Alec Patric was only six or seven when he realised that writing was important. His mother was involved in a poetry competition between Australia and Yugoslavia and he sat holding her hand in a university lecture theatre.
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"And her name is announced and she goes down and makes a speech and I see my mother get an award for a poem she wrote. That is probably the most significant moment in my life."
Fast forward to Friday night and he might want to change that assessment as it is Alec Patric getting the award – this year's Miles Franklin, Australia's most important literary prize, for his first novel, Black Rock White City. He has previously published two collections of short stories and a novella.
The prize was presented at the opening of the Melbourne Writers Festival at which Maxine Beneba Clarke delivered a keynote address bouncing off her new memoir, The Hate Race, about growing up black in Australia.
Black Rock White City tells of two refugees from the Bosnian civil war, Jovan and Suzana, both writers, negotiating in the late '90s their new and very different lives in bayside Melbourne, dealing with the traumas of war, exile and loss. Jovan is working as a cleaner in a hospital that is subject to a spate of graffiti attacks that are getting more aggressive and more focused.
Judges spokesman Richard Neville, Mitchell Librarian at the State Library of NSW, said the novel's urgent narrative "envelops the reader in one of the great issues of our time".
The Fairfax review of Black Rock White City described it as "formally rigorous and emotionally powerful, (Patric's) new novel can only add to his stature as one of the most fascinating writers in this part of the world".
Patric's parents migrated from Serbia in the early '70s: "They came to Australia to give their children new possibilities, and for me to win the Miles Franklin, that's certainly that coming to fruition," he said.
Patric wins $65,000 while the other novelists on the shortlist – Peggy Frew (Hope Farm), Myfanwy Jones (Leap), Lucy Treloar (Salt Creek) and Charlotte Wood (The Natural Way of Things) – each take home $5000.
Patric was surprised to win the prize, which is given to a novel that depicts "Australian life in any of its phases".
"Generally speaking, if you look at what the Miles Franklin has been given to in the past," he said, "it hasn't often represented multicultural perspectives yet multiculturalism has been a very significant part of Australian life and culture for decades."
He said the disintegration of Yugoslavia was relevant to Australia because it had been one of the first countries to set up as a multicultural society and its collapse was significant to all such societies. "These people really are part of Australian culture, part of Australian society. They do live amongst us and ... it's really important for us to understand where we really are."
But he was quick to point out that the book is no political rant. "It was driven by a love of literature, of art, a love of peace, a love of family, of children, a love of all those things that are significant to people simply being able to live happy lives."
For him literature "is a religion ... Jane Smiley said it is an act of humanity; not in terms of saving other people but simply in enlarging ourselves and our sense of self".
When Patric is not writing literature, he sells it in his day job at Readings' St Kilda bookshop. So what happens to Black Rock White City?
"You don't generally sell your own book. If someone said I want a book about Bosnian refugees living in Melbourne set in a bayside suburb, even then I would hesitate to say here's my book. All I can do is leave the book there and hopefully people will discover it."
After winning the Miles Franklin, plenty more people are going to discover Black Rock White City.
