In July this year, Siang Lu’s second novel, Ghost Cities, was announced as the winner of the 2025 Miles Franklin award, the most prestigious literary award in Australia. The fact that this is the first time the award has gone to a work by a Chinese Australian writer, and that three of the six short-listed works were by Asian Australians, testifies to the shift that has taken place in Australian literature and culture over the last thirty or so years, from Anglo-dominated to more accurately reflecting the current composition of the nation’s population. It also prompts a rethinking of the role of diasporic authors and texts within the national literature, their reading of Australia, their connection to homelands and their perspective on diasporic culture itself. In this paper I first consider diasporic fiction as reading practice: a cross-cultural lens trained on the cultural coordinates of the authors’ experience and imagination. I move on to the reading of diasporic fiction, particularly to the very different readings produced by readers in the author’s home country, host nation or in the diaspora. My reading of Ghost Cities, a genre-defying, tradition-defying firecracker of a novel, will serve throughout to illustrate my argument.
Wenche Ommundsen
Wenche Ommundsen was born in Norway and educated in Norway, USA, Switzerland, UK and Australia. After receiving her PhD in Literary Studies from the University of Melbourne she has taught Literary and Cultural Studies at Deakin University and the University of Wollongong, Australia, as well as Wuhan University, China. She has held numerous positions in academic leadership, including Dean of Research and Dean of the Faculty of Arts. Her teaching and research expertise includes Australian and comparative literature, cultural studies and critical theory, with particular emphasis on multicultural, postcolonial and diasporic writing. She has published widely in these fields, specialising in Asian diaspora writing. Her publications include five books and close to a hundred book chapters and journal articles. Current projects include the editing of a book on Asian Australian writing as world literature to be published by Bloomsbury, UK.
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