Author: Kate Prendergast
Mariana Dimópulos, author of All My Goodbyes, on tour in Australia
Argentinian author Mariana Dimópulos, whose novel All My Goodbyes Giramondo published last year, will be holding several public events in Australia in August and September. Dimópulos will appear at events in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne, joined in some by her Australian translator Alice Whitmore. More information on these events can be found below.
All My Goodbyes was published in Giramondo’s new Southern Latitudes series in August 2017, and will be published in the United States in January 2019 by Transit Books. Dimópulos’ next book, Pendiente, is forthcoming from Giramondo in April 2019.
Dimópulos is currently undertaking a residency at the JM Coetzee Centre in Adelaide, sponsored by the ARC Discovery Project ‘Other Worlds: Forms of World Literature’.
Sydney
31 August: Mariana Dimópulos, Literary Reading and Q&A with Ivor Indyk – Western Sydney University, Parramatta Campus, EA.G.03, 1pm
4 September: Mariana Dimópulos in Conversation with Ivor Indyk – Gleebooks, Glebe, 6pm for 6.30pm
Canberra
29 August: Australian National Centre for Latin American Studies, Australian National University (details to come)
Melbourne
6 September: In Conversation: Mariana Dimópulos and Dr Alice Whitmore – Monash University, Caulfield Campus, Building S, Room S901, 2pm6 September: Salon Series: Mariana Dimópulos in Conversation with Anna Macdonald – Paperback Bookshop, Melbourne, 6pm
Border Districts and No More Boats shortlisted for the 2018 Miles Franklin
We are thrilled that Border Districts by Gerald Murnane and No More Boats by Felicity Castagna have been shortlisted for the 2018 Miles Franklin Literary Award. The announcement was made at a ceremony in Canberra on Sunday, 17 June. Giramondo is the only publisher to have more than one of their published works on the finalist list.
Gerald Murnane, author of 12 fiction works and a ‘neglected literary giant’ according to the Sydney Morning Herald, has made the list for the first time and given his ‘first nod in [a] 44-year career’. Approaching his eightieth year and now ‘delivered of [his] books’, the New York Times proposed in March that he may be ‘the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of’. Border Districts has also been shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal.
No More Boats is Felicity Castagna’s debut adult novel, which tells the unravelling of a man and a nation at the time of the Tampa crisis. ‘I wanted to ask questions about what happens when we cut off our past,’ Castagna told Jason Steger for the Sydney Morning Herald. ‘But also to ask how the trauma of separating yourself from your past and actively suppressing it can come out later in your life in your relationships with other people and in your understanding of the world.’ No More Boats was shortlisted for the 2018 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and her previous novel The Incredible Here and Now won the 2015 Prime Minister’s Award for Young Adult Fiction.
The winner of the $60,000 prize will be announced on 26 August.
The occasion for this novel is the narrator’s move to a remote district near the border to be alert to what might be described as the landscape of his own mind. We are told that what we are reading is a ‘report’, intended only for the narrator’s own files, on the series of mental images that are set in train by a very ordinary sight: a tiny church and its porch window that is passed daily on the morning walk to the shops and the post office. From here, we follow the narrator down certain rabbit holes into his history that centre on books read, people recalled, objects owned and locations visited.
The focus is on paying attention to the vines of thoughts and feelings, then and now, that wind around and cling to these things. The telling is lyrical, precise, highly self-aware and, at times, disarmingly humorous. The result is a subjective portrait of certain religious, geographical, architectural, social and cultural textures of life as it has been lived in Australia over the past seven decades. This novel, a consolidation of the idiosyncratic aesthetic programme Murnane has pursued throughout his career, gestures towards the capriciousness of consciousness, the relationship between fiction and fact and the purpose of writing itself.
Judges’ comments
This novel brings to life an Italo-Australian migrant family living in Parramatta, that historic town at the border of Sydney’s western suburbs, on the river ‘where salt water met fresh and the boats could go no further’. It is 2001, the time of the Tampa crisis when the prime minister intoned, ‘we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.’ His words resonate with Antonio Martone, unhinged by grief for his dead friend and his forced retirement from the building business they shared. When he paints ‘No More Boats’ on his front yard, his alienation from his English-born wife and adult son and daughter is complete.
