She was told her fiction wasn’t ‘Australian enough’. Then she won the Miles Franklin

I’m about halfway through a jab, cross, body-hook combo when I realise I might have underestimated Shankari Chandran. As I struggle to master the most feeble of punches, I look across to the 49-year-old standing next to me, who is letting fly a savage kick to the boxing bag. Barefoot, wearing a tank top, track pants and now slightly fogged glasses, a sweaty halo of frizz above her face, boxing gloves that are almost the size of her torso, she’s in full fighter mode. “What’s your favourite move?” I gasp at one point. The most recent Miles Franklin Literary Award winner flashes me a smile – the vast, white, straight kind that changes a whole face – then answers. “Hitting the bag in the balls.” Patrick White, eat your heart out.

“She called me up before she first came to the class and said, ‘I just want you to know the only thing I have stuck at is writing. I will probably come once and you’ll never see me again,’ ” says Bang Bang Muay Thai trainer Sarah Clisdell of her client before I join their Thursday evening class on Sydney’s lower north shore. “And she’s still here.”

Of course she is. Chandran, as you’ll soon learn, can withstand more than a few rounds in the ring. While the aches of ageing nagged her to take up exercise, the violence of boxing offered a satisfaction of its own. “I suspect I have a lot of suppressed rage about life and the state of the world,” she says. She’s named after a Hindu goddess, the destroyer and creator of worlds. The mortal Shankari does a little of this, too – in her novels, legal work and community advocacy, she’s always breaking things with a view to rebuilding them for the better. The morning after the class, Chandran sends me a check-in email (that’s how poorly I performed). “You are an absolute legend,” she writes in one of her trademark full-of-personality missives. “So game. I hope you’re feeling well and ready to hit something again.”

Indefatigable. If there’s one theme that emerges from speaking to dozens of Chandran’s friends, family and colleagues, it’s her sheer relentlessness. “You don’t want to be compared to Shanks,” says former law colleague, Jilly Field. “I probably don’t know anyone else who is that high-achieving. She’s quite the – I don’t know if this is the right word – but a prodigy.”

Shankari Chandran wears many hats. There’s Writer Chandran, whose third published novel Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens won Australia’s most famous literary prize, the $60,000 Miles Franklin Literary Award, last year. Her Audible Original Unfinished Business was released in February (and will be out in book form later this year), and her new novel Safe Haven will be published by Ultimo Press this month. There are also screen deals and scripts in the works, with her debut novel Song of the Sun God slated for a six-parter, featuring Bridgerton star Charithra Chandran, and Unfinished Business in the initial stages of development as a television series.

Then there’s Lawyer Chandran. She’s overseen pro bono and law reform work at two major firms, Allen & Overy in the UK and Ashurst in Australia, including steering a team that represented Guantánamo Bay detainees and serving on an advisory committee to the then-UK prime minister Gordon Brown. Now, Chandran is head of sustainability for one of Australia’s largest retailers, Super Retail Group (owners of Supercheap Auto, Rebel, BCF and Macpac). I remember this a little too late when we meet for the first time, and absentmindedly toss my half-drunk coffee into a bin. I then watch as Chandran patiently disassembles her lid, flattens her cup and deposits each in their appropriate receptacles. “It can be very confusing,” she offers, her wry wit never far from the polished surface.

Then there’s Family Chandran, the mother, wife, sister and daughter. She has four children (Ellora, 20; Kailash, 18; Hari, 15; and Siddharth, 14) with her
husband of nearly 25 years, Haran Siva, a former director at Deloitte, now a country manager at the not-for-profit Climate Bonds Initiative. They even seem to still like each other, with Siva, 52, describing Chandran as “hugely loving” and recounting a recent birthday getaway where they “talked the whole way and didn’t bring the kids up once”.

That’s not to mention all the other Chandrans – the one who appears on panels, delivers speeches, writes essays, organises Tamil community events, makes eggplant curries that win the praise of her mother (even if she does follow a slightly different recipe), attends book clubs, oversees writing organisations, and reads over her neighbour’s daughter’s high school creative-writing stories.

