Siang Lu’s Ghost Cities is a haunting comedy about tyranny. Is it the funniest winner ever?
- Written by: Joseph Steinberg, Forrest Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, English & Literary Studies, The University of Western Australia
The Miles Franklin judges described Siang Lu’s Ghost Cities, winner of the 2025 award, as “a grand farce and a haunting meditation on diaspora”. To my mind, it is perhaps the funniest novel ever to have won the Miles Franklin. In the last decade, its closest competitor would be Melissa Lucashenko’s boisterous, brilliant Too Much Lip.
Turn the clock back a few more years, and it’d square off against the puerile humour of Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, the zany folly of Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, and Thea Astley’s biting satire The Acolyte. It’d remain a strong contender even in such company.
Lu earned a reputation for satire with his first novel, The Whitewash, in which he lampooned the racial politics of the film industry. Ghost Cities extends this skit, while dialling it up to 11.
“Sitting within a tradition in Australian writing that explores failed expatriation and cultural fraud, Lu’s novel is also something strikingly new,” the judges said, praising its “absurdist bravura”.
A comedy of tyranny
Lu’s sense of humour relies on hyperbole. Over some 300 pages, the characters in Ghost Cities tie themselves in knots over a ludicrous series of edicts, demands and directives issued by a pair of dictators who grow crueller and more capricious with every chapter.
Ghost Cities is a comedy of tyranny in two plots, told via alternating chapters. One begins in a semi-recognisable Sydney, then relocates to the fictitious ghost city of Port Man Tou; the other is a fable set in China’s Imperial City and its labyrinths millennia ago.
