‘It feels pretty bloody good’: Jennifer Down wins Miles Franklin Award

The first story Jennifer Down wrote was called Barbie and the Divorce. A surprisingly dark subject given she was only five years old and dictated the story to her happily married mother. Fast-forward more than 20 years and Down found herself tackling significantly darker material.

She was writing a novel about the traumatising experiences of a girl living in residential and foster care and her subsequent struggles as an adult, and she was finding it a heavy load. Like most Australian writers, she was working full time so had to write at weekends or set her alarm absurdly early to fit in a few hours before work.

“All my free time was being devoted to metabolising some of the ugliest things imaginable and that turned me – for a while – into quite a sad and cynical person.”

Jennifer Down is appalled by the way society ignores or neglects marginalised children.Credit:Simon Schluter

But all that gloom has proven worthwhile. Bodies of Light was published to enthusiastic reviews and has been named as winner of this year’s $60,000 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia’s most significant prize for fiction. No more darkness now: “It feels pretty bloody good, actually.” At 31, Down is one of the youngest winners of the prize and the sixth woman in a row to win.

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Her novel was chosen from a shortlist that included The Other Half of You by Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Scary Monsters by Michelle de Kretser, One Hundred Days by Alice Pung, and Grimmish by Michael Winkler, who each receive $5000. The judges said with extraordinary skill and compassion, Down had “written an important book which speaks to an urgent issue in contemporary Australian life”.

Bodies of Light grew out of twin obsessions – one with children in care and the other with people who decide to disappear.

“For a really long time I’ve been appalled with the way we as Australian society are prepared to ignore or neglect marginalised children and young people, in particular,” she says. “The way the welfare system fails young people is something I have thought about for years and this story is one way of telling that story.”

Some people have responded to the book with the view that too many bad things happen to one person, or the portrayal of growing up in care is too bleak, but Down says the fictional account of Maggie Sullivan’s life was grounded in the real world. “What I’d really like to see is for more people to understand this is very much the lived reality and very much an ongoing problem.”

Down’s other obsession is with cases of people who take their own lives having taken deliberate steps to erase their own identity beforehand. “But I became less interested in the identity of the real-life people and more interested in what it would take to constitute a new identity, both in very practical steps but also psychically.”

Bodies of Light begins with adult Maggie living a new life under a new name in a new country and being contacted by someone from her past. That prompts her to tell her story of abuse, tragedy, blighted love and misunderstanding as she moves from various homes and foster homes and later between various relationships. Yet it is also a novel that relishes Maggie’s determination to survive.

The Age and Sydney Morning Herald review of Bodies of Light described it as “staggering in its scope, encompassing half a century of life lived by its magnetic and mystifying central character … a dignified documentation bearing witness to a life both quiet and immense”.

Down started thinking about the story more than seven years ago, and actually published a first iteration as a short story in 2016, the same year her first novel, Our Magic Hour, came out. Her second book, Pulse Points, a collection of short stories, was published two years later, and she was twice named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist.

When Down was 19 she won third place in the 2011 Age short-story award. One of the judges said then that she was a writer who clearly understood the demands of a difficult craft. She agrees writing is difficult and sees it as a constant apprenticeship.

“I have just started – tentatively – writing a new novel. It’s kind of horrific, but every time I start something new whether it’s a piece of short fiction or a novel-length manuscript, I have to learn how to do it all over again. There’s no muscle memory that kicks back in, and I’m like, ‘Oh yes, now we move to second gear’, so I think craftwise I don’t imagine I’ll feel like I’ve got this in the bag.”

But at least she’s got the Miles Franklin in the bag.

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