“If I have to write a tricky email, I’ll send her an email and say, ‘This is what I’m writing, can you please give me a fun last line?’ and she’ll supply me with about three different options,” says television producer Karen Radzyner, who has optioned two of Chandran’s novels.

Chandran rolls her eyes at such praise, twisting the conversation to credit her support networks at work and home and to highlight her fortune and privilege. She half-jokes that she sees life in terms of billable hours; that she separates her day into units – a shower, for example, takes six – and finds herself unconsciously tapping her watch as a reminder that time is money. “I see it as maths now,” she says. “If the day is finite and my life is finite, where is the best place to put my time? And my instinct is to push myself on everything – but I [also] really try hard to challenge that instinct.”

You might think winning the Miles Franklin would grant Chandran permission to slow down, at least a little. After all, she’s joined an elite club of Australian authors that includes the 1957 inaugural winner Patrick White, George Johnston, Thomas Keneally, Ruth Park, Peter Carey, Tim Winton, Elizabeth Jolley and Michelle de Kretser, to name but a few. Good things flow automatically after a prestigious win like that. But what becomes clear when spending any time in Chandran’s orbit, is that she very determinedly has no time to waste. There will be no resting on any Miles Franklin laurels here.

“If I have an idea that needs to be externalised into a novel, I am obsessive, I actually cannot stop,” she says. “I don’t know how to stop until I’ve written it.”

Perhaps Chandran’s parents have heard about the heat I copped at boxing, because they seem to have gone blessedly light on the chilli in the Tamil dishes they pile onto my plate when I visit for dinner. Beetroot, eggplant, dhal, chickpeas, rice. I’m at their apartment, overlooking Sydney’s Parramatta River at Breakfast Point, along with Chandran and her younger brother, Narendran Nadanachandran, whom she describes as one of her favourite people.

Food is a symbol of love and tradition in both this household and in Chandran’s novels, so fittingly the evening begins with a debate about who was responsible for making the murukku, a crunchy fried noodle dish offered to me when I arrive, and ends with a factory-style line-up for packing leftovers, which seems so familiar to them that their bodies weave around each other in an unconscious dance. I’ve never been so well-fed while working on a story; I leave with two containers of food, plus fresh papadams.

This dance is present in their words, too; they bounce off each other, finishing sentences and derailing conversations with backstories, memories and questions, as they write and rewrite the family lore. “Shankari was always very keen on reading and learning. From the very early days she would be with books,” says her father, Nadana Chandran. “She was a very easy child to manage.” Her mother, Rathy, picks up the thread. “Shankari was a very organised child. So I actually had nothing very much to do with organising her.”

“Almost OCD,” quips her brother bestie, Narendran. “Let’s call it a pathology.”

Sitting at this table, I can trace the cornerstones of Chandran’s life up the branches of the family tree. Her parents are both doctors, her father a neurosurgeon and her mother a general practitioner, who were married by arrangement in Colombo, Sri Lanka. They left Sri Lanka for London in 1971, part of a generation of Tamils to flee as civil war loomed, with tensions between Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese and Tamil populations growing in lockstep with anti-Tamil legislation. If you had the money or education to get out, the feeling was, you should.

‘We would have almost like a double life. I’d go out and hang with my Australian friends and code-switch into white Australia, then code-switch back at home into Tamil Australia …’

Chandran was born in London, before the family of three followed relatives to Australia in 1977, eventually settling in Canberra (Narendran, who is now a doctor, was born the following year). The White Australia Policy had ended just a few years earlier and her parents knew of only three other Tamil families in the city at the time.

“I think [my parents’] approach was that they wanted us to be able to fit in and do well and contribute to Australian society and not be especially visible,” Chandran says. “At the same time, they were desperate to retain their culture and tradition and Tamil values and closeness to the Tamil community. So we would have almost like a double life. I’d go out and hang with my Australian friends and code-switch into white Australia, then code-switch back at home into Tamil Australia, whatever was unfolding there.”

