Basket

Your basket is empty.

Uncategorized

Šime Knežević: a note on In Your Dreams

Šime Knežević reflects on In Your Dreams (Giramondo 2025). His first book-length poetry collection, the work gestures towards the elusive and often fragmented reality of dreams and recollections.


I have to admit that I am still coming to terms with In Your Dreams as a book-object and not as an unwieldy folder of TextEdit files. The journey to write the collection has spanned roughly eight years. It’s tempting to connect the poems with a kind of autobiographical narrative of their composition, like looking through a photo album – I was in this country when I wrote X, I was recovering from this emotional weather when I wrote Y, I wrote Z before the pandemic, etc.

Reading the poems again, I am surprised with how my preoccupations as a writer have endured and deepened over time, how they’ve suggested contiguities and connections. Be it memory and identity. Autobiography and make-believe. Self and Other in their various inflections, crises, under the influence of desire or iPhones or whatever else. Sometimes I have tried to capture a vexed sense of remoteness and separation, the world of adult unease and the distances we harbour, caught between reality and dream and fantasy, labour and play, longing and loss. 

What I look for in a poem is a sense of change, a startling gesture, a small mercy, a consolation, something negotiable. I think this is reflected too in the range of formal approaches with riffs, vignettes, suggestions, stock-taking and direct address. I want a poem to be more than a remnant or souvenir of an experience, but itself be an experience for the reader.

Photo: Tim Bauer

A poem from In Your Dreams by Šime Knežević

Translating His English into English

And so was the brief: fetch the ‘pinch-bar’.
I peered into the small shed,
a corrugated cave of tools and such,

but I didn’t know what a pinch-bar was.
Back to him, I asked what it looked like,
he scolded: pinch-bar! pinch-bar!

(Is it sheepishly? yes,) sheepishly
I journeyed back to the toolshed. Inside,
quick: forage, hunt. Not the wrench—

not the tape measure—not the nails,
nor the hammer—not the axe—and definitely
not the car battery. I took a stab

in the dark: could you be the one,
or you? I called you out. I spoke
into your name, pinch-bar, but

your syllables mirrored my hands,
no thing, no use. I came back bearing
bad news. Empty-handed.

Perhaps the pressure of the job
expended his patience, so the moment
gave rise to a dialogic fiasco.

Enraged by my ignorance (not the time
for the unknown and doubt)
his temper soured the air

as he lumbered hazardously
down to the shed
and in an instant re-emerged

with the instrument hoisted out—
‘crowbar’, I said, and there was no relief
knowing it had two names.

Bonny Cassidy and Hasib Hourani shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards

Two Giramondo authors are shortlisted for the 2025 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Bonny Cassidy’s Monument is a finalist in the non-fiction category, with Hasib Hourani’s rock flight a finalist for poetry. Manisha Anjali’s debut collection Naag Mountain was also highly commended.

The shortlist was announced on 28 January, with the winners announced on 19 March.

Judges’ comments, Monument by Bonny Cassy

Their story isn’t mine, but I’m standing by it.’ Bonny Cassidy’s Monument is an audacious and complex act of historical recovery. It combines poetry, memoir and speculative historical narrative as the author reckons with her own family’s settler past and attempts to construct a white Australian remembering that is adjacent to First Nations’ experience. There is a precise richness in this remembering and reconstruction, set down with a poet’s ability to weigh each word and position them with care and attention. Monument examines an occluded, violent past and assembles a point of adjacent, lyrical witness.

Judges’ comments, rock flight by Hasib Hourani

Hasib Hourani’s rock flight is a thrilling and original work, featuring a sophisticated exploration of the possibilities of language to deconstruct and reconstruct, to destroy and create. Drawing on diverse influences, Hourani renders not only the devastation of Israeli occupation on Palestinian people wherever they are now, but creates a new vocabulary for contemplating the past, and forging pathways of resistance into the future. rock flight is attentive to form and underpinned by lyric virtuosity that activates the reader to see and consider space and time in different ways. It shifts elegantly between intimacy and reportage, political analysis and the soft fragmentation of everyday life. This is a book that changes the poetic landscape and makes ground for genuine revolution.

