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What Kept You?

What Kept You?

Raaza Jamshed

A coming-of-age story set in a world marked by political turmoil and the threat of violence, What Kept You? is the powerful debut novel by Raaza Jamshed. A feminist anti-tale, written in a uniquely expressive voice that floats between English, Urdu and Arabic, the book explores survival, metamorphosis, and the radical freedom of choosing one’s own ending. ‘An energetic new voice in Australian fiction: vivid in expression and bold in vision’ (Gail Jones).

Fiction
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Joss: A History

Joss: A History

Grace Yee

Grace Yee’s follow-up to her triple award-winning poetry collection Chinese Fish, Joss: A History is inspired by the lived experiences of early Chinese settlers in Bendigo, and their compatriots and descendants Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. The poems pay tribute to the author’s ancestors, illuminating how they survived – and thrived – amid longstanding colonialist stories that have exoticised and diminished Chinese communities in white settler nations since the nineteenth century.

Poetry
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July release

Raaza Jamshed, author of What Kept You

‘This novel is, in many ways, a story told at the mouth of catastrophe, where fairy tales meet headlines, where frogs kissed become dogs, and girls sucked by shadows reappear elsewhere,’ writes Raaza Jamshed in her note on What Kept You?. ‘But it’s also a love song to return, to storytelling as survival, to metamorphosis. If Kafka imagined metamorphosis as a man waking up a bug, I wanted to ask: What does metamorphosis look like for women who change slowly, imperceptibly, under the grind of history, migration, grief?’

What Kept You? launches on 31 July in Parramatta, NSW. Register here.

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Coming soon

Recent releases

Alexis Wright

News

Raaza Jamshed: a note on What Kept You?

‘What can return look like, not just to a place, or a life interrupted, but to a self? What Kept You? is, in many ways, a series of responses to that question. Each chapter could be read as an answer to a different dimension of what keeps us away, or stands between us and the path home.’

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rock flight by Hasib Hourani wins 2025 Mary Gilmore Award

‘rock flight is an extended poetic negotiation with certainty: the certainty of colonial violence, of dispossession, of the forces that degrade home and homeland, and of the suffering to self and family and collective identity that comes of these modern conditions. rock flight also performs the certainty of witnessing, of testimony, of the bonds of family and memory.’

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HEAT

HEAT, Australia's international literary magazine

HEAT subscriptions

HEAT 19 features writing by Miro Bilbrough, Chris Andrews, Vanessa Berry, Michael Farrell, Miriam Webster, and Reyumeh Ejue. Subscribe now to receive this and future issues of Australia’s international literary magazine.

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Award-winning titles

Authors

π.O.

Π.O. is a legendary figure in the Australian poetry scene, the chronicler of Melbourne and its culture and migrations, and an anarchist who has worked as a draughtsman for forty years to support his art. He is the publisher of Unusual Work by Collective Effort Press, a long-time magazine editor, a pioneer of performance poetry in Australia, and the author of many collections. His latest books are HEIDE and The Tour.

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Amy Crutchfield

Amy Crutchfield studied Classics and Law at the University of Melbourne. Her poetry has been published in Australia, the UK and Ireland. She has worked as a teacher and a lawyer. The Cyprian is her first book.

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