A grotesque hopping vampire, pioneering Chinese gold digger and ambitious marketing executive consumed by regret make for an unlikely trio in a Hamilton author’s book shortlisted for the 2026 Miles Franklin Literary Award.
Author Steve MinOn said: “I was going to write a heroic migrant story – the noble migrant… And then I realized that that was reductive of what the migrant experience was.”
“So I wanted to write a more multi-dimensional, private story.”
MinOn’s debut novel First Name Last Name is a fictional retelling of his own family history.
On his father’s side, his family is pre-federation Australian, descended from Pan Min On who emigrated from China during the 19th century gold rush.
Compare these names and you may get a hint at the book title’s significance.
On his mother’s side, he is the child of a Scottish immigrant.
Yet, it was always his Chinese identity which made him feel out of place.
MinOn wrote this novel “to find some answers to some questions that I had”.
“[It] is what a lot of authors do, you know, they work it out on paper,” he said.
“It’s a little bit like play acting – you can get some distance from the personal story by putting it in the hands of the other characters.”
The book’s through line of the man-turned-vampire – called a jiangshi – making his way back to his hometown was inspired by a small sign on a Chinese shrine at the back of a cemetery near Cooktown.
The sign said most of the Chinese people on the Palmer Goldfields who died had been interred at the cemetery but returned back to China.
“I was fixated on the idea of, what happened to the ones who weren’t returned back to China?” MinOn said.
Researching Chinese traditions, he found out the jiangshi were inspired by the sight of bouncing corpses, arms strung over bamboo poles, being carried from the place they died back to their place of birth to be buried.
The metaphor of the jiangshi trying to get home expresses the protagonist Stephen’s “generational regrets”.
“The chief one of those is his family, as a mixed-race family, is leaning away… from the Chinese side of their heritage towards the Scottish side,” MinOn said.
On the jiangshi’s journey north, his body’s horrifying decomposition is detailed along the way in a morbid but matter-of-fact manner – MinOn’s dry humour shining through.
This literary device helped MinOn articulate the mixture of emotions he feels about his own body.
“One of the reasons I wanted to use body horror was because so much of my experience as a half-Chinese person has been about people criticizing my body,” MinOn said.
“When these things are happening to people, it’s very hard for them to explain it, as the intensity of the feeling is very personal.
“For somebody who doesn’t have that same experience, it’s hard to accept on face value the intensity of the feeling.
“So, you use an analogy like a walking corpse to try to do it poetically as opposed to prosaically,” he said.
MinOn said this book tells the story of Australia too – a country which has not faced up to its past.
Set in the tropics of coastal Queensland, the oppressive weight of the northern humidity mirrors the ever-present questions of identity that hover over the book’s characters.
“I appreciate the gothic nature of the landscape. Nature imposes itself on you, nature imposes itself on that main character, and I think there’s a lesson there for us all,” MinOn said.
