Alexis Wright is the winner of the 2024 Melbourne Prize for Literature, worth $60,000. The announcement was made on 14 November at a ceremony at Federation Square, Melbourne.

Awarded triennially, and now in its twentieth year, the prize aims to recognise a Victorian writer whose ‘body of published work has made an outstanding contribution to Australian literature and to cultural and intellectual life’. This year’s shortlist of four included anarchist poet π.O., also published by Giramondo, who last month received the 2024 Patrick White Literary Award. The last Giramondo author to win the prize was Gerald Murnane in 2009.

The judges this year were Evelyn Araluen, Michael Williams and Christos Tsiolkas.

Araluen commented: ‘While we’re privileged to have a wealth of phenomenal writers in Melbourne, Alexis embodies an order of excellence and influence that is transformational for her readers, First Nations or otherwise. It has been a privilege to read her throughout my life, and I’m honoured to have been able to play a role in affirming yet another well-deserved accolade for all her achievements.’

In addition to the Melbourne Prize, Alexis Wright has this year won awards including the Miles Franklin Literary Award, Stella Prize and the UK’s James Tait Black Prize for her epic novel, Praiseworthy. Other books by Alexis Wright are Carpentaria, The Swan Book, and Tracker, with each winning major literary awards.

Wright will be appearing later this month at the Mountain Festival in Macedon, Victoria. Learn more here.

Further reading

• The Guardian
• ABC Arts

Giramondo Publishing is pleased to announce the appointment of Anna Thwaites as the new editor of HEAT magazine.

Anna has had nearly fifteen years of editorial experience in Australian publishing. She started out as assistant editor at the political and cultural Arena Magazine, and then worked as editor and assistant to the publisher at Scribe Publications from 2014 to 2020. More recently she has been co-editor of the live event and chapbook series Slow Canoe (with Oliver Driscoll) and of the micro-journal Paragraph (with Caitie Lawless), where she has commissioned and developed work from new and established writers around the world. Alongside these projects and a lively and various freelance editing career, she has worked at two of Melbourne’s best independent bookshops, Readings and The Paperback. She has an Honours degree in literature and philosophy from ANU and a postgraduate qualification in editing and publishing from RMIT.

‘Anna has been actively involved with the literary community for many years, as a magazine and book editor, and bookseller, and her expertise, and enthusiasm for contemporary writing, will bring a new editorial vision to HEAT, and to Giramondo’, according to Giramondo publisher Ivor Indyk.

‘HEAT is a visionary magazine,’ Anna Thwaites comments, ‘conceived in anger and pursued with integrity. The wealth of talent and skill, the variety and challenge of the writing that has been published within its pages across the three series has so often reinvigorated my belief in what it is possible for a literary magazine – Australian and international – to be.’

Anna’s first issue as editor will be HEAT Series 3 Number 18, released in March 2025.

HEAT was founded in 1996, in the wake of the Demidenko affair, with the purpose of publishing innovative Australian and international writers of the highest quality. Fifteen issues were published in the first series, from 1996 to 2000. It was succeeded by the second series of HEAT, designed by Harry Williamson, with twenty-four issues published between 2001 and 2011. The third series, designed by Jenny Grigg and initially edited by Alexandra Christie, began publication early in 2022, in a print format delivered directly to readers and available from selected bookstores.

The third series of HEAT has been made possible by a multi-year funding grant from Creative Australia, and the continuing support of Western Sydney University.

The Prodigal

Reeds stuck to her unwashed hair
and her cheek was bruised from sleeping
on the long string of tulasī beads she’d
bought at a temple stall in Tiruchirappalli.
Unbeknown to her they would tattoo
her skin in the night, writing their faint,
inscrutable calligraphy. No less than road
signs or stars or the compass of her GPS
(when the Airtel Towers gave signal),
she placed faith in the skein of these
wooden auguries. If they broke, she’d
weigh again the argument of freedom
over sanctuary, wild arithmetic that had
led her away from what was promised,
already hers. Her sandals – loose from
the monsoon – had been repaired at mochī
twice over; and the clothes she had taken
quickly, in the dead of night, slipping by
undetected while the watchman slept –
yellowed, grown threadbare. Legs sore
from wandering, she quenched her thirst on
salt lassis in random pure-veg restaurants,
counting her cash and days under the aegis
of goddesses with supernumerary arms.
Slick with yoga and āyurveda, their earthly
consorts flexed lissom torsos next door,
while a man whose legs belied all algebra
described exponential circles in the market –
his vāhana a makeshift skateboard. Stooping
to offer her leftover bhaji puri, she recalled
the rheumy eyes of the family dog Prabhu,
to whom she’d secretly feed breakfast rotis
under the table – later vomited in the yard.
In Rishikesh she entered the arms of a pilgrim
who, as he kissed her, whispered an Upanisad
of Isha: ‘He who sees all beings in himself and
himself in all beings loses all fear’ – but sensing
only her own anxiety, she soon took to the hills.
Through the window of a toy train, workers’
children played a game, balancing on steel rods
of a building site; between them, a celestial drop;
then mountains, ranges – called Dhauladhar.
In that last town, monkeys kept her awake, running
across the tin roof of the guesthouse and stealing
apples the caretaker’s wife, suspecting she was ill,
left out for her. One morning, instinct directed
her to a doctor on the town outskirts; a sign on the
grubby, scarred door thus qualified his credentials:
‘Sex determination of foetus not performed here’…
Afterwards, she kept walking, now and again resting
on hay bales, until farmers chased her away.
As she entered the river to wash, she realised it
was the glacial cover she’d seen earlier forming
the current and in its swift stream caught sight
of the bright wings of birds. It hardly mattered
she could not identify them by name, for their
choruses swelled in her, soon grew unmistakable.

