides a feast of reading, including close encounters with a polio-stricken girl determined to be an artist, a young boy kidnapped by his runaway mother, an unexpected shipwreck adoption, a family of kookaburras, a rock journalist and a famously shambolic poet."