Jennifer Down wins the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award with Bodies of Light, a shattering novel of loneliness and heartbreak
- Written by: Jen Webb, Dean, Graduate Research, University of Canberra
Jennifer Down’s Bodies of Light is a shattering novel, one that breaks and then rebuilds its readers. It has won the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award, the judges commending it as “a novel of affirmation, resilience and survival, told through an astonishing voice that reinvents itself from six to 60”.
Down had already demonstrated the quality of her writing. In 2017, she won the Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist of the Year award for her debut novel, Our Magic Hour, which was also short-listed and long-listed for several other awards and commendations. In 2018, she was again named the Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist of the Year for her short-story collection Pulse Points.
In Bodies of Light, Jennifer Down looks directly into the black hole of lost childhood.
Leah Jing McIntosh/Text Publishing
Maggie does not hold to the belief that the world owes her anything. Indeed, she lives so tenuously that she is barely there at all – characterising herself, and being described by others, as an alien, a robot, a ghost.
Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that her many relationships prove to be unsustainable. Though she falls in love with several generous and affectionate people – in Australia, and later in New Zealand and then in the USA – Maggie cannot give herself fully into the sort of trust and everyday comfort that she, and they, deserve. As she says, even when embraced by a lover, “I was always looking ahead to a time when I would miss this.”
Bodies of Light is a brutally precise portrait of the consequences of failure to provide children with the nurturing experiences they need to develop into functional adults. It brings to mind nothing so much as William Blake’s chilling binary in his Auguries of Innocence:
Some are born to sweet delightSome are born to Endless Night
Maggie may have been born to endless night, but her “body of light” offers the possibility of transformation, of reversal. She manages to craft loving, albeit short-term, relationships as she moves across the world, recrafting herself along the way.
She is a captivating character, and one worth a reader’s time. Through the desperate sorrows of childhood, through the heartbreak and loss of young adulthood, she eventually manages to build an ethical and liveable life. By story’s end, she has gathered enough tenderness and hope to become “secure in the knowledge of who knows me”.
Read more:
A touch of hope after the doom? Your guide to the Miles Franklin 2022 shortlist
Authors: Jen Webb, Dean, Graduate Research, University of Canberra 
