UWA Publishing congratulates John Hughes on his shortlisting for the 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award for his fantastic novel, No One, released last year. No One is one of six shortlisted titles for this year's Award.
Part crime novel, part road movie, part love story, No One takes us to the heart of contemporary Australia’s festering relationship with its Indigenous past, and the long tail of the legacies of institutional care. What emerges is a portrait of being Australian that entails the necessity of listening to the relentless rumbles of traumatic histories.
Speaking on behalf of the judging panel, Mitchell Librarian of the State Library of NSW and Chair, Richard Neville, said, “The books on this year’s shortlist, diverse in form and tone, all explore the effects of trauma. From familial stories of neglect and abuse to the national story of racial and cultural dispossession, these novels demonstrate powerfully how past trauma continues to inform the present”.
The Copyright Agency’s CEO, Adam Suckling, said, “The Copyright Agency is proud to be announcing this year’s nominees as part of its ongoing support of Australia’s creative writing industry. At a time when the creative infrastructure that supports the production, promotion and sales of writing is being smashed, the evolution into an online event offers greater reach and access while inspiring and challenging our view of Australian life, and most of all showcasing the vibrant voices of some of the country’s most talented authors.”
Praise for No One
John Hughes’s vivid, dark, intensely beautiful new novella No One is an unprecedented excursion into the nightmares of our colonial unconscious.
- Geordie Williamson in The Australian, July 2019
In No One, the echoes and traces that drive the narrator’s quest to find out who or what he collided with on the fateful evening have as much to do with the legacy of Australia’s colonial history and treatment of the original owners of the land as they do with the events that define his own traumatic history.
Extraordinary
- George Kouvaros for Sydney Review of Books, August 2019
Like all good fiction, this novella tells more than one story.
No One is about the fractured identity of Australian society, delivered with an allegorist’s sensibility.
- Jack Cameron Stanton in The Sydney Morning Herald, June 2019