Tim Winton wins fourth Miles Franklin award
Novelist 'stoked' after Breath takes Australia's top literary award
Alison Flood reporting in the guardian.co.uk,
Thursday 18 June 2009



'I feel like the kid who's simply left holding the parcel when the music stops' ... Tim Winton. Photograph: Martin Godwin

A novel about surfing has won Tim Winton his fourth Miles Franklin award, Australia's most important literary prize, 25 years after he picked up his first one.
Breath, which traces a young man's initiation into the dangerous worlds of surfing and sex, was named winner of the £20,000 prize in Sydney, but Winton himself wasn't at the awards ceremony, having shunned them since Shallows won him his first Miles Franklin prize in 1984, aged just 24. "I was overawed that first time," he told the Australian, speaking from Western Australia's North West Cape. "It was odd and strange and I think I was almost as surprised as everybody else, but I haven't been to an award night since then, once I realised you don't actually have to go. I don't go to many festivals either, I've just usually got other things to do and I'm not good in a crowd."

Breath, described by judges as "a searing document about masculinity, about risk, and about young people's desire to push the limits", follows the life story of Bruce "Pikelet" Pike, who as a young boy learns to surf with his friend. "How strange it was to see men do something beautiful," says Pikelet, who narrates the book. "Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared." But their mentor Sando urges Pikelet and friend on to ever-bigger, more dangerous waves, until Pikelet is too frightened to go on, and is abandoned by his friends. Aged just 14, he is then drawn into a dangerous sexual relationship with Sando's bitter, unhappy wife.

The win – he's also won the prize for Cloudstreet in 1992 and Dirt Music in 2002 – means Winton enters the record books as the only author to take the Miles Franklin four times as the sole winner. (Thea Astley has won it four times, but she shared her 1962 win with George Turner, and her 2000 win with Kim Scott).
Winton, "at the height of his powers as a novelist", said judges, beat an all-male line-up of four other novels including Christos Tsiolkas's Commonwealth writers' prize-winning The Slap and former Miles Franklin winner Murray Bail's The Pages to take the prize.
Alison Flood's full story here.
And here is the report from The Australian.
And from the Sydney Morning Herald.