The titular poem from pp.1-2 of The Prodigal.

Legendary Melbourne poet π.O. has won the 2024 Patrick White Literary Award, receiving $20,000 in recognition of his outstanding contribution to Australian literature. The announcement was made on 25 October by the award’s trustee, Perpetual.

The Patrick White Literary Award was established by Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick White to advance Australian literature ‘by encouraging the writing of novels, short stories, poetry and plays for publication or performance’. It is awarded to an author who has made an ongoing contribution to Australian literature but may not have received adequate recognition.

Born in Greece and brought up in Fitzroy, π.O. is a chronicler of Melbourne and its culture and migrations, and a highly disciplined anarchist who has worked as a draughtsman for forty years to support his art. His two most recent books are HEIDE (2019) and The Tour (2023). He is a finalist for the 2024 Melbourne Prize for Literature.

π.O. will be officially honoured at the Patrick White Literary Award celebration at Readings State Library Victoria on Wednesday 13 November from 6pm. Members of the public are welcome to attend, and can RSVP by emailing philanthropy@perpetual.com.au.

The 2024 judging panel comprised Ms Michelle de Kretser (Chair), Dr Kerryn Goldsworthy and Dr Sarah Holland-Batt. Read their citation below.

 
π.O. is a poet, publisher and literary editor from Melbourne who was born in Greece in 1951. In 1954 his family immigrated to Australia, where they settled in Fitzroy. For the past forty years, π.o. has worked as a draughtsman to support his creative practice, which is informed by his working-class, non-Anglo background and his anarchist politics.

Fitzroy brothel, π.O.’s first collection of poems, was published in 1974. Since then π.O. has published twelve books of poetry, including Big Numbers: New and Selected Poems (2008). He edited 925 and Unusual Work, magazines focusing on experimental literature, as well as Off The Road, an anthology of performance poetry (1985). π.O. is also a publisher at Collective Effort press.

A pioneering practitioner of spoken word and performance poetry in Australia, π.o. campaigned for its acceptance as a valid poetic form. On the page, his poems continue to display a lively and witty interest in spoken language: migrant idioms, working-class speech and Australian colloquialisms jostle and unsettle standard English in his work. Similarly, an encyclopaedic range of sources – proverbs, science writing, historical documents, classical mythology and children’s games to name a few – provide disparate linguistic elements that are juxtaposed in his poems to brilliant effect. The range and diversity of his registers remind us that π.O. is always, and foremost, an intensely political writer. 

Along with its deployment of the vernacular, π.O.’s poetry is characterised by the idiosyncratic use of punctuation and spelling. His concrete poems employ numbers, punctuation marks and other typographical devices in visually striking ways; see, for instance, Missing Form: Concrete, visual and experimental poems (1981). According to Andy Jackson, writing in The Saturday Paper, π.O.’s ‘invigorating use of punctuation and phonetic spelling reminds us that language is always vocal, accented and political’.  In short, π.O. has always favoured a radical and experimental poetics, which for many years went unrecognised by mainstream Australian literature.

24 hours: The day the language stood still (1996) is the first volume in π.O.’s ‘epic’ trilogy. It was followed by Fitzroy: The Biography (2015) and Heide (2019). In Fishing for Lightning, Sarah Holland-Batt suggests that these works function, in fact, as anti-epics, as the poet chooses nonlinear histories and an array of characters over the epic’s linearity and heroic single protagonist. Yet π.O.’s poems retain the sweep and scale of the epic, moving fluently backwards and forwards in time to uncover and scrutinise the echoes between present and past. Together, these three monumental volumes are consummate mappings of cities and their denizens: they seek to replicate the metropolis’s kaleidoscopic and anarchic nature at the level of concept, language and line. 

The Tour (2023), π.O.’s most recent book, chronicles the tensions within a group of Australian poets touring North America in the mid-1980s. Lucy Van, reviewing it for the Sydney Review of Books, calls it ‘the achievement of π.o.’s life [because] it actively bears the burden of the orders and disorders of our national poetry’.

In recent years, prize juries have recognised π.o.’s significant contribution to Australian literature with awards and nominations. Heide won the 2020 Judith Wright Calanthe Prize in the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and was shortlisted in the 2020 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, while The Tour was longlisted for the 2024 ALS Gold Medal. In addition, π.O. was a finalist for the 2021 Melbourne Prize for Literature; he is currently a finalist for the same prize. It would seem that Australia is finally catching up with π.O.

When considering π.O.’s body of work, the judges of the Patrick White Literary Award were particularly impressed by his unflinching commitment to an experimental poetics and engagement with place, along with the wit and energy of his work. They noted that at every stage of his career, π.O. has defied literary norms, forging a distinctive, idiosyncratic and profound contribution to Australian literature, expanding its boundaries and possibilities for all who follow him.

The judges congratulate π.O. on the award.

Anne de Marcken is the winner of the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction for It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over. The work is the American author’s debut novel and second book.

Now in its third year, the prize is ‘an annual $25,000 cash prize given to a writer for a single work of imaginative fiction’ and is ‘intended to recognize those writers Ursula spoke of in her 2014 National Book Awards speech – realists of a larger reality, who can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now.’

The judges this year were Margaret Atwood, Omar El Akkad, Megan Giddings, Ken Liu, and Carmen Maria Machado. 

‘It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is a work of quietly detonative imagination,’ wrote the panel. ‘Written in the guise of a zombie novel, it quickly reveals itself to be a deeply felt meditation on the many afterlives of memory, the strange disorienting space where our pasts go to disintegrate. As the heroine wanders a shattered world, clutching a dead crow that is still muttering away, she becomes an incarnation of grief – its numbness and regrets and heartbreaks – and of the inevitability of our decline: we are what we lose. Haunting, poignant, and surprisingly funny, Anne de Marcken’s book is a tightly written tour de force about what it is to be human.’

de Marcken’s novel was the joint winner of the 2022 Novel Prize, and was published early this year by Giramondo (AU/NZ), New Directions (US) and Fitzcarraldo (UK). 

