Peter Temple’s crime novel Truth has won the 2010 Miles Franklin Literary Award, presented last night at a ceremony in Sydney.Michael Heyward of Text publishing told the Weekly Book Newsletter he was ‘over the moon’, following Temple’s win. He said Truth had ‘changed the possibility of the crime novel’. ‘Truth is a crime novel but also a novel about crime. It’s a contemporary tragedy,’ he said.
Temple’s acceptance speech, full of self-deprecating humour, went down well with the audience. He used it to ponder the trajectory of the Miles Franklin award, which began with Patrick White and had now led to his win, suggesting--and it was difficult to tell if he was joking--that White would ‘think it unthinkable’ that he had won.The South Africa-born author also added, and this time seriously, that he hoped ‘the Miles Franklin would put an end to the matter of my “Australian-ness”’.
