Amanda Lohrey

Amanda Lohrey is an Australian author and essayist who won the Miles Franklin Award in 2021 for The Labyrinth. She is one of Australia's most celebrated and enduring literary novelists, with a career spanning five decades. The Labyrinth is a contemplative novel about a mother who builds a labyrinth in a rural coastal community while her son serves a prison sentence. Lohrey's fiction is characterised by its psychological depth, its political intelligence, and its exploration of questions of meaning, faith, and community. Her earlier novels include Reading Madame Bovary (1988), The Morality of Gentlemen (1984), and Camille's Bread (1995). She was also a significant public intellectual during the Hawke-Keating Labor era. The Labyrinth was published when Lohrey was 73, cementing her status as one of Australia's great literary voices. She has received numerous other awards and recognitions, including the Patrick White Literary Award.