Watch de Marcken’s acceptance speech – in which she recalls her early impulse towards writing, and her first encounter with Le Guin’s work – below:

Suneeta Peres da Costa reflects on her debut poetry collection The Prodigal (1 November 2024). Her first book since Saudade, shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, The Prodigal unravels myths of homecoming and return, belonging and displacement, patrimony and sovereignty.

Travelling in a North Indian city some years ago, I got lost on the subterranean floors of a public building and even more disoriented by a sign I saw on a doctor’s door: ‘Sex determination of foetus not performed here’. Wanting a child myself at the time, it was what the sign didn’t say which provided the entry point, or portal, into the title poem’s psychological world. 

When I knew Giramondo wouldn’t go with ‘and Other Poems’, the ‘The Prodigal’ felt sufficiently expansive to encapsulate the myriad meanings and associations of the whole manuscript. I observe that these deviate from, even escape, canonical ones of the parable of Luke 15:11-32 – familiar to me from a Catholic childhood – with its settled arcs and redemptive imaginary of home and patrimony; leave-taking and remaining; the lure and māyā of foreign travel; filial piety and disobedience; servants, masters and indentured labour; want and abundance; squandering one’s inheritance; self-realisation, repentance and humility; forgiveness and reconciliation. 

The Prodigal is itself a patchwork of poems, sewn together from different modes – lyrical, narrative, confessional, dramatic, prose. To the extent that their identities can be called diasporic, the poems’ speakers register a contested sense of belonging to history and country, through a reckoning with imperialism’s traces and encounters with contemporary forces of ecocide, ethno-nationalism, gender and caste violence.

The word sūtra – in Sanskrit meaning a string or thread, or even collection of threads; that which holds things together; aphoristic syllables and words woven together; a condensed verse or text – arises a few times. Spiritually, a sūtra may also of course be a prayer or invocation; for instance, the Heart Sūtra. Sūtras are also written on prayer flags whose threadbare fragments birds carry away to make springtime nests (this is occurring just beyond my window as I draft this Note). 

The poems, invoking gods and goddesses, stigmata and samskāra, simultaneously conjure the mystical and the mundane world: skins, scars and tattoos; frogspawn and spiderwebs; sand-lines, battlelines and fissures; wombs, soil, hair and vines; blood and leads; scissors and axes; banksia and thorns; husks, shells, songs and bells. Metaphors of suturing, mending and healing act as counterpoints to cutting, breaking and tearing, I hope testifying to the inextricable connections between the landscapes of the body, the living Earth and interbeing.

— Suneeta Peres da Costa, October 2024

Brian Castro reflects on his new novel Chinese Postman (1 October 2024). The book centres on the character Abraham Quin, a thrice-divorced migrant and writer, and a one-time postman and professor. Living out his old age in the Adelaide Hills, Quin becomes increasingly engaged in an epistolary correspondence with a woman seeking refuge from the war in Ukraine.

It has been seven years since my last book. Not that you can gather a lot of material in seven years. But you can still collect a lifetime of imagination; missed moments; lost lives. Diary entries. Old letters from dead friends.

I was, and still am, a great fan of the New York writer, the late David Markson. His intelligence jumps about peripatetically. His novel This Is Not A Novel  is a case in point. Vanishing Point even more so. His wife Elaine, who was a literary agent in New York, gave me a lot of encouragement. Thus began my stirring a pot called The Chinese Postman.

I got my first job in Australia as a postman. They made sure I could read. I repeated to them the Queen’s English. I could have got a job at the BBC. I over-reached. I was not Australian. But I could ride a bicycle. The Minister for Immigration at the time, Hubert Opperman, thought I would make a good citizen. My father wrote countless letters to him. Mainly about his being Portuguese and white, though he was married to a Chinese woman.

My father was a great letter-writer. He wrote letters to the editors of newspapers, to lovers, to business clients, to President Jimmy Carter. Some of them replied. Some replied through their offices or agencies. He became a collector of stamps and of women; all in the most epistolary fashion; all stylishly-blamelessly and in longhand.

His philogyny and philately paid dividends. Not in money, but in chance.

For me it was something he passed down: suffering and memory. He left me the art of letter-writing and the music of time. Also postage-stamps that were both common and rare.

These days the internet has truncated the interstices of letters, made reading between the lines risible, erased the nuances of intention, and eliminated the hazards of misreading. Kafka’s ghosts, who stole kisses within the letters of written loves, have vacated the post-office building. His Imperial Messenger never reached the outer walls of the Forbidden City. Authenticity? There is now only the void and deepfake.

And so, what do we do with the unreality of selves, those floating situationist reconstructions of authenticity?

My book then, is about the inauthenticity of letter-writing, which is no longer an art, but has now become the ‘authenticity’ of virtual lives, serialised without presence or character. Either believer or scammer, there is no resonance of culture or of literary depth in what I see as current digital correspondence. No one has the time and we’re all watching our backs. In the USA this is business as usual or a game. In Ukraine, it is the face of apocalypse.

— Brian Castro, 2024

The following excerpt is from the opening pages of Chinese Postman by Brian Castro (1 October 2024), one of Australia’s most important novelists. It centres on the character of Abraham Quin – a thrice-divorced man in his mid-seventies, a migrant, a one-time postman and professor, and a writer, now living alone in the Adelaide Hills.

How time-honoured custom reverts to ruin!