Not that they had to worry about Chandran. She was then much as she is now: organised, disciplined, determined. A high achiever. Her parents were conservative and strict, but supportive. Sex, alcohol and dates were off-limits; learning and education, which had allowed her parents to leave Sri Lanka, were paramount. Chandran remembers watching her father perform neurosurgery in the operating theatre, and videos of his successful operations being interspersed with holiday pictures on family slide nights. “You just got up on time. You did your chores. You did your homework. I don’t think we were particularly good children or submissive children, we were just efficient as a family. Why wouldn’t you do things the way that had been optimally suggested to you?” Chandran says. “I have definitely been a good girl. I am a pleaser. I’m a typical first child. I really wanted to make them proud. I was overly concerned with gold stars.”

There were family trips back to Sri Lanka but when the civil war started in 1983, her parents’ former home seemed suddenly both closer and further away. Chandran’s father was heavily engaged with politics, lobbying the Australian government to open the borders to Tamils seeking refuge, attending protest marches, forming the Canberra Tamil Association and helping sponsor families to come to Australia. Chandran remembers falling asleep on the sofa as a girl to the sound of aunties and uncles swapping stories of lost loves and lives destroyed. Her father (who was made a member of the Order of Australia in 2015, for his medical and cultural contributions to the community) received threats on the phone and in the mail. “As children, we shouldn’t be hearing these things but you are hearing these things,” she says, “because the community in Australia is collectively grieving and collectively asking what they can do.”

Chandran and her brother laugh when I ask if she could have told her parents she wanted to be a writer. Doctor, engineer, lawyer, accountant, that’s the professional hierarchy, her father tells me over dinner. Even now, if someone asks what their daughter does, her parents will say “lawyer” first. No one in the family had a clue what the Miles Franklin was before Chandran won it. But the two passions – lawyer and novelist – aren’t as strange bedfellows as they might appear. For Chandran, social justice and storytelling are inextricably linked.

After studying law at the University of NSW and travelling, Chandran moved to London at 25 to be with British-born Siva, a family friend. She had met him when her parents offered him a lift while he was visiting Australia. Legend has it she didn’t speak a word to him because she was in such a bad mood after a fight with her father over a sleeveless shirt she’d worn that left her bra strap showing.

In London, she turned a maternity role as a pro bono officer at Allen & Overy into a decade-long position, extending the company’s pro bono reach at such a rate they joked it was the fastest-growing team in the firm. “When she wants something, she will do it,” says Jilly Field, her former colleague at Ashurst (the law firm where Chandran worked when she returned to Australia). “She has just got the capacity, the tenacity, the commitment and the absolute wild intelligence to do it.”

Chandran worked on projects in more than 30 countries, channelling the power and reach of the firm into social justice issues, including working on cases dealing with freedom of speech, unlawful detention and women’s right to access abortions. By the time she and Siva relocated to Australia at the end of 2009, with three children and a fourth on the way, she was burnt out. While she’d attended fiction workshops and created plans for a novel over the years, her desire to write intensified with the politics and polemic around border security, as Tamil asylum seekers began arriving here via boat.

“It was an educated, privileged class that could leave [Sri Lanka] in the ’70s and as a result, we became educated and privileged,” she says. “And we are growing up seeing this and thinking, ‘What is our responsibility? What is our duty to these people that have been left behind? They are our people.’ ” She felt guilty that she hadn’t done enough while working in London. “And so when I came to Australia, I thought, ‘Well, let me try writing this story because terrible things have happened. And no one knows and no one cares. And we’re complicit in it … What is my duty from my position of privilege?’ And I chose to write.”

