THE debut novel by Marija Pericic is about a spectacular Kafkaesque literary fraud involving Franz Kafka and his literary executor Max Brod. And it has earned her the Vogel Literary Award.
Dying of tuberculosis in 1924, Franz Kafka, the German language writer, instructed his closest friend to take his diaries and draft works and burn them, "completely and unread" after his death.
Literary executor Max Brod went on to defy Kafka's last wishes publishing his novels, even completing unfinished manuscripts, and so cemented his friend's reputation as a literary giant of the 20th century.
A debut novel reimagining the writers' roles in a spectacular literary fraud has won the Vogel Literary Award, Australia's richest literary prize for an undiscovered manuscript.
Melbourne English language teacher Marija Pericic receives $20,000, and her book, The Lost Pages, has been published by Allen & Unwin, available in stores immediately.
The Lost Pages opens in Prague in 1908, at the cusp of Kafka's rise to fame and pertains to be a lost memoir of Brod. It is Pericic's first attempt at a novel and its writing took her to the Czech Republic and Germany during which she kept the enterprise secret from all but her partner and closest friends.
"I just loved literature and I always wanted to write a novel, and then I just did and I didn't tell anyone I was doing it," Pericic says.
"I did it alongside my work as an English language teacher. It took me about five years. I found it hard to talk about it, but I also didn't want to talk about it in case I never did it or I never completed it. I had a daily quota of 1000 words and I just did that and, after a while, I couldn't have stopped even if I wanted to."
The coveted manuscript prize is open to writers 35 years and under and has launched the careers of Gillian Mears, Tim Winton and Kate Grenville.
Pericic hadn't thought she'd stood a chance given 2016's winner, Katherine Brabon's The Memory Artist, had also been set in Eastern Europe and had no links to Australia in setting or plot.
"Because I'm now 35 it was my last chance at the Vogel's. It's a dream come true for me, and it felt so unreal to me. The next day I woke up and wondered if it had happened or not."
The genesis for The Lost Pages came from a New York Times article outlining the court squabble over Kafka's papers and manuscripts inherited by two "septuagenarian cat ladies" living in Israel. Their ownership had been disputed by a German literary archive and the National Library of Israel – since resolved in favour of the library.
Pericic had been unimpressed by the few Kafka's stories she had read, the author coming across as "quite a depressing man, pretty neurotic". "Then, when I researched him, no, he was actually very charming, handsome, very successful at his job.
"He was an insurance lawyer and he developed all these safety devices for factory workers and the civilian safety helmet as well. It was totally not the same as the public image of Kafka, and I didn't expect that."
Living today Pericic thinks Kafka would be an internet hit, an icon for a deeply cynical generation living online lives. "He's hugely before his time," she says.
"I was trying to interrogate that idea of self and a creative work and its creator, and the links between [them>[/embedp>