Announcing the 2024 Novel Prize shortlist

Giramondo, Fitzcarraldo Editions and New Directions are pleased to announce the shortlist for the 2024 Novel Prize, a biennial award for a book-length work of literary fiction written in English by published and unpublished writers around the world.

Selected from 1,100 submissions, the five books shortlisted for the 2024 Novel Prize are:

How to Live Together by Rey Conquer
Touch Me Now by Neal Amandus Gellaco
Porcupine by Nick Holdstock
Ruins, Child by Giada Scodellaro
Moss House by Hollen Singleton

The Novel Prize offers US$10,000 to the winner and simultaneous publication in Australia and New Zealand by the Sydney-based Giramondo, in North America by the New York-based New Directions, and in the UK and Ireland by the London-based Fitzcarraldo Editions. The prize rewards novels which explore and expand the possibilities of the form, and are innovative and imaginative in style. The winner will be announced in February 2025 and published in early 2026.

Read more about the shortlisted books and their authors below.


How to Live Together by Rey Conquer

How to Live Together is a novel about an academic who moves into a house to cat-sit, seeking solitude away from the pressures of having to relate to others – only to discover that the cats present their own challenges of relation. Through a kaleidoscopic prose form, How to Live Together probes the relationship between queerness, nature and a masculine fantasy of self-sufficiency, questioning the human projections and desires bound up in the genre of nature writing, and exploring what an authentic relationship between humans and non-humans – as well as between humans – might be.

Rey Conquer is a lecturer in German literature and film at Queen Mary, University of London, and a freelance writer; they are also currently translator-in-residence at Holocaust Centre North. Their academic monograph, Reading Colour (2019), won the 2018 Institute for German Studies Early Career Researcher Prize. They write reviews and essays on a wide range of topics – from contemporary German culture to queer morality – for the TLS, LA Review of Books, Burlington Contemporary and others, and their art criticism was shortlisted for the Burlington Contemporary Art Writing Prize. A short story, ‘It’s Called Fashion’, was published in the award-winning anthology Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers.

Touch Me Now by Neal Amandus Gellaco

Touch Me Now weaves a kaleidoscopic tapestry of contemporary Filipino life across a fortnight, against a backdrop of escalating political and military tension. Opening on the third Sunday of October, as the Dela Rosa family hold a feast in celebration of Our Lady de Navire, the narrative delves into each character in turn, culminating in the president’s declaration of martial law and a rally in Mendiola. Part Two resumes on the last Saturday of October, at a party held despite the strict governmental curfews and public searches. The intertwining lives of the characters continue, as the tightening clutches of tyranny force small businesses to close, with the price of food ever-increasing and daily life now lived under the waiting, watching presence of guns.

Neal Amandus Gellaco is a Teaching Associate at the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines Diliman, where he is pursuing his MA in English Studies: Anglo-American Literature. Touch Me Now is his first novel.

Porcupine by Nick Holdstock

Porcupine is a novel which recreates the first meeting of the art historian Aby Warburg and the philosopher Ernst Cassirer in a Swiss asylum in 1924. A brilliant Renaissance scholar, Warburg became increasingly afraid of political and social collapse and the rise of anti-Semitism during the aftermath of the First World War, fears which led to a psychotic breakdown. Warburg is in a highly paranoid state when Cassirer visits, and as the two men walk loops of the institution gardens, he conducts a series of circular, elliptical monologues, an escalating struggle between his psychosis and his attempts to lucidly convey his core ideas and convince Cassirer of his sanity. Porcupine engages philosophical and intellectual debates inspired by the scholarship of both men, with Warburg’s need for connection at its emotional heart.

