Siang Lu has won one of Australia’s most prestigious book prizes, the $60,000 Miles Franklin Literary Award, for his part-fable, part-rom-com novel Ghost Cities.
The Chinese Malaysian Australian author says he’s “overwhelmed” by his win.
“[I feel] super joyful, super excited, but it’s a lot to take in.”
Key facts:The Miles Franklin Award was first awarded in 1957.It was established in the will of author Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin (author of My Brilliant Career).It distinguishes a novel “of the highest literary merit” that presents “Australian life in any of its phases”.Past winners include Thea Astley, Peter Carey, Tim Winton and Melissa Lucashenko.The 2024 Miles Franklin was won by Alexis Wright for Praiseworthy.
Perhaps that’s in part because for almost 10 years the book languished, unpublished, in Lu’s drawer. It was rejected more than 200 times, both in Australia and overseas.
Then, in 2022 — after winning an unpublished manuscript award at the Queensland Literary Awards — he published his debut novel, The Whitewash, an oral history of the fictional first spy thriller with an Asian male lead.
And it was a success: It was shortlisted at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and won best audiobook at the Australian Book Industry Awards.
“It’s a very long and sometimes torturous road to publication,” Lu says. “Sometimes the book that you think will be the debut book ends up not being that.”
The success of The Whitewash led Lu to dust off Ghost Cities.
Accepting the Miles Franklin at an event in Sydney on Thursday, Lu recalled how he would print out every rejection letter and stick it to a glass window between his office and bedroom, where his newborn baby lay sleeping.
“This book, and its difficult journey into being, taught me how to be a man,” he says. “Because I finally understood in that moment how to make sense of my failures.
Ghost Cities was also shortlisted for best fiction at the Queensland Literary Awards, and for humour writing at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. (Supplied: UQP)
“One must accept failure, embrace failure, make a friend of it. We are fools for art. But I am glad to have been a fool.”
Ghost Cities is the story of Xiang Lu, a translator living in Sydney, who is fired from the Chinese consulate when his employers realise he doesn’t speak Mandarin. His deception soon goes viral on Chinese social media, with Xiang dubbed #BadChinese.
That’s when he meets a Chinese auteur filmmaker, Baby Bao, and his translator, Yuan. The mischievous director invites the now-infamous Xiang to Port Man Tou, a ghost city turned into a film set, where he plans to make a movie about a villainous ancient Chinese emperor — whose story is also told through fables in the novel.
Xiang and Yuan’s romantic relationship quickly develops in Port Man Tou, against a backdrop of round-the-clock filmmaking, or surveillance, with the pair talking about their ideas about art, myth, history and identity.
“It’s not only a romantic love story,” Lu says. “It’s also a love letter to literature.
“It’s a love letter to storytelling and storytellers. It’s a love letter to the two cultures that I embrace.”
Advocating for your culture
The Miles Franklin award judges described Ghost Cities as a “grand farce and a haunting meditation of diaspora”.
“Shimmering with satire and wisdom, and with an absurdist bravura, Ghost Cities is a genuine landmark in Australian literature.”
Speaking on ABC Radio National’s The Book Show in 2024, Lu recalled wanting to fit in when he was growing up. Now he tells his two children it’s a gift to be from two different cultures.
Listen to Siang Lu on The Book Show in 2024
“A book like The Whitewash and a book like Ghost Cities, these books are not possible to have been written by anyone but someone between two cultures,” he says.
Since the book’s release last year, Lu — who, like his narrator, doesn’t speak Mandarin — has been approached by readers from migrant backgrounds who relate to the idea of #BadChinese.
“We’ve all been shamed by our family members and joked at by uncles and aunts, who’ve said: ‘You can’t speak the language, so you’re not a good Chinese or [other] ethnicity,'” Lu told The Book Show this month.
“I certainly feel that way. But there’s another part of me that thinks there are other ways to be good advocates for your culture as well.
“And I hope this book is one.”
Empty cities and Catch-22
Years before he wrote Ghost Cities, Lu and his wife Yuan visited an abandoned theme park on the outskirts of Beijing.
He had wanted to see one of China’s notorious ghost cities — empty cities, complete with skyscrapers, built in the rural countryside but never populated.
“The thing that fascinates me the most about these ghost cities is that they’re these sort of modern ruins,” Lu says.
“We often think of ruins as being something from the ancient world. But these are completely new.”
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The couple didn’t have time to make it to a ghost city, so a trip to the theme park was the next best thing.
“We didn’t see any of the ticket operators, we didn’t see anyone who lived on the land, but we saw evidence of them,” Lu says.
“We saw these tiny farms; [farmers] were forced into becoming ticket operators, but in the shadows, they were still farming, which I found incredible.”
It was a spark for Ghost Cities.
Another came in the form of postmodern literature, like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, which Lu first read about 20 years ago.
He wanted to capture the wry, absurd humour of that book in his novel. Inspired by the character Major Major Major Major, he dubbed the director in Ghost Cities Baby Bao, which in Mandarin sounds like: “Bao Bao Bao”. It’s what Lu calls a “bilingual pun”.
Moments such as this offer a levity that can sometimes be missing from Australian literature, Lu says. He’s proud to have also been shortlisted for two prizes for humour writing this year.
“When I’m sitting down to write, I have to amuse myself in the writing and in the work. Otherwise, at least for me, it’s almost not worth sitting down to do it.”
Same book, but different
Bestselling crime writer Hayley Scrivenor described Ghost Cities as an “instant Australian classic”. Lu recalls thinking it was wonderful of Scrivenor to have said that, but that he didn’t believe her.
But winning the Miles Franklin is, for Lu, a “step towards” Scrivenor’s description.
2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlistChinese Postman by Brian Castro Theory & Practice by Michelle de KretserDirt Poor Islanders by Winnie Dunn Compassion by Julie Janson Ghost Cities by Siang Lu Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlaneÂ
“This is the same book as it was word-for-word a year ago, before it won the Miles Franklin,” Lu says.
“But now, having won the Miles Franklin, it’s a different book, and that’s something I’m still trying to wrap my head around.”
He finds it especially hard to grasp that he is joining a list of Miles Franklin winners that includes some of his literary idols.
“When I think about authors whose works I’ve revered and really loved and enjoyed, like Melissa Lucashenko and Tara June Winch, my enjoyment of their books has in some ways been part and parcel with my sense of who they are as authors as well,” he says.
“If you care about literature, then you sometimes care about the literary weight of something, which is afforded when a book wins a big prize or becomes a bestseller.”
“Siang Lu is doing things that no other author in Australia is doing,” Claire Nichols from The Book Show says. (ABC News: Teresa Tan)
For now, winning the Miles Franklin gives Lu money to buy his parents a car, as well as the time and space to write the next thing.
“There’s a sense that things might change, but I don’t know how, and there’s a sense that I might have more opportunities, but again, I don’t know how,” Lu says.
“If there is some relief in the time pressures — certainly monetarily — to give space to write the next thing, then it’s a tremendous gift.”