''Drylands'' (1999) (subtitled "A Book for the World's Last Reader") is a Miles Franklin Award-winning novel by

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

n author

Thea Astley Thea Beatrice May Astley (25 August 1925 – 17 August 2004) was an Australian novelist and short story writer. She was a prolific writer who was published for over 40 years from 1958. At the time of her death, she had won more Miles Franklin ...

. This novel shared the award with ''

Benang ''Benang: From the Heart'' is a 1999 Miles Franklin Award-winning novel by Australian author Kim Scott. The award was shared with ''Drylands'' by Thea Astley. Context of Novel One of the main contexts in the novel deals with the process of " ...

'' by

Kim Scott Kim Scott (born 18 February 1957) is an Australian novelist of Aboriginal Australian ancestry. He is a descendant of the Noongar people of Western Australia. Biography Scott was born in Perth in 1957 and is the eldest of four siblings with a ...

Awards

Miles Franklin Literary Award The Miles Franklin Literary Award is an annual literary prize awarded to "a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases". The award was set up according to the will of Miles Franklin (1879–19 ...

, 2000: joint winner * Queensland Premier's Literary Awards, Best Fiction Book, 2000: winner

Review

* * Kerryn Goldsworthy: "''Drylands'' is Astley's ''Waste Land'', with a cast of exhausted and alienated characters wandering through it in the death-grip of entropy, pursued by '' fin-de-siècle'' furies and other personifications of failure and defeat. In the small town of Drylands there are no fragments shored against anybody's ruin (well, there are, but even the fragments get vandalized and tossed), and there is certainly none of the peace that passeth understanding."

Notes

For a description of "drylands" see biomes.

Awards

Review

Notes

References

See also