Castagna skilfully dramatizes the generational conflicts as well as the everyday multiculturalism of the Martones’ relationships with family and friends. Borders, boats and homes are powerful motifs in this novel. It conveys a vivid sense of a decisive historical moment, as the events of 9/11 loom – events that generated ‘all those connections between Muslims in planes and Muslims on boats’ that have marked Australian life ever since.
Judges’ comments
Alexis Wright wins the 2018 Stella Prize for Tracker
Our heartfelt congratulations to Alexis Wright, who has been named winner of the 2018 Stella Prize for Tracker. Her book is a collective memoir on the visionary Aboriginal leader, Tracker Tilmouth.
Worth $50,000, the Stella Prize is a major annual literary award celebrating Australian women’s writing. In her acceptance speech, Alexis Wright – the first Indigenous Australian to receive the prize in its six-year history – said she was ‘completely overwhelmed’ that Tracker had won, and that she ‘really had to spend some time unpacking this idea.’
‘I would like to thank you for considering the important messages in this book and its style,’ she said. ‘I wanted it to be a book for our times and from our place in the world. I am deeply grateful to you for helping Tracker reach a greater audience.’
Wright also praised the ‘remarkable diversity’ of the year’s shortlist, saying that ‘a literary dialogue that allows us to have greater knowledge and understanding of each other…is what will make Australian literature truly marvellous, relevant and far stronger than it has ever been.’
Published in November 2017, Tracker was also shortlisted for the 2018 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-fiction, and is longlisted for the 2018 ABIA Book Awards. The book can be purchased through our website and in bookstores.
In this remarkable biography, Alexis Wright follows an Aboriginal tradition of storytelling that she describes as a ‘practice for crossing landscapes and boundaries, giving many voices a part in the story’. Tracker is a collective memoir of Tracker Tilmouth, charismatic Aboriginal leader, thinker, entrepreneur, visionary and provocateur. Tilmouth worked tirelessly for Aboriginal self-determination, creating opportunities for land use and economic development in his many roles including Director of the Central Land Council. This unique, majestic biography has been composed by Wright from interviews with family, friends, foes and Tilmouth himself. It is one man’s story told by many voices, almost operatic in scale. With a tight narrative structure, compelling real-life characters, the book sings with insight and Tracker’s unique humour. Wright has crafted an epic that is a truly rewarding read.
Stella Prize judges’ citation for Tracker
Image credit: Connor Tomas O’Brien
Vanessa Berry and Brian Castro win at the 2018 Mascara Avant-garde Awards
Vanessa Berry and Brian Castro have each taken out first prize at the 2018 Mascara Avant-garde Awards for works published last year. Berry’s Mirror Sydney (recently longlisted for the ABIA awards), has topped the nonfiction category, and Castro’s Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria has won for fiction.
We also extend our congratulations to Oscar Schwartz, whose collection The Honeymoon Stage was shortlisted in the poetry category, and Ali Alizadeh, whose book The Last Days of Jeanne d’Arc was shortlisted for fiction.
Read the judges’ comments on the two winning works below.
Described as an off-piste urban field manual, this book walks us through a psycho geography where alternative narratives find space between the icons, infrastructure, wharves and freeways. Historical layering, speculative flourishes and the rhetoric of maps shape the city’s ethical and hybrid possibilities. An extended meditation on time, space, history and urban subjectivity.
With its dark ironies and playful liberties of form there is mastery and joy in this verse novel. Castro’s musicality, anagrams and puns interpolate the banal with the absurd in 34 cantos that riff on The Divine Comedy as they tell the story of the last days of cancer fugitive and Adelaide architect, Lucian Gracq. This superb novel is innovative, thoughtful, comforting and profound.
Felicity Castagna’s No More Boats Shortlisted for the 2018 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards
Felicity Castagna’s fiction novel No More Boats has been shortlisted for the 2018 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.
The book, which is about the unravelling of a man and a nation set against the backdrop of the Tampa Crisis, is competing in the Multicultural NSW Award category, worth $20,000. Castagna’s previous novel The Incredible Here and Now was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 2014, and won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction the same year.
Established in 1979, the awards have a history of ‘celebrating achievement by Australian writers and in helping to establish values and standards in Australian literature’. This year, over 600 works were entered across 10 prize categories.