Nick Holdstock’s most recent novel Quarantine was published by Swift Press in 2023. His previous books are The Tree That Bleeds (Luath, 2011), The Casualties (St Martins Press, 2015), China’s Forgotten People (Bloomsbury, 2015, 2019), Chasing the Chinese Dream (Bloomsbury, 2018) and The False River (Unthank, 2019). He writes for the TLS, the FT, the Guardian, the LRB and the Literary Review, among other publications.

Ruins, Child by Giada Scodellaro

Ruins, Child – a hybrid novel written in triptych form – renders the lives of six cohabiting women, and the community/landscape in which they exist. A surreal musing, this work uses the lens of urban infrastructure, social commentary, folklore, choreography and collective listening to create an ethnography of place and an ode to communal ruins.

Giada Scodellaro was born in Naples, Italy and raised in the Bronx, New York. Giada’s writings have appeared in the New YorkerBOMB, and Harper’s, among other publications. Giada is a recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and is the inaugural Tables of Contents Regenerative Residency fellow. Her debut collection, Some of Them Will Carry Me, was named one of the New Yorker’s best books of 2022.

Moss House by Hollen Singleton

Within days of a mysterious airborne event in the Tasman, mosses grow over streets and houses, starting in Sydney and spreading along the coast. Green auroras appear in the sky at night, disturbing electricity and the internet, raising speculation about their effect on the human population residing under the new lights. The story moves through multiple perspectives, centring on Matt, a visitor, and the housemates he joins: Gia, Jayden and Neve. Matt is from the west coast of Aotearoa, accompanied by his ghost; Neve is from Lord Howe Island and aims to return; Gia and Jayden focus on the share house – on rent, jobs and meals – and on protecting it against the rapidly changing outside world. Mosses expand, transforming the landscape and people. Over a span of ten days, housemates disappear. Some change, some flee, and some remain in waiting.

Hollen Singleton is a writer and editor in Naarm and teaches at the University of Melbourne and RMIT. They live in Sunshine.


Jessica Au won the inaugural Novel Prize in 2020 for Cold Enough for Snow. The novel, selected from over 1500 entries worldwide, was published in English in February 2022 and was published in 22 territories. The novel went on to win the 2023 Prime Minister’s Literary Award the 2023 Victorian Prize for Literature, among other prizes. The other shortlisted entries were Glenn Diaz’s Yñiga, Emily Hall’s The Longcut, Christine Lai’s Landscapes, Nora Lange’s Us Fools and Lani Yamamoto’s Ours and Others’.

In 2022, the Novel Prize was shared by Jonathan Buckley for Tell and Anne de Marcken for It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, selected from close to 1,000 submissions. de Marcken’s book went on to win the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. The other shortlisted titles for the 2022 Novel Prize were Darcie Dennigan’s Forever Valley, Marie Doezema’s Aurora Australis, Florina Enache’s Palimpsest, Vijay Khurana’s The Passenger Seat, Valer Popa’s Moon Over Bucharest and Sola Saar’s Anonymity Is Life

The Novel Prize is managed by three publishers working in collaboration. Giramondo reads submissions from Asia and Australasia, New Directions from the Americas, and Fitzcarraldo Editions from Africa and Europe.

Sign up to the Giramondo newsletter for updates about the prize.

Transcript: Ken Bolton’s launch speech for Chinese Postman by Brian Castro

Ken Bolton presents launch speech of Chinese Postman by Brian Castro. Credit: J. M. Coetzee Centre.
Ken Bolton delivers his launch speech of Chinese Postman by Brian Castro. Credit: J. M. Coetzee Centre.

Chinese Postman by Brian Castro was launched in Adelaide at the Ern Malley wine bar in November 2024. Read a lightly edited excerpt from Ken Bolton’s launch speech below, or download the full version – which is ‘set out with spacing indicative of intended delivery– here. The event was presented by the J.M. Coetzee Centre. You can also read a transcript of Castro’s launch speech here.


