Shankari Chandran wins 2023 Miles Franklin award for Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens

Set around a culture war in a nursing home, Chandran’s third novel has won Australia’s biggest literary prize – and yet, she says, she was almost too afraid to write it

Shankari Chandran’s Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, an intergenerational epic confronting Australia’s uneasy relationship with multiculturalism and postcolonial trauma, has won the 2023 Miles Franklin literary award.

Chandran, a Sydney-based lawyer of Tamil heritage, collected the prestigious $60,000 award in Sydney on Tuesday night. The judges praised Chandran’s third novel, set in an aged care facility in contemporary western Sydney and Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war, as an accomplished work of character, dialogue and action.

“It treads carefully on contested historical claims, reminding us that horrors forgotten are horrors bound to be repeated, and that the reclamation and retelling of history cannot be undertaken without listening to the story-tellers amongst us,” the judges’ said in a joint statement.