“See, no one knows me here,” Chandran whispers as we arrive at the Sydney Writers’ Festival program launch at the cavernous Carriageworks in early March. I have just enough time to shoot her a bemused look over the heads of two young women who approach and introduce themselves, almost emotional with excitement to tell her how much they love her novels, and her. Chandran stands at the back during the speeches, as her face flashes on the screen as one of the upcoming festival’s highlight events (Chandran will appear at both the Melbourne and Sydney writers’ festivals this month). She’s wearing sneakers and carrying a canvas tote bag imprinted with an image of a library borrowing card, her hair half held in place by a mini claw clip. Chandran rarely spends money on herself, thanks to a mix of frugality and sustainability, leaving her cousins to dress her with hand-me-downs, and friends to convince her to treat herself to new dresses.

At one point, she whispers to me that she loves another festival guest, Richard Flanagan, whom she references not-so-covertly in all her novels (there’s a Flanagan River in her latest). Flanagan no longer enters the Miles Franklin, having asked his publishers to withdraw him from contention in 2017 after being shortlisted five times, and publicly questioning the value of literary prizes. The award – established by the My Brilliant Career novelist Miles Franklin for “a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases” – has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, as has the entire Australian literary industry, which is small and tight-knit at best and insular at worst. The overwhelming majority of winners have been of Anglo-Saxon and European descent, with Noongar man Kim Scott the first Indigenous person to win, sharing the prize in 2000, more than four decades after Patrick White’s win. (Scott won it solo in 2011.)

Aside from Michelle de Kretser, who was born in Sri Lanka, immigrated to Australia as a teen and won the Miles Franklin in 2013 and 2018, no other South Asian writer had received the award before.

Chandran says she’s not noticed people treating her differently since the win – mostly. “The other day, we were walking to the temple just around the corner, and there was a Sri Lankan lady there, and she wanted to meet me rather than my mother. If anything, that’s been the most significant change – that people are now more interested in talking to me than they are in talking to my mother.”

But something has changed. Not that long ago, publishers would not touch her debut novel Song of the Sun God, a multi-generational, multi-continent epic based on Chandran’s family history, about a young Tamil couple who wed on the eve of Sri Lanka’s independence from Britain before being caught in the civil war. It was written (and rewritten) over the years in between moving, work, maternity leave and mothering.

During the past decade, Australian publishing has been forced to reckon with its lack of diversity at all levels, from agents to publishers to authors. The first Australian Publishing Industry Workforce Survey on Diversity and Inclusion, a project run by the Australian Publishers Association and the University of Melbourne, released in 2022, confirmed what is obvious to anyone in the industry – it is largely white, with less than 10 per cent of workers identifying as Asian, less than 11 per cent with a European (non-British) heritage and fewer than one per cent as First Nations. And that’s now.

‘I remember lying down and putting my head on my dad’s lap and just having a good cry because of the frustration of wanting something so much ...’

In 2014, before the conversation around publishing diversity went mainstream, and when Chandran was trying to sell Song of the Sun God, those stats were worse. Tara Wynne, from the prestigious literary agency Curtis Brown, tried and failed to get the novel published in Australia. She had fallen in love with Sun God, as well as with its “exceptionally charming, hugely bright” author. Chandran was repeatedly told her story was beautiful but wouldn’t sell. She remembers calling an editor directly, desperate to understand the rejection, pushing her until she explained that it wasn’t considered “Australian enough”. It was a devastating blow.

“I was angry and also deeply saddened by it. It’s a kind of grief,” Chandran says. “Because you effectively have your place in Australia, and as the teller of Australian stories, the validity and value of that is repudiated. And you’ve always known, you’ve always sensed that you are on the margins of Australian society, but then to have it reflected back so directly about a story that to me spoke so honestly to an Australian experience.” She adds, “I remember lying down and putting my head on my dad’s lap and just having a good cry because of the frustration of wanting something so much and the barrier to entry was not the quality of the work that I was producing.”

Song of the Sun God was eventually published in Sri Lanka in 2017, in a deal Chandran says wasn’t favourable for her. It was around this point that she put on her boxing gloves and made up her mind: she would keep writing until she could bring Song of the Sun God home.

