In an engaging, though-provoking and moving conversation, Winnie Dunn, Julie Janson and Siang Lu - all shortlisted for the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award - discuss their nominated works, the ideas that shaped them, and the questions they raise about Australian life, literature and identity today, with writer and broadcaster Sunil Badami.

The Miles Franklin Literary Award is Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, awarded each year to a novel of the highest literary merit that presents Australian life in any of its phases.

This special episode of Fully Lit is presented by Copyright Agency Cultural Fund and Gleebooks, Sydney’s premier literary events program. Go to gleebooks.com.au to discover more great literary events featuring some of Australia’s best and best known authors.

Winnie Dunn is a Tongan-Australian writer from Mount Druitt. She is the general manager of Sweatshop Literacy Movement. Her debut novel is Dirt Poor Islanders, published by Hachette.

Julie Janson is a Burruberongal woman of the Darug Aboriginal nation NSW. She is a novelist, playwright, and poet. Her novel Compassion is published by Magabala Books.

Her career as a playwright resulted in ten productions at various theatres including Belvoir and Sydney Opera House. As a poet she is co-recipient of the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Poetry Prize 2016 and winner of the Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2019.

Her Indigenous crime novel Madukka the River Serpent was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2023. Benevolence, an Indigenous historical novel published by Magabala in 2020, and later published by Harper Collins in the USA and UK, was shortlisted for the Barbara Jefferis Award 2022 and the Voss Literary Prize. Her shortlisted novel Compassion is a sequel to Benevolence A gripping historical novel set in colonial NSW, charting resistance, survival, and legacy through the life of a Darug woman outlaw.

Siang Lu is the author of Ghost Cities, published by University of Queensland Press.

His first book The Whitewash won the ABIA Audiobook of the Year in 2023. Ghost Cities has been shortlisted for five literary awards, including the 2025 Russell Prize for Humour Writing, the VPLA John Clarke Humour Award, the Readings New Australian Fiction Prize and The University of Queensland Fiction Book Award and The Courier-Mail People’s Choice Queensland Book of the Year Award at the Queensland Literary Awards. In 2023 Siang was named one of the Top 40 Under 40 Asian-Australians at the Asian-Australian Leadership Awards.

Fully Lit is is a podcast by Impact Studios, a media production house based on Gadigal land at UTS, Sydney.

This episode was recorded at Gleebooks, at an event hosted by Sunil Badami.

Sound engineering by Simon Branthwaite.

Executive producer, Sarah Gilbert.

Writer, editor and producer Charle Malycon (Penguin Random House and Overland literary journal) and co-founder and director of Amplify bookstore, Jing Xuan Teo, join Alice Grundy to dissect the current state of the industry. What goes on behind the scenes? What is the work of publishing today and who is doing it? Our guests share their personal experiences in publishing and bookselling, taking the listener through the complex process of getting a book from manuscript to reader and highlighting the many hands that shape the reader’s experience.

Alice Grundy is Managing Editor of Australia Institute Press and a Research Manager at The Australia Institute. She worked in book publishing for over a decade before researching a PhD on editing and publishing history, the first half of which was published as a minigraph by Cambridge University Press.

Charle Malycon (Shh-arl, she//her) is an editor, writer and critic. She is a fulltime editor at one of Australia’s largest publishing houses and has poetry, monologues, short stories and literary reviews published in ABR, Meanjin, Overland, UTS Writers’ Anthology, UTS Central and Voices for Woman. She has an MA Creative Writing, a BA Communications and is a professional member of IPEd, APA and ASA.

Jing Xuan Teo is a freelance marketer and co-founder of Amplify Bookstore, Australia's first antiracist bookstore specialising in books by BIPOC authors. Her focus is on strategic content creation, community building and supporting marginalised authors throughout the publishing process.

Readings

Author and bookseller Laura Elizabeth Woollett reading from her essay, ‘Paying to Play’, at the Sydney Review of Books.

Anita Heiss, Wiradjuri woman, author and editor at large at Bundyi, a First Nations imprint at Simon & Schuster, shares her insights into the Australian publishing industry with Alice Grundy, managing editor at Australia Institute Press. They take a close look at the way First Nations writing has affected and been affected by the prevailing practices in the industry, from author-editor relationships to marketing. What would sovereign publishing look like for First Nations writers in Australia?

Alice Grundy is Managing Editor of Australia Institute Press and a Research Manager at The Australia Institute. She worked in book publishing for over a decade before researching a PhD on editing and publishing history, the first half of which was published as a minigraph by Cambridge University Press.

Anita Heiss is an internationally published, award-winning author of 25 books across genres. She is a proud member of the Wiradyuri Nation of central NSW, an Ambassador for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation and Professor of Communications at the University of Queensland.

Her adult fiction includes Manhattan Dreaming, Paris Dreaming and Tiddas which she adapted for the stage. Her novel Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms was shortlisted for the QLD Literary Awards and longlisted for the Dublin International Literary Prize. Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray won the 2022 NSW Premier’s Literary Prize for Indigenous Writing, was shortlisted for the 2021 HNSA ARA Historical Novel (Adult Category) and longlisted for the 2022 Stella Prize.

In 2023, Anita released a children’s book Bidhi Galing (Big Rain) illustrated by Samantha Campbell, and became Publisher of her own imprint, Bundyi Publishing (Simon & Schuster).

In 2024, she released the historical novel Dirrayawadha (Rise Up).

Anita’s latest novel is Red Dust Running.

Further reading

‘Dhuuluu-Yala (To Talk Straight): Publishing Aboriginal Literature,’

Dirrayawadha

Don't Take Your Love To Town

My Place

'Just How White is the Book Industry?'

'Unliterary History: Toni Morrison, The Black Book, and 'Real Black Publishing'

Fully Lit is presented by Anna Funder.

The podcast series is produced, edited and sound designed by Regina Botros.

Sound engineering by Simon Branthwaite.

Executive producers are James Jiang and Sarah Gilbert.

Fully Lit is a co-production between UTS Impact Studios and the Sydney Review of...