Friday 23 June, 2006

Miles Franklin Award

Roger McDonald's 'Desmond Kale' won the MIles Franklin Award last night. He had some interesting things to say about history and fiction in the Age today.

"The past is a country we can't travel in. The sense of what was the statistical reality of the past can be achieved by historians," he said. "Any novelist who would make their primary claim a claim to be writing history is doing a disservice to fiction. Fiction has its own way of crystalising truth and it comes out of what is imagined by the writer in the fictional moment of conceiving that novel." Rather than defending the history in their novels, McDonald said, writers should be defending the fiction.

"Take a novel like Desmond Kale; it's based on a totally imaginative conceit or image of the golden fleece growing to perfection in this dry, dusty, uncongenial, rather nasty country," he said. "Every single detail in my story comes from my magpie-picking over an immense amount of the historical record, not for the sake of the historical record but for the sake of the fiction."

Permanent Link for this Article