Chandran’s novels are an all-in affair. She’s not one of those writers who have a death grip on manuscripts until they’re finished or are superstitious about speaking of them too early. She invites friends and family to read her drafts and give her feedback. As a kind of thank you, they’ll often find themselves making cameos in her novels. “I think everyone in book club is there somehow,” says Su Lin Ho, who has been in a book club with Chandran for more than a decade. “I think one is a butcher, another is a sassy bartender.”

Her writing room is tucked between the living and dining rooms in her circa 1920s home in Roseville, the walls dotted with tall bookshelves, Hindu gods and goddesses, and Tamil art. A map of Indigenous Australia hangs above her desk – she’s worked significantly on issues of incarceration here – alongside portraits of her and Siva drawn by their children, a framed letter of thanks from Gordon Brown for serving on his Council on Social Action, artwork by her daughter of Siva’s ancestral home in Jaffna, and framed images of her novel covers.

Blu-Tacked to the bottom of her laptop screen is a quote that reads, “We need to redefine ‘hard work’ to include ‘hard thinking’ ... The hardest work is thinking of a better way to do it.”

Chandran says it’s encouragement for her corporate role, but it also speaks to her willingness to fight. After the blow of Song of the Sun God, she decided to give publishers exactly what they were telling her they wanted. And it worked.

“I thought, ‘What novels are getting published? If it’s a sweeping saga in the tradition of, you know, Isabel Allende, it is not getting published. What is getting published? Apocalypse novels are getting published.’ And I love a good apocalypse. I am absolutely obsessed with apocalypses, and so I was like, ‘OK, I can write an apocalypse.’ ”

In 2017, The Barrier – a sci-fi thriller set in a future world struck by a religious war and an Ebola epidemic, where issues of vaccination have divided the West from the East – became Chandran’s first novel published in Australia. Based on the feedback she’d received about Song of the Sun God, Chandran had decided to rewrite her scientist-spy protagonist, Noah Williams, as white. While acknowledging that regret is a waste of billable hours, she wishes today that she’d left her lead as South Asian.

“I should have backed myself and my style of storytelling more. I think that having a South Asian protagonist made for a much more intriguing story.” While it offered her a crash course in publishing, she was disappointed by both the novel’s reception and its sales (which she suspects were largely fuelled by her dozens of cousins).

After The Barrier, Chandran accepted that she’d probably not have a publishing career in Australia. The liberation from expectation gave her the freedom to write Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens as she wanted to write it. The story feels like a spiritual sequel to her debut, telling the story of a nursing home in western Sydney bought by Maya and Zakhir after they fled Sri Lanka during the civil war, now run by their daughter, Anji. The residents are diverse, many of them Tamil, and their stories toggle between the past and the present as the novel explores racism, trauma, colonisation and identity. At its heart, Chandran says, Chai Time is about what it means to “be Australian”.

When the Chai Time manuscript was sent to publishers in 2020, Chandran received a very different reception from that she’d received several years earlier. “When I read it, I was in love with it,” says her publisher at Ultimo Press, Robert Watkins. “I thought there was a really broad readership for it ... From the very beginning, I really was sold on the idea of a novel that feels warm and comforting but has kind of an edge to it.”

Watkins describes the book as a “Trojan horse” – the twee cover and name belying a story that doesn’t pull its punches. Readers are made comfortable, then confronted. It’s a reflection of Chandran’s own approach to the world. While she can have a forceful directness, her criticisms of social injustices are bubble-wrapped in kindness and humour. There’s a gentleness and grace that belies her fierceness.

Friend Indumathi Balachandran, a third-generation veena player, Carnatic singer, and producer, who is Tamil-Indian and has collaborated with Chandran on cultural projects, says the novel felt important for migrant communities like hers. “I remember thinking, ‘You are so brave.’ To put this in a book and to put your name to it. It’s different when you’re talking over dinner or coffee, but this is really saying it and standing by it.”

