AustLit

'The shortlist for the 2011 Miles Franklin Literary Award, which included Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance, was controversial because it consisted of only three novels, all written by men. The exclusion of women writers for that year itself was noteworthy: for example, Fiona McGregor’s fine novel of Sydney, Indelible Ink (Scribe), did not even appear on the longlist. The 2011 shortlist served also to emphasise the historical male dominance of the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Nonetheless, Scott’s That Deadman Dance, a novel about early contact between indigenous and non-indigenous people in Western Australia, was a worthy and widely anticipated winner. And as Scott noted, indigenous writers are also under-represented in the history of the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Apart from Scott himself, whose earlier novel Benang shared the 2000 award with Thea Astley’s Drylands, Alexis Wright won in 2007 for Carpentaria.' (Introduction)