The award finalists will be announced on 30 April 2018 as part of the Sydney Writers’ Festival.
Gerald Murnane and Ali Alizadeh on the 2018 ALS Gold Medal Longlist
Fiction writers Gerald Murnane and Ali Alizadeh have been longlisted for the 2018 Australian Literature Society (ALS) Gold Medal for their respective works Border Districts and The Last Days of Jeanne d’Arc.
The ALS Gold Medal is an annual award presented by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL), recognising ‘outstanding literary work in the preceding calendar year’. In 2014, Alexis Wright received the award for her novel The Swan Book.
Nine Giramondo authors to feature at this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival
We are proud to announce that nine Giramondo authors will be appearing at this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival. Running from 30 April to 6 May at a new temporary location at Carriageworks, the program – designed around the theme of ‘power’ by artistic director Michaela McGuire – will include sessions with recently published authors Alexis Wright (Tracker), Vanessa Berry (Mirror Sydney) and Fiona Wright (Domestic Interior), with the latter in conversation with New Zealand author Ashleigh Young (Can You Tolerate This?). It will also include a panel discussion featuring Western Sydney poet Maryam Azam, whose debut collection The Hijab Files will be coming out in May.
Find full sessions details for all attending authors by following the links below.
Alexis Wright
Alexis Wright: Tracker – 3 May
Vanessa Berry
Stories of Sydney – 3 May
Maryam Azam
Women, Colour and Western Sydney – 5 May
Ashleigh Young
Ashleigh Young: Can You Tolerate This? – 5 May
Felicity Castagna
Felicity Castagna: No More Boats – 2 May
Home Truths: Telling Australian Stories – 3 May
Finishing School Presents Talking Bodies – 3 May
Fiona Wright
Ashleigh Young: Can You Tolerate This? – 5 May
Kate Fagan
Varuna Festival Launch Party – 27 April
Music, Gender and Transformation with Eddie Ayres – 30 April
Joanne Burns
Big Bent Poetry Reading – 3 May
Zoë Norton Lodge
Story Club – 3 May
Ashleigh Young and Felicity Castagna to Appear at the Adelaide Writers’ Week
We’re pleased to announce that Giramondo authors Ashleigh Young and Felicity Castagna will be appearing at this year’s Adelaide Writers’ Week (3–8 March 2018).
Young will be speaking at two sessions alongside Patricia Lockwood, Sarah Krasnostein and Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich. The New Zealand writer’s book of essays, Can You Tolerate This?, was published in September last year, winning the prestigious $20,000 Windham-Campbell Prize and the Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Nonfiction.
The award-winning author Castagna will join Michelle de Kretser to discuss issues of migration and Australian culture as explored in her fiction novel No More Boats, also published last year.
Find more information on each of the two author’s festival sessions below.
Ashleigh Young
Poet First, Then… – 5 Mar
The Self in the Story – 6 Mar
Felicity Castagna
Boat People – 4 Mar
Corey Wakeling and Shevaun Cooley to appear at the 2018 Perth Writers Week
Giramondo poets Corey Wakeling and Shevaun Cooley will be appearing across six sessions at the 2018 Perth Writers Week as part of the Perth International Arts Festival. The authors are both originally from Western Australia, with Cooley an Adjunct Lecturer at the state’s Edith Cowan University, while Wakeling has since relocated to the Kansai region of Japan.
Each poet has a festival session dedicated to their latest work. On Wednesday 24 February, Wakeling will be talking to poet Philip Mead on his fervent and provocative poetry collection The Alarming Conservatory, which is to be released early next month. (Mead’s 2008 review of Wakeling’s previous collection, Goad Omen, can be found on Cordite Poetry Review.) On Thursday 25 February, Shevaun’s 2017 book Homing – a meditation on her preoccupation with place and belonging – will be discussed with Robert Wood.
Please find information on the two poets’ festival sessions below.
Corey Wakeling
The Alarming Conservatory – 24 Feb
Poetry Land – 24 Feb
A Gala for Fay Zwicky – 25 Feb
Shevaun Cooley
The Poets Speak – 19 Feb
Poetry Land II – 24 Feb
Homing – 25 Feb