Congratulations to Gregory Day on being longlisted for the Miles Franklin 2019 for 'A Sand Archive'
Author Gregory Day has been long-listed for Miles Franklin 2019 for his novel A Sand Archive.
Seeking stories of Australia's Great Ocean Road, a young writer stumbles across a manual from a minor player in the road's history, FB Herschell. It is a volume unremarkable in every way, save for the surprising portrait of its author that can be read between its lines: a vision of a man who writes with uncanny poetry about sand.
And as he continues to mine the archive of FB Herschell - engineer, historian, philosopher - it is not the subject, but the man who begins to fascinate. A man whose private revolution among the streets of Paris in May 1968 begins to change the way he views life, love, and the coastal landscape into which he was born...
Praise for A Sand Archive:
"Effortlessly combines the erudition of two rarely yoked disciplines: engineering and literature [and] harnesses technical language to convincingly lyrical ends." Sydney Morning Herald
"The novel is an elegiac meditation on worlds changed by natural processes and human forces. Ultimately, through Herschell's character, it provides a model for the kind of rigorous and poetic attentiveness that might best honour the profundities of our landscapes and the lives we experience alongside them." The Saturday Paper
A shortlist will be announced on July 2nd, with the winner named on July 30th. For more information on the prize, head to the Perpetual/Miles Franklin website.