On summer evenings, during the vesper hours, after dinner, people used to take their walks in the parks, the gardens, and on the road leading up to the magic mountain. To see, to be seen, to make conversation, to connect with neighbours, shopkeepers and colleagues. There was always a low buzz of quiet exchanges. There was always soft laughter and sidewalk wine in front of the local art gallery.

No longer. Because the walk has become too muddy and slippery after the rains. And because of that solitary figure, that old man there, their passeggiata had all but been ruined. That’s me there. I have a bad back, few teeth and I’ve lost my smile. And these are the Adelaide Hills.

That lone walker, yes, that stooping figure over there, that bitter and twisted man who only straightens up to look at treetops and sees nothing but fragments – ruins are his best friends. He sees only broken columns lying horizontally in the grass, symbols of fallen ambition. He does not know many people now, or only by sight. Most of those his age have passed away. The killing zone, he calls it. It occurs within a few short years. He is too old to connect with young energy; with their rapid rattle of rap; their pointers of no universal significance. Too tired to talk. Most of those he knew well are now in their graves. A heavy burden. Walking slowly is the most he can manage. Count the steps towards oblivion. And because he is loath to talk, others also stay silent as they pass. They sense something funereal that they should not engage with, something that may infect them. Like his cigar smoke, which they treat like asbestos dust. Environment; environment. They should all wear masks, he thinks. But they are all destined to die. Gradually, those who pass do not resume much conversation within themselves afterwards, since the hand of solitude and pessimism presses down upon them more firmly. They sense it, but it’s not for articulating. It’s a disturbance of wellbeing; a virus or a miasma: on the main street, over the town, the parks, the esplanade. Children stop screaming. Dogs stop barking. Choirs stop singing. The caravans have long gone.

He talks mainly to himself. Clears his throat often. This guarantees others will stay away from him: To speak truth to power is a case of putting the cart before the horse. One must speak powerfully to ‘truth’, that is, rhetorical power to expose the deafening truth; the truth which is usually bare and dull. Bring on the catastrophe with the illusion. Oral art before going hoarse. The thing is, how not to lose effective words, both in terms of brain cells and through rigorous rote and painstaking transcription? Every process is lethal since words can fall through seams of syntax and can turn out to be their opposite when the process is completed. But that is all youth and myth. In time there will be detachment, and then disgust and then silence. Words fail faster than music. I dislike the political feebleness of poetry and hawk with contempt for those who try. But I honour those who have been tortured or imprisoned.

I snort a lot. I spit. It saves on handkerchiefs. Better for the sinuses anyway.

He hates these italics inside the mind. People, especially writers, cannot read them, or they nod off. Less literary readers of ebooks confuse these declamations and emphases with popular highlights. Nobody takes note of anything. But writers are the worst in exhibiting their narcissism. There are too many writers with too much preciosity, who even after their deaths do not leave an impression of having been very memorable. They may have written fairly well, but since they were totally self-involved, they had no textual camaraderie, they leave behind a residue of grey skies rather than warm light, the former redeemed by distant lightning and faux self-humbling. No humour. No revolution. I forgive them for dying, but not for the afterburners smelling of ozone that gave them stardom. They should speak to you still, like Shakespeare, with diabolic emancipation, piercing reason, paranoid fantasy or drunken spit. One should still hear their laughter in the dark. But perhaps it is better for the observer to be acerbic and smile at how literary memory grows out of waste, of schadenfreude and shit. Shit is the highest form of subjectivity, more meaningful in defining the individual than the sublime. It is both dialogue and meditation. Medieval monks have now been found to have had massive intestinal worms. Wrigglies coming out of their backsides in their sleep. All because they fertilised their veges with human waste. Meditation was recycling, like night soil. Why ‘night’? The stink was constant, twenty-four hours a day. Flies. Floating words like clouds forming and reforming: different each time and unpredictably so in terms of the winds of honesty. It is important to collect honesties upon dying, important to know its odours. Know thy worms. Consume thy worms. Worms make rich soil. Monks slept very little. They produced illuminated books; books of hours; which turned into short stories; legends; tales of chivalry. Worming their way into popular culture.

Writing makes matter out of metaphysics. To do it the other way round is an insult to life. Abe Quin…for that is my name. I am a scrivener. Not Abe Quill, though that would sound better. Abe Quin makes kirigami flowers out of newspaper. He loves to see them blossom when cast into the waters of the lake. Children are delighted by it. Capillary action is the scientific explanation; but what he makes is not above physics. It is not a metaphysics. Aphorisms should have the same effect of blooming, he thinks, without metaphysics or explanations.

They simply expand through leaping frogs of metaphors, which are physical, morphing in the liminal. For delight, just add water. Water finds its own level, as any plumber will tell you. It discovers and corrects and steadies the world. But these flowers have no smell. It is important that writing smells because life smells. Dogs are alive because they smell.

From pages 1-4

Amy Crutchfield is the winner of the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry with her debut collection, The Cyprian.

The announcement was made on Thursday 12 September at a ceremony at the National Library of Australia. The book was in competition with four other poetry books, including two works by Giramondo authors: In the Photograph by Luke Beesley, and The Drama Student by Autumn Royal.

This is the second consecutive year that a Giramondo author has won the PMLA for Poetry, with Grace Yee winning the 2023 prize with Chinese Fish.

Read the judges’ comments on The Cyprian below.

Amy Crutchfield’s The Cyprian reappraises the figure of Aphrodite—Greek goddess of beauty, lust, love, procreation and passion—from a contemporary vantage point, finding in Aphrodite a capacious and complex avatar for love and its violent destruction across time.

