Text Publishing is thrilled to announce that Eva Hornung has been shortlisted for the 2018 Miles Franklin Literary Award.
First presented in 1957, the award helps to support authors and to foster uniquely Australian literature. Miles Franklin believed that ‘Without an indigenous literature, people can remain alien in their own soil.’ She also had firsthand experience of struggling to make a living as a writer and was the beneficiary of two literary prizes herself.
Eva Hornung
The Last Garden is a powerful literary work about frailty, redemption, and the healing power of animals, from the author of the award-winning Dog Boy.
The settlement of Wahrheit, founded in exile to await the return of the Messiah, has been waiting longer than expected. Pastor Helfgott has begun to feel the subtle fraying of the community’s faith.
Then Matthias Orion shoots his wife and himself, on the very day their son Benedict returns home from boarding school.
Benedict is unmoored by shock, severed from his past and his future. Unable to be inside the house, unable to speak, he moves into the barn with the horses and chooks, relying on the animals’ strength and the rhythm of the working day to hold his shattered self together.
The pastor watches over Benedict through the year of his crazy grief: man and boy growing, each according to his own capacity, as they come to terms with the unknowable past and the frailties of being human.
The Last Garden
Read an extract from The Last Garden here.
The winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award will be announced on 26 August 2018.
For more details about the award, visit the Miles Franklin website here.
The Last Garden is available in all good bookshops, on the Text website (Free postage) and as an eBook.
