Wiradjuri author Tara June Winch has won the Miles Franklin Literary Award — Australia’s most prestigious writing prize, and one of its richest at $60,000 — for her novel ‘The Yield’.

Winch is the fourth Indigenous Australian author to win the prize, following last year’s winner Melissa Lucashenko (for Too Much Lip), Kim Scott (who shared the prize in 2000 for Benang and won again in 2011 with That Deadman Dance) and Alexis Wright (for Carpentaria, 2007).

The Yield’ follows a 30-something woman, August, as she returns home from overseas to her small town of Massacre Plains for the funeral of her grandfather, Albert.’

Her family home is about to be demolished for a new tin mine and she’s trying to find a dictionary that “Poppy” Albert was writing before he died.

The book refracts Winch’s vision of past, present and future Australia through three characters, or voices, in alternating chapters: August, her grandfather Albert Gondiwindi (through excerpts from his Wiradjuri-language dictionary), and a 19th-century missionary, Reverend Greenleaf (through his letters to the British Society of Ethnography in 1915).

Other books that were shortlisted for the Miles Franklin included Rony Birch’s ‘The White Girl’, Carrie Tiffany’s. ‘Exploded View’, John Hughes’ ‘No One’, Peggy Frew ‘Islands’ and Philip Salon’s ‘The Returns’/