Kim Scott wins Miles Franklin - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
Aboriginal author Kim Scott has won this year's Miles Franklin literary award with his novel That Deadman Dance.
The winner of the prestigious $50,000 prize was announced in Melbourne tonight.
Scott became the first Aboriginal writer to win the Miles Franklin in 2000 with his book Benang. He tied that year with writer Thea Astley.
Scott beat a short list of two other writers - Roger McDonald and Chris Womersley - to take out the prize.
Ryde Library does not appear to have a copy of That Deadman Dance yet.
Review of That Deadman Dance
Flawed, credible characters are the stars of a complex story that explores the early contact between Aborigines and settlers.
Midway through his heart-stretching new novel, Kim Scott sets two unlikely friends - a 19th-century Noongar man called Wunyeran and a retired British military surgeon, Joseph Cross - inside a candlelit caul of intimacy, "heads close and nodding to one another, gesticulating with wrists and fingers, speaking slowly and softly".
The two men drink a little brandy and sing, at ease in one another's company, and Cross muses: "We are men of such different backgrounds ... and, attempting to fuse them, we are preparing for the birth of a new world."
