The Miles Franklin Literary Award is an annual literary prize awarded to "a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases". The award was set up according to the will of Miles Franklin (1879–1954), who is best known for writing the Australian classic My Brilliant Career (1901). She bequeathed her estate to fund this award. As of 2025, the award is valued at A$60,000.

The prize originally took its date from the year in which eligible novels were published, ignoring the fact that it was not awarded until the following year.

The prize is still for the best novel published during the preceding year, but now bears the date of the year in which it is awarded. While the change meant there was no prize called "1988", there is no break in the annual series. The award for novels published in 1987 was announced on 10 May 1988 as the "1987" prize (won by Glenda Adams), and the award for novels published in 1988 was announced on 25 July 1989 as the "1989" prize (won by Peter Carey).

Author Frank Moorhouse was disqualified from consideration for his novel Grand Days because the story was set in Europe during the 1920s and was not sufficiently Australian.

1995 winner Helen Darville, also known as Helen Demidenko and Helen Dale, won for The Hand That Signed the Paper and sparked a debate about authenticity in Australian literature. Darville claimed to be of Ukrainian descent and said it was fiction based on family history. Writer David Marr, who presented the award to her, said that revelations about her true background did not "alter a single thing about the quality of the story, it knocks completely out of the water her answers to critics who said it was not historically accurate, that she knows because of direct family experience, which appears to be complete bull----."

Even before the hoax was revealed, Darville’s book was considered anti-Semitic and justified the genocide of Jewish people. It was also later revealed that she plagiarised from multiple sources.

In 2004, three judges resigned due to what they viewed as the commodification of the awards.

2022 longlisted writer John Hughes was accused of plagiarising significant sections of his 2021 book The Dogs from Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich's nonfiction book The Unwomanly Face of War. Nearly 60 similarities and identical sentences were found in a comparison of Hughes' novel and the English version of Alexievich's book. The Guardian newspaper also found similarities between incidents described in the books, including the central scene from which The Dogs takes its title. Further investigation found other examples of plagiarism in the novel and that Hughes copied sections of classic texts including The Great Gatsby and Anna Karenina without acknowledging the original source. The book was subsequently withdrawn from competition.