Chandran’s daughter, Ellora, says since she left home to study at university, she’s started to fully understand the impact her mum’s books have had on Tamils in Australia. “For me, and my brothers and my cousins, all the books she’s writing and all the talks she does, I very much feel that they are for us because we don’t know a lot of that stuff,” Ellora says. “We’ve only been to Sri Lanka once, and this is very much our way of connecting with that lost culture and that lost history.”

Chandran missed the multiple calls from Richard Neville, the State Library of NSW’s Mitchell Librarian and chair of the Miles Franklin Literary Award judging panel, as he attempted to tell her she had won the 2023 prize. When he finally found her, Chandran, in disbelief, had to ask him multiple times to repeat himself. “It was pretty emotional,” she says. “It’s a prize about the reflection of Australia, and for so much of my life, I’ve been uncertain of my place here. The books themselves speak to this.”

The biggest prize of all, perhaps, was that it finally helped bring Song of the Sun God home; it was published in Australia in November 2022 and then issued in a new format in July 2023 after the Miles Franklin win. And the flow-on continues. The Audible Original, Unfinished Business, a reworking of a political thriller Chandran had completed years earlier but could not find a publisher for, will be published in book form this year. Notably, Chandran has switched the novel’s protagonist, CIA agent and human rights lawyer Ellie Harper, from being white to having South Asian ancestry.

Safe Haven, her first new novel to be published since the win, takes on Australia’s offshore detention policy and community advocacy. Inspired by high-profile cases like that of the Nadesalingam family (often known as “the Biloela family”), it tells the stories of a refugee threatened with deportation and the community that activates to help her, and a lawyer investigating the death of a security officer at a fictional detention centre. Readers will recognise the same quiet fury and gentle humour that drives all of Chandran’s novels, as well as her ongoing interest in representing the Sri Lankan civil war and the experience of Tamils in her fiction.

Chandran wrote the novel before she won the Miles Franklin but knows the prize means there will be increased expectation and attention. Her belief in her work is tempered by nerves, particularly that the book might be politicised given the recent High Court ruling that indefinite detention is unlawful. “I would say, ‘Read the book,’ ” she says preemptively. “‘Think about the questions that it’s actually asking.’ ”

The promotional campaign for Safe Haven adds more talks, events and deadlines to Chandran’s to-do list. Each time we speak, there’s a long list of commitments ahead as well as behind her. She admits she’s unsure how much longer she can sustain this intense pace. After a long seminar in Melbourne one day recently, she returned home and did something unremarkable to many of us but almost unheard of for her: she zoned out. “I literally lay down in the foetal position, with children either lying around or ignoring me completely, depending on the child, and watched the second half of The Equalizer. I then proceeded to watch The Equalizer 2; I had already seen both movies but I rewatched them.”

Her law-school friend, Rebekah Cheney, has been watching the demands pile up since the Miles Franklin win with mild concern. “I’m always saying to her, ‘If you want to be remarkable, you can’t be busy. They don’t work well together. And for you to continue to be remarkable and for your next book to be your best yet, you need the headspace,’ ” Cheney says. “She has everything that a person could need to be remarkable. And I want her to continue to be remarkable.”

How to be less busy, though? Chandran is reluctant to leave her corporate role – she enjoys the social purpose. And she won’t take her success as a writer for granted either, nor the ability to make a living wage from novels. Nor does she assume she’ll always be published. The “migrant mentality”, as she calls it, the sense that scarcity is just around the corner, is always with her. But there’s something else, too: a deep sense of duty and desire to help others. And a hopeful sense – perhaps emboldened by her publishing turnaround of recent years – that things can get better.

“I do wake up every morning thinking that social change is possible, and I will die thinking that social change is possible, and there is an optimism and a hopefulness in that. I think the fact that I’ve brought four children into the world, knowing what the world is, suggests that I am optimistic.”

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