In incisive lyric poems, Crutchfield brings the mythic into contact with the quotidian, using Aphrodite to explore women’s loves, needs and losses. Counterpointing poems concerned with the female perspective are explorations of male desire, misogyny, power and control. Crutchfield is alert to the idealisation, eroticisation and demonisation of women in visual art and history and considers these questions in relation to the deifying gaze in Bonnard and Picasso’s cruelty to his lovers, among others, demanding we reckon with old shibboleths: ‘There are not enough museums / for all we once believed in,’ the poet tells us.

While Crutchfield brings a classicist’s range of reference to bear in The Cyprian, the poems are frank, lively and acerbic, as befits one ‘who says what she means and / means what she says.’ Crutchfield’s lines are almost aphoristic in their concision yet see through to worlds magnitudes larger, and her voice arrives fully-fledged, and entirely in command.

Along with the other winners of this year’s PMLA’s, Crutchfield will be in conversation with the Artistic Director of the Canberra Writers Festival Beejay Silcox on Friday 13 September at the National Library Theatre and Foyer. Learn more here.

π.O. (PiO) and Alexis Wright have been announced as finalists for the 2024 Melbourne Prize for Literature. They are two of four authors shortlisted for the $60,000 prize, now in its 20th year.

The prize is awarded to ‘a Victorian author whose body of published work has made an outstanding contribution to Australian literature and to cultural and intellectual life.’

Wright’s most recent work, Praiseworthy, this year became the first book to win both the Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. π.O. is a legendary anarchist poet, and one of the earliest practitioners of performance poetry in Australia. His latest book is The Tour.

Members of the public can vote for a finalist to win the Civic Choice Award 2024, worth $1,500, with voting ending November 13 at 5pm. Cast your vote here.

Giramondo Publishing is looking to appoint a skilled and innovative editor to oversee the planning, commissioning and publishing processes of our literary magazine HEAT. Applicants should have university qualifications in literature or a related field, an understanding of the contemporary literary scene, and experience in editing and publishing. They should be skilled in the relevant software, and have the ability to seek out and interact with contributors to and readers of the magazine. A sensitivity to the diverse styles and voices that constitute contemporary Australian and international writing, and to the strengths of emerging and established writers alike, are also essential characteristics. Intending applicants should be acquainted with the range of Giramondo’s publications, and with the current and previous series of HEAT.

The HEAT editor will work alongside the Giramondo team at our Parramatta office, and will be involved in our discussions about publishing schedules, design, printing, publicity and funding. Working remotely is also an option. The position is a minimum 0.6 part-time appointment, with the possibility of a larger role within Giramondo to be negotiated. The salary will be from $70,000 p.a. pro rata, with superannuation and four weeks annual leave.

Expressions of interest for the position of HEAT editor should be submitted to applications@giramondopublishing.com by 5 p.m. AEST Monday 23 September 2024. A one-page letter outlining your interest in and suitability for the position should be accompanied by a CV which also lists two referees. Please include these in a single file, with your name as the file name.

The following excerpt is from page 14 of rock flight (1 September 2024), the debut work by Lebanese-Palestinian writer, Hasib Hourani. A book-length poem, rock flight follows a personal and historical narrative over seven chapters to compose an understated yet powerful allegory of Palestine’s occupation.

Three Giramondo authors have been shortlisted for the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in Poetry: Luke Beesley for In the Photograph, Amy Crutchfield for The Cyprian and Autumn Royal for The Drama Student.

The awards recognise individual excellence and the contribution Australian authors make to the nation’s cultural and intellectual life. The finalists were announced on 15 August.

Judges’ comments, In the Photograph

Luke Beesley’s In the Photograph offers a series of vignettes that capture the poetic imagination in flight. In these prose poems, capacious and playful, the subtle ‘twists in emotional grammar’ inconspicuously ‘concertinaed’ in the seconds of our diurnal existences billow out into surreal and hypervivid epiphanies.

Shuttling between the suburban and the sublime, Beesley finds provocations in everything, from the way light falls across cut lettuce to a Melbourne water tower to the music of Belle and Sebastian. These perceptions and reveries are seasoned with prosodic precision: the prospect of facing rush-hour traffic incites ‘a very small fear of the day’s adult inevitability’; a daydream about the painter Cy Twombly recalls ‘yesterday’s listlessness in the unusual spring heat, and this late sequence of strange clarity’.

This is a savvy collection that moves comfortably within the world of the visual arts, cinema, and music; yet it is also at home in the rounds of domestic routine and familial intimacy. This intimacy transfuses the poet’s relationship to words and his artmaking so that the quirks of fatherhood transmogrify into a home-grown practice of Dada. In pulling off such unlikely juxtapositions, this book provides conclusive proof of the compatibility between formal experimentation and democratic appeal.

Judges’ comments, The Cyprian

Amy Crutchfield’s The Cyprian reappraises the figure of Aphrodite—Greek goddess of beauty, lust, love, procreation and passion—from a contemporary vantage point, finding in Aphrodite a capacious and complex avatar for love and its violent destruction across time.

In incisive lyric poems, Crutchfield brings the mythic into contact with the quotidian, using Aphrodite to explore women’s loves, needs and losses. Counterpointing poems concerned with the female perspective are explorations of male desire, misogyny, power and control. Crutchfield is alert to the idealisation, eroticisation and demonisation of women in visual art and history and considers these questions in relation to the deifying gaze in Bonnard and Picasso’s cruelty to his lovers, among others, demanding we reckon with old shibboleths: ‘There are not enough museums / for all we once believed in,’ the poet tells us.

While Crutchfield brings a classicist’s range of reference to bear in The Cyprian, the poems are frank, lively and acerbic, as befits one ‘who says what she means and / means what she says.’ Crutchfield’s lines are almost aphoristic in their concision yet see through to worlds magnitudes larger, and her voice arrives fully-fledged, and entirely in command.

