Australian fiction has long been interested in the relationship between the local and the global – and the six books shortlisted for this year’s Miles Franklin Award are no exception. They range across time and place, from Tasmania to Malaysian Borneo and the Middle East. And they engage with histories of empire, environmental ruin, migration, ageing, political activism and war.

There is a striking willingness to experiment with form. Some authors borrow from poetry or genre fiction, while others draw on avant-garde traditions and techniques. Some novels overplay their hand; not every formal innovation succeeds. But the judges have clearly rewarded books that attempt something distinctive, rather than settling for familiar literary realism.

This raises a perennial question about the Miles Franklin itself. Is it primarily designed to recognise a successful work of art? Or should it reward novels that intercede in the public life of the nation? These ambitions often coincide, but can pull in different directions.

This year, the shortlist’s most overtly political novel is its least formally adventurous and distinguished. And the novels performing the boldest experiments are often less interested in direct political positioning than in expanding the possibilities of fiction itself. Whatever readers make of the eventual winner, these novels offer six very different answers to the question: what can Australian fiction be – and do?

Discipline, Randa Abdel-Fattah

Discipline is the most provocative novel on this year’s shortlist. Published in the shadow of the current conflict in Gaza, set during the Israeli bombardment in May 2021, Randa Abdel-Fattah’s novel treats fiction as a form of political argument.

It operates simultaneously at two scales. On the macro level, it examines how conflict in the Middle East has the capacity to reshape Australian universities, media organisations and public discourse. At the micro level, it follows an academic and a journalist, together with their families and communities, as they grapple with the personal and professional consequences of those events. This strident novel insists these two scales cannot be separated.

There is real intellectual ambition here, together with a willingness to confront some of the most divisive and traumatic political questions of the present – without equivocation. Abdel-Fattah asks what fiction can contribute to debates more often shaped by headlines, social media and competing ideological claims.

At times, however, that........

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