The Miles Franklin judges described Siang Lu’s Ghost Cities, winner of the 2025 award, as “a grand farce and a haunting meditation on diaspora”. To my mind, it is perhaps the funniest novel ever to have won the Miles Franklin. In the last decade, its closest competitor would be Melissa Lucashenko’s boisterous, brilliant Too Much Lip.
Turn the clock back a few more years, and it’d square off against the puerile humour of Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, the zany folly of Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, and Thea Astley’s biting satire The Acolyte. It’d remain a strong contender even in such company.