Judges’ comments, The Drama Student

A suite of eerily suggestive performances, Autumn Royal’s The Drama Student rehearses the modes and moods of an array of poetic genres – from the elegiac to the anacreontic – to lay bare the inseparability of candour and artifice.

These are poems that manifest an impressive discipline of attention: to the body in its libidinal contortions; to the furtive expressivity of fabrics; and to the brittle self-possession of the artist, whether of the stage or page. Royal’s voices evince a poise collected and confected from the debris of self-exposure, and from the pressure of what remains unsaid: ‘I want these words to thicken – to form a cloth case for the bolster / stuffed with denial.’

In its mastery of atmosphere and implication, The Drama Student belongs to a lineage that includes poets such as Robert Browning, Sylvia Plath, and Emma Lew. It is a learned book, deeply embedded in a literary history of lamentation that culminates in the citational bravura of its concluding prose poem, ‘Soliloquy’.

The density of allusions in Royal’s work is emblematic of a generosity it extends not just to other writers, but also to the reader in recognising the excess and violence that often characterise the life of our emotions.

The winners will be announced on 12 September 2024.

The following excerpt is from John Berger and Me by Nikos Papastergiadis (1 August 2024), an eminent Australian sociologist. Part memoir, part biography, this book tells of the deep connections between the two, with the late English writer and art critic to Papastergiadis a mentor, father figure and friend.

A year before I met John, I had a lunch with Edward Said, the author of the magisterial Orientalism and the brilliant campaigner for Palestine. He talked with reverence about John’s work and even more warmly about John. Edward had a voice that flowed like a river but would creak and leap when he hit a rocky point of injustice. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and looked impeccable in a dark suit. And then he added:

‘But whatever you do don’t go and visit him in the village, there are pigs and shit everywhere!’

‘That’s fine with me, it sounds like my father’s village.’

It was the first time that the idea of visiting John in the village entered my head. At that point I was trying to work out the status of Ways of Seeing in my dissertation. I was given this book by my university friend Michael Healy. He was a poet who had just returned to Melbourne after a year in Berlin. In sympathy with my irritation at what Aby Warburg called the excessive empiricism and petty formalism of art history he sneaked a copy in his dungarees and walked out of the university bookshop. The moment I started reading it my mind blew up. At last, I thought, a real comrade in art and politics.

…

I once asked John why he never bought the house in Quincy from Louis. He was clearly very attached to it. His desk was upstairs by the window at the end of the bedroom. On this small table was a checked tablecloth, with just room enough for a couple of A4 sheets, an Indian ink bottle and another book. He used a Sheaffer fountain pen. Yves pointed out to me that Schäfer in German means shepherd, which of course in French is Berger. In the kitchen there was a pot-belly stove with a long pipe that kept the room cosy in the winter. The wood was stored under the verandah. They even installed a hot shower decorated with the odd Delft tiles.

So why didn’t they buy it?

John replied: ‘I have no wish to. This predisposition in myself – because it is almost a repugnance – served me very well in my relationship with the peasants who are my neighbours. I have noticed that whenever a peasant sells his house to say a Swiss family so that they can use it as a holiday home, and no matter whether it is a fair price, there is always a lament in the contract; the peasant feels as if he has betrayed his ancestors. It is felt as the illegitimate taking of something that if justice existed belonged to them.’

…

Not long before I arrived in Quincy, John’s chimney caught fire and the house almost burnt down: ‘It was a question of two minutes. Had it not been for all the neighbours who came with water the whole thing would have gone. As it happens the damage was not very great. Knowing that Louis would hear about it very quickly via bush telegraph, I immediately went to tell him. His reply was “Well as long as you are fine, it’s all right.” A couple of months later I went around to pay the rent which he refused to accept. “No. I don’t want it. You use the money to buy the things of yours that were burnt”.’

I don’t want to give the impression that John and the peasants had a monk-like disregard for material possessions. Artists, especially photographers, often gifted their work to him. Anya Bostock had the perspicacity to keep the painting by Fernand Léger when they separated. John treated each piece with great care and attention. As he stared deep into an image he would sigh, rub his thumb and index finger together, then an insight would flash in his eyes, and finally, a string of metaphors and similes would tumble out.

In the house in Quincy there were very few images that adorned the walls. There was an enigmatic poster of the pregnant Madonna by Piero della Francesca (Madonna del Parto 1460) that was glued into the arch under the verandah. The original painting was a fresco for the modest chapel of Santa Maria di Momentana. It showed the Madonna, patron saint of pregnant women, in a long flowing blue gown. Her hand is resting on her protruding belly. There is a slit in her gown revealing a cream-coloured under-dress. Two angels, one on each side of the Madonna, are holding up a damask canopy. The arching of the curtains draws the eye to her delicate and bent fingers that touch the slit. The poster was still legible even as it had peeled and faded in the harsh weather.

Inside the house there was another poster that was loosely framed, tinged in nicotine-time and watermarked, as if it had once served as a table protector. It was dedicated to Orlando Letelier, the Minister of Defence in the Allende Socialist government of Chile. The photograph shows him being frogmarched by a dozen armed soldiers. Their guns pointing at his back and their helmets shining in the morning sun. Orlando is in a dark suit, flared trousers, white shirt, with a wide floral tie. His head is upright, and his moustache is unflinching. The prison guards tortured this guitar-playing minister by breaking his fingers. A year later he was released. Soon after he was appointed as Director of the Transnational Institute where John and Teodor Shanin were research fellows. He continued to call for the downfall of the Chilean junta. The military ordered his assassination. His car in Washington DC was detonated by Cuban exiles. Below the poster is a poem by John about the quiet valour of this man. It ends with an invitation to come to the village:

He has come
as the season turns
at the moment of the blood red rowanberry
he endured the time without seasons
which belongs to the torturers
he will be here too
in the spring
every spring
until the seasons returning
explode
in Santiago
– John Berger, Sept. 1976

From pages 30-36

Alexis Wright has won the 2024 Miles Franklin Literary Award for her epic novel Praiseworthy.  
 
