Alex Miller

Alex Miller deals with ideas, moral choices and the direction of society. He writes of our interior lives within the artful carapace of story. Miller is a storyteller.

‘Each of his novels draws us into a fully created world, and each new story is fresh, even where there is continuity of character … His body of writing is now acknowledged as one of the great Australian literary achievements of the past half-century.’ - Morag Fraser, Australian Book Review, 2024.

The Deal, available on October 1, 2024, is Alex Miller’s fourteenth novel. He has won the Miles Franklin Literary Award twice, for Miller is twice winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, for The Ancestor Game and for Journey to the Stone Country. The Ancestor Game also won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Conditions of Faith and Lovesong are both winners of the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the NSW Premier's Awards. Landscape of Farewell was awarded the Chinese 21st Century Weishanhi Best Foreign Novel of the Year and the Manning Clark Medal for Miller’s outstanding contribution to Australian cultural life. With Autumn Laing, he was awarded the Melbourne Prize for Literature. Coal Creek won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award. Alex's twelfth novel, The Passage of Love is his most autobiographical work, a deeply moving masterpiece of the writer's early struggles and loves from the vantage of old age. A Brief Affair, published in 2022 is ‘ A richly satisfying and luminous novel.’ – Tom Griffiths, historian and author of The Art of Time Travel.

Miller’s work of non-fiction, Max, based on the life of his friend and mentor, Max Blatt, was shortlisted for the National Biography Award in 2021. The Simplest Words is a collection of short pieces, fiction and non-fiction. A Kind of Confession, a selection of letters and notebook entries from 1961 to 2023, provides ‘lively, often thought-provoking exchanges with family, friends and readers. Its recurring preoccupations range from the domestic and homely to the worldly and philosophical.’ – Brigid Rooney, The Conversation, 2023.

Robert Dixon’s 2014 monograph, Alex Miller, The Ruin of Time, describes Miller’s novels as ‘immediately accessible ... works of high literary seriousness - substantial, technically masterly and assured, intricately interconnected and of great imaginative, intellectual and ethical weight’. Read a review of Dixon’s work here and here.