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Mick Cummins bumped into his neighbour a few weeks ago. The man knew that Cummins had been shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s unpublished manuscript award so gave him a copy of previous winner Miles Allinson’s Fever of Animals.
“And there it was across the top, winner of the unpublished manuscript award, 2014,” Cummins said with glee.
The award has something of a Midas touch. Plenty of winners have gone on to great things in the literary world, so 69-year-old Cummins, who won this year’s award on Thursday, has some big shoes to fill. He gets $15,000 for his novel One Divine Night, but, more importantly, he stands an odds-on chance of seeing his work for sale in a bookshop in the not-too-distant future.
Mick Cummins says he could not shake off a tragic story he read in The Sunday Age.Credit:Joe Armao
When the shortlist was announced, a couple of publishers got in touch to ask for a copy of the manuscript to read. One got back to say they would wait and see the outcome of the awards. “I wasn’t actually aware of how influential the prize was. Until it started happening really.”
Cummins should consider the case of Graeme Simsion, who won the award for The Rosie Project – first published 10 years ago this week – which has sold several million copies. A few years after Simsion, Jane Harper won for The Dry, the crime novel that ushered in the outback-noir genre and was turned into a successful film starring Eric Bana. Others to have won the prize include inaugural winner Carrie Tiffany, Maxine Beneba Clarke, and Christian White.
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One Divine Night was inspired by a story Cummins read in The Sunday Age.
“That must have been about 10 years ago now. It was about this young man who was abused by his grandfather who was fairly high up in government and so forth. The story just wouldn’t leave me and finally at the beginning of lockdown my partner said ‘well, why don’t you just write a novel’.”
Cummins cut it fine, entering the award the day before the deadline. He says his story follows his character, Aaron Peters, as he becomes estranged from his family, addicted to heroin, and living on the streets all while “wanting to be something, wanting his life without the pain, without the heroin. So the story really is about that journey”.