The award was announced at a ceremony in Sydney on 1 September. The win marks another achievement in Australian literature for Wright, with Praiseworthy the only book to have won both the Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin.
 
Wright was previously awarded the Miles Franklin in 2007 for her novel Carpentaria. She joins an esteemed group of authors who have won the award twice, including Michelle de Kretser, Kim Scott, Thomas Keneally and Patrick White. Wright receives $60,000 in prize money.

On winning the award, Wright said: ‘I am both amazed and humbled to win the 2024 Miles Franklin Award for Praiseworthy. To win a Miles Franklin a second time is monumental. I wanted to make Praiseworthy a big book in more ways than one. I wanted to capture the spirit of our times.’

Praiseworthy has also won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction, the Queensland Literary Award for Fiction and the ALS Gold Medal, and was shortlisted for the world’s richest literary prize, the Dublin Literary Award. It was also shortlisted for two NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and the Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance. It has been hailed by the New York Times as the ‘most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century’.

The judges praised the novel in the following terms:

Praiseworthy is an astonishing feat of storytelling and sovereign imagination. It is a capacious work in which Alexis Wright takes on the role of creative custodian, singing the songs of unceded lands. She bears witness to the catastrophic transformations wrought by white fantasies, against which Indigenous ingenuity still stands, its connection to Country unbroken. Wright’s literary technique is a superb mash-up of different languages, ancient and modern, and displays an exceptional mastery of craft. The novel is imbued with astonishing emotional range, deploying Wright’s signature humour despite its powerful sense of the tragic. Through its sheer ambition, astringency and audacity, Praiseworthy redraws the map of Australian literature and expands the possibilities of fiction.

https://twitter.com/GiramondoBooks/status/1818927608052302322

Australia’s first literary award, established in 1957 and managed by Perpetual, the Miles Franklin promotes the ‘advancement, improvement and betterment of Australian literature,’ and recognises a ‘novel of the highest literary merit‘ that ‘presents Australian life in any of its phases.’

The 2024 judging panel comprises Richard Neville, Mitchell Librarian of the State Library of NSW and Chair; literary scholar, A/Prof Jumana Bayeh; literary scholar and translator, Dr Mridula Nath Chakraborty; book critic, Dr James Ley; and author and literary scholar, Prof Hsu-Ming Teo.

Other books by Wright include the novels Carpentaria and The Swan Book, and the collective memoir Tracker.

Media coverage

• ‘Alexis Wright wins second Miles Franklin prize for Praiseworthy’ The Guardian
• ‘Alexis Wright makes history with Miles Franklin, Stella wins in same year’ SMH
• ‘Alexis Wright wins the 2024 Miles Franklin Literary Award for her epic novel Praiseworthy’ ABC News
• ‘Praiseworthy makes history: Alexis Wright is the first author to win the Miles Franklin and the Stella Prize’ The Conversation
• ‘Wright awarded 2024 Miles Franklin for ‘Praiseworthy’, becomes two-time winner’ Books+Publishing
• ‘First Nations writer Alexis Wright wins second Miles Franklin Literary Award’ National Indigenous Times
• ‘Alexis Wright makes literary history’ ABC listen
• ‘Alexis Wright wins the Miles Franklin Literary Award, again’ The Australian
• ‘Praiseworthy author Alexis Wright wins Miles Franklin Award’ The New Daily
• ‘Author Alexis Wright Makes History Winning 2024 Miles Franklin and Stella Awards’ Broadsheet
• ‘Alexis Wright Is the 2024 Miles Franklin Winner’ Read This
• ‘Praiseworthy: why Alexis Wright’s ‘staggering’ epic is sweeping prizes – and challenging readers’ The Guardian

Read the preface to Mourning a Breast, a multi-genre, auto-fictional work in which the cult Hong Kong writer Xi Xi (1937–2022) tries to make sense of her experiences with breast cancer – of diagnosis, illness and treatment. First released in China in 1992, it is published in English for the first time with translation by Jennifer Feeley.

Dear reader, when you open this book, are you standing in a bookstore? You’ve come to the bookstore today to have a look around and see if there are any books that pique your interest. You stumble upon Mourning a Breast – hey, what’s this book about? There’s no one around, so you casually pick it up. Out of all the books here, you just happen to flip through the one titled Mourning a Breast. Is it the word ‘breast’ that grabs your attention, though you feign otherwise? At this very moment, when you think of breasts, what comes to mind?

This is a book about breasts. Breasts are the subject matter, though I suppose the content may be rather different from what you’re envisioning. More than two and a half years ago, on a bright summer day, after this narrator had been swimming without a care in the world, she stood in the shower of the pool changing room and found a small lump in her breast, no bigger than a peanut. Soon after, it was confirmed to be breast cancer. This book tells the story of losing a breast. There are no melodramatic or sensationalist characters or plot twists. If this isn’t the book you’re looking for, carry on and good luck. However, I don’t intend to lose you, reader, so come on, why not buy a copy of Mourning a Breast while you’re at it, since on many levels, you and this book are actually quite closely connected? Are you a woman? May I ask how old you are? Please forgive me for being so presumptuous. Regardless of your age, the very fact that you can read these words is enough for you to be at risk for breast cancer. Let me put it this way: You’re just like the narrator of this book, living freely and happily in the world. There’s so much you’ve yet to do. The world is your oyster. Yet you’re completely unaware that there’s a tiny alien taking shape inside of you, scheming to supplant and devour you. That’s the demon known as cancer.

