We've read every book on the 2026 Miles Franklin shortlist. Who will win?

Um, and Sarah, why don't we start with a Chinese hopping zombie in Steve Minon's First Name Second Name.

[upbeat music] First Name Second Name is the first novel by the Queensland-based writer Steve Minon, and the setup for this one, I don't reckon it can be beat.

A, a corpse wakes up in a hospital morgue.

It's stiff with rigor mortis.

It flings its body onto the floor.

It starts walking north.

It wants to walk all the way back to Innisfail in Queensland, back to the place of its birth.

And so in every alternating chapter in this book, we are with this rotting corpse, and yes, it does continue to rot as the book goes on.

It's the corpse of this Asian Australian man called Steven Bo Lin, and Steven is compelled to walk and walk and walk all the way home, and occasionally attack people and suck the life force out of them.

Uh, so of course, my first question to Steve Minon is, why a walking corpse?

I became interested in this idea because I was always sort of interested in the idea of regret that you have when you die, and, um, I was thinking about that idea when I s- went looking, researching in cemeteries in Far North Queensland because I wanted to know a little bit more about the Chinese in Far North Queensland.

There's a really big history of the Chinese if you go looking for it.

It's not commonly known.

And there's a cemetery up there where all of the graves are, um, uh, separated i- along religious lines and then sort of out in the bush there's, kind of have to walk for quite a way to get there, there is a shrine to the Chinese who were in- originally interred in that cemetery.

The interesting thing that I found was that there's, uh, uh, an information board that says the Chinese who were interred, most of them had been returned back to China, and I was interested in this idea of most of them-

Hmm

... 'cause what happened to the others? And it made me think, oh, if there's possibly souls that are not at rest here in this cemetery, and that led me down the path of in, of researching what happens to Chinese souls who are not at rest.

And this is where this, this word jiangshi comes in, right?

Yes, that's right.

Tell me about jiangshi.

They're known as, i- in Hong Kong cinema, as the Chinese hopping vampire, but before Hong Kong cinema, they a- actually have a traditional or, um, myth associated with them.

It began back in the Qing Dynasty when there were a lot of, uh, uh, workers who were working far away from home, and they would, um, have an accident or die of natural causes far away from their place of birth, and there became a, a sort of a mini industry returning them back to the town of their birth so that they could be buried.

And there were some people who could afford to send them back in a, uh, on a carriage, but there were others who had to walk the corpses back, and they walked them back strung between two poles of bamboo upright, and they walked them at night.

Um, I suppose local villagers would see them walking through the night and attribute them to being some kind of demon or something supernatural, and so that's where the myth began.

began.[gentle music] And actually, the character Steven, he does leave a dying request that his body is escorted back to Innisfail in this way, Sarah, strung up between these two bamboo poles.