The Miles Franklin Literary Award: Investigating the Value of a Local Prize on the Global Stage

Abstract:The Miles Franklin Literary Award has long been recognized as Australia's most prestigious literary prize: winners include include Patrick White, Thea Astley, Thomas Keneally, Peter Carey, David Malouf, Kim Scott, Shirley Hazzard, Anna Funder, and Michelle de Kretser. But it is given for works that "present Australian life in any of its phases." So how is this very local prize valued on the global stage? There is little empirical research into the connection between national literary prizes and the licensing of international rights. Yet these licenses are a recognized indicator of literary value. Building on the existing records in the AustLit database, Miles Franklin Rights Project researchers tracked down twenty-one years of international editions of shortlisted and Miles Franklin–winning titles to discover the where, when, and who of their publishing lives. The result is a fully searchable data set that researchers can draw on to explore the relationship between local and global literary value. This article demonstrates the benefit of combining digital bibliographical approaches with sociologically informed publishing studies to produce new data that can be used to discover new insights into Australia's status on the international literary field.