The twentieth century is coming to an end. In this era of cutting-edge science and technology, cancer is growing more and more rampant. The number of people suffering from cancer is steadily increasing, while patients’ ages are dropping to alarming lows. Are you a teenager in school? You say: I’m only sixteen – what do I have to worry about? Well, let me tell you, last year I came to know a breast cancer patient who was only twelve years old. Breast cancer is unpredictable. By the time you discover it, it’s likely that a tumour has already formed, leaving you with no choice but to part with the breasts that we women hold dear, and from then on, there’s no escaping death’s shadow. However, breast cancer is still considered one of the most fortunate forms of cancer, as it exhibits clear signs, can be surgically removed, and is also preventable. Eating well works wonders, and thanks to the miracle of modern medicine, we can keep on living for a considerably long time. Mourning a Breast aims to discuss precisely these matters and was written to help you – not from an expert’s viewpoint but from the perspective of a patient sharing her course of treatment, along with assorted reflections on her illness. A while back, a long-lost friend came across some selections from this book that had been published here and there. She started examining her own body, and lo and behold, she found that she also had breast cancer. Luckily, it was detected early; time is of the essence in treating this type of disease. If after reading this book, you begin taking better care of your health and paying attention to the various signals your body emits, then it won’t have been written in vain.

Of course, I hope you won’t get sick. Though birth, aging, illness and death are inevitable for everyone, I don’t want you ever to have to deal with cancer. Yet as the median age of the population increases, and the earth is desecrated day after day, we must psychologically prepare for the worst. Your elderly grandmother, mother, sister, friend or colleague could get cancer. If such an unfortunate turn of events were to occur, what would you do? Sever ties with them because you’re scared? Or lend a hand in the face of hardship? Mourning a Breast also touches upon these issues. Sick people don’t need your pity, but your concern and assistance can give them emotional comfort and help support their fight against the disease.

From another angle, disclosing the disease is also a form of self-healing for patients. The Chinese have always been a people who are secretive about sickness and hesitant to seek medical treatment, concealing illness, especially of this kind, and considering it a taboo subject. As a result, not only the body but also the soul ends up sick. Psychiatrists treat illness by making patients aware of unconscious mental blocks, then confronting and resolving them. Your narrator openly details her illness but doesn’t dare claim to smash any taboos, though this nevertheless can be considered self-help. The term ‘mourning’ actually suggests that while we can’t undo the past, we can focus on the future and hope for rebirth.

Or maybe, you there in the bookstore, you are a man. You may laugh and say: Breast cancer is something that only happens to women – what does it have to do with me? I’m sorry, but you’re mistaken. Breast cancer is like the sun, shining on women and shining on men as well. Moreover, by the time it’s detected in men, it tends to be more serious. No person is an island; you’re a man, but you may have a mother, sister, and possibly a wife or a lover – if your other half gets breast cancer, what will you do? While your attitude reveals your personal feelings and standards, I suspect that our fear and avoidance of cancer are due mainly to ignorance. Clinging to ignorance is also an incurable disease.

When all is said and done, this is a book written using a range of literary techniques. Some friends regard it as a novel, and others as a collection of essays. Dear reader, you’re welcome to categorise it however you’d like; this time, it’s up to you. It’s just that the life of the modern person is so hectic, and work is demanding. In your free time, take a walk in the country or by the sea, breathe the fresh air, swim, play ball games and look after your body. Perhaps it’s not worth spending too much time reading this book – you’re better off just flipping through a few chapters and choosing the ones that most interest you. If you’re curious about cancer, skimming seven or eight paragraphs of ‘The Doctor Says’ or ‘The Flying Guillotine’ is more than enough. Where appropriate, I’ve inserted prompts throughout the book so as not to waste your precious time. If you’re a self-preoccupied manly man, then scanning the section ‘Beards and Brows’ should suffice. If you’re a doctor, how about giving ‘Daifu Di’ a try? If you don’t like words and prefer looking at pictures, simply turn to the last few pages of the book – at first, there were only images, but I added some text, as I worried that staring solely at images might lead to a new kind of illiteracy. Are you someone who is hunched over a desk all day and enjoys sitting at home reading? ‘The Body’s Language’ was written just for you. We place too much emphasis on knowledge, at the expense of ignoring our bodies. Without a body, how would the soul have a place to rest? Are you about forty? Maybe ‘Maths Time’ is just what the doctor ordered – once you reach adulthood, you need to take responsibility for your own health. Is there a constant dull ache in your stomach? Have you packed on a few pounds? Are you chronically fatigued? Are you overworked? Please cherish your body and pay attention to your diet.

Maybe when you open this book, you’re sitting at home. Are you one of my real-life friends? You’ve turned to this book not because you’re in the mood for a story but because you’re wondering how I’ve been doing these past couple of years. Dear friend, I’m grateful for your concern. I’m actually quite blessed. The past two years of my life have been like a magic-realist novel, a blurring of dream and reality, as though I’m under a spell, my entire being an ethereal fiction, whereas the city, streets and friends within are all real. Yet am I not fortunate compared to someone who’s paralysed in bed, stuck in a vegetative state or afflicted with AIDS? I can still enjoy walking down the street and taking in the scenery, read some books, write a few words, and on good days, I can even take short trips. I don’t need to worry about putting food on the table, nor do I have to go to work. What more could I ask for? In these times, I’ve found I have far more friends than I realised, who treat me better than I ever could have imagined. I’m touched by the outpouring of care and support. Indeed, it’s because of friends that I’m reluctant to leave this world. I’m but a very cowardly person, no braver than anyone else. Thank you, friends, for rebuilding my confidence. I’ll live my life to the fullest.

— Xi Xi, June 1992