Departures: 2012 Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlist announced

The Trust Company, as Trustee, and the 2012 judges today announced the shortlist for this year's Miles Franklin Literary Award, regarded as Australia's most prestigious literary prize. Announced at the State Library of New South Wales, the 2012 shortlist features five works of fiction and includes a mixture of well-established Australian authors and first time novelists.

Established by writer, Miles Franklin, to support and encourage authors of Australian literature, the Miles Franklin Literary Award is Australia's oldest and most prestigious literary prize. The winner of the award will receive $50,000 for the novel of the year judged to be of the highest literary merit which "must present Australian life in any of its phases".

For the first time this year the five person judging panel were formally authorised by the Trustee to use their discretion to modernise the interpretation of Australian life beyond geographical boundaries to include mindset, language, history and values.

The 2012 Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlist is:

Tony Birch Blood University of Queensland Press

Anna Funder All That I Am Hamish Hamilton (Penguin Group Australia)

Gillian Mears Foal's Bread Allen & Unwin

Frank Moorhouse Cold Light Vintage (Random House Australia)

Favel Parrett Past the Shallows Hachette Australia (Hachette imprint)

Judging the 2012 Miles Franklin Literary Award is Richard Neville, State Library of New South Wales Mitchell Librarian, Professor Gillian Whitlock, Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow at the University of Queensland, Murray Waldren, journalist and columnist at The Australian, Anna Low, a Sydney based bookseller and Dr Julianne Schultz AM, founding editor of Griffith REVIEW.

Speaking on behalf of the judging panel, Gillian Whitlock said: "This year we had a big longlist that made the judging panel reflect on the power of historical fiction, extending from the colonial period through to memories of the world wars and their aftermath. We see this reflected in the shortlisted fictions by Anna Funder and Frank Moorhouse.

"We also see more contemporary lives explored with a turn to trauma narratives and childhood, in the shortlisted novels by Tony Birch, Favel Parrett and Gillian Mears. The breadth of the shortlist includes well-known and loved Australian authors and includes the end of one of the great historical trilogies in Cold Light, as well as featuring two wonderful first time novelists. The Miles Franklin prize is now more than ever a national celebration of Australian writing," Ms Whitlock said.

John Atkin, CEO of The Trust Company, commended the five shortlisted authors on their challenging and evocative novels, "The Trust Company is extremely proud to be associated with the Miles Franklin Award and as Trustee we are constantly working to maintain and develop the legacy Miles Franklin entrusted us with for the advancement of Australian literature. As part of that role we have been looking at the ambiguity around "Australian life in any of its phases". It has been much cause for debate and there has been a traditionally conservative interpretation of the quote. I wrote to the judges authorising them to use their discretions to modernise the interpretation of "Australianess" beyond geographical boundaries to include mindset, language, history and values, as is in keeping with the current Australian literary landscape."

Each of the shortlisted authors will be awarded $5,000 prize money from Copyright Agency Limited's Cultural Fund, a long-term partner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

The shortlist events at National Library of Australia, Canberra on 29 May, also sponsored by the Copyright Agency's Cultural Fund include a public meet the author event. The winner will be announced in Brisbane on 20 June 2012 at the State Library of Queensland.

DVD Review: 2012

2012. 151 minutes. Rated M. Directed by Roland Emmerich. Written by Roland Emmerich and Harald Kloser.

One of the many great attractions of cinema is the artform's ability to create magic – to capture our imagination and transport us to another time and place where we spend time sharing in the lives of others. We can walk away from the cinema enriched, moved, educated and entertained. We can spend hours afterwards discussing the story, the characters, particular scenes and how we feel about what we have just witnessed. When magic happens in the cinema, it has the power to change the way we think about life and our place in the world. It can, in short, be the most enriching experience. But when we are promised magic and it never appears, then it's an entirely different story.

When science-fiction writer Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) discovers that Earth is about to be destroyed by an environmental catastrophe that will trigger a contintent-swamping mega-tsunami, he also learns that gigantic arks have been secretly built (in China) to ensure the survival of humanity. At one billion euros (one a half billion Australian dollars) a ticket, Curtis cannot hope to afford tickets for his ex-wife and his two children, so instead, he resolves to find these massive lifeboats and smuggle his family onboard.

It's almost impossible to imagine what went wrong with this film. Its classy production pedigree, experienced cast and a massive $200 million plus budget should have guaranteed at least something – but the lazy, cliché-ridden script and the awful "acting" combine to result in a film so incomprehensibly bad that it is only ever, and almost immediately, just boring. While a couple of the set-pieces are impressively imagined (watch out for a rogue aircraft carrier heading for Washington DC), the lavish scale of the end-of-the-world destruction sequences actually only results in them only looking and feeling fake. That they wipe-out most of the film's cloyingly bad acting actually only ends up being a blessed relief.

Emmerich (Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow, 10,000 BC) and composer-turned-screenplay-writer Kloser, share all the responsibility for this monumental dud that utterly fails to generate one moment of genuine emotion or interest throughout its tedious, interminable two-and-a-half hour running time. But even so, Emmerich has actually achieved something quite unique. He's managed to make a film about the end of the world that I, for one, couldn't have cared less about. Maybe that is a kind of magic after all?