Brian Castro’s novels were seen from the first as impressively intellectual. I remember – I was a young writer, a poet, and actually not much concerned with Australian novels – when Double-Wolf came out and was greeted as ‘an Intellectual novel’.

Was this a warning to readers, I wondered, or a defence of the reviewer’s uncertain performance?

Despite this characterisation as formidably intelligent, Brian’s books win awards.

If you check, this is true of nearly every one. Brian Castro is the real thing – which is why we are here.

In the early pages [of Chinese Postman], as I marvelled at the writing, every sentence, almost, seeming to produce a fabulous insight, or wonderfully expressed conception. I remember thinking, Wow, this is as good as Adorno.

What is the novel about? What does it deal with? Or deal in?

Chinese Postman is philosophical: a look at memory, at ageing and age; a joke about the constraining patterns that old age can bring: patterns of thought or patterns of preoccupation and revision; thoughts about desires – former, or lingering, or unachieved; about goals, ideals, fixations; about a search for validation.

It is about the question of whether a life has a story or a shape (and does it have a good one?) and about the recognition that most of this will be in vain. The novel is partly an object lesson in the impossibility of preparing for death.

Structurally Chinese Postman presents not so much a Plot as A Situation. One that involves asymmetries, and uncertain elements. Can these be overcome, can the situation resolve into something acceptable?

The seeming near success in bringing this about, and the actual failure at the last hurdle, give a final irony: the failure arrives as an endorsement, and as foreseeable. Quin is caught-out by what, all along, might have been predicted. But if you’re a pessimist, in losing you win.

As Quin dies this failure will confirm his thinking and give him a chuckle: ‘Right Again!’


Read Ken Bolton’s launch speech in full.

Brian Castro and Ken Bolton. Credit: J. M. Coetzee Centre.
Brian Castro and Ken Bolton. Credit: J. M. Coetzee Centre.

Transcript: Brian Castro at the launch of Chinese Postman

Brian Castro Chinese Postman
Brian Castro at the Adelaide launch of Chinese Postman. Credit: J. M. Coetzee Centre.

Chinese Postman by Brian Castro was launched in Adelaide at the Ern Malley wine bar in November 2024. Read a transcript of Castro’s speech below, which followed from words by Ken Bolton. The event was presented by the J.M. Coetzee Centre.


Thank you all for being here. I haven’t seen so many people I know for a long time. It reminds me of Proust, when he once ventured out of his bedroom, and was astounded by the number of people in the street and he asked why was everyone going to the bank today? … In anticipation of some kind of catastrophe.

Thank you so much Ken, for your kind words. I realise it’s a real burden to be asked to launch someone else’s book. I normally avoid it, making excuses like ‘I can’t leave my dog’. Or ‘my grandmother just died – again.’ But honestly, one is never too old to be received by old friends. As you may know, Ken has a world-wide reputation as a poet. In David Bellos’ biography of the French writer Georges Perec, it was noted that when Perec was in Australia, the two people he most wanted to meet was John Forbes and Ken Bolton. Ken, of course, is a Zen master of life as a user’s manual, and the exacting quietude in his poetry is second to none.

I think you have to be a poet to have a good memory. Memory of course, is the music of syntax. But memory is now becoming more difficult for me. I have to sing the alphabet song to retrieve the names of people I know, and when that fails, it becomes a spectrum, sliding between the fictional and the factual. Like a dog, patchouli reminds me of my grandmother; Havana cigars of a great-uncle; Jean-Patou, the perfume of my mother. These synaesthesic correspondences have kept me in touch with the material reality of writing. To stave off rampant forgetfulness on my travels, I’ve always carried this postman’s bag as a security item, a mnemonic, a man-bag, a dog-tag, a reminder that my trade was epistolary and mortal. You can witness my double on the cover of the book, although he had the added luxury of an opium-pipe. According to the photograph taken in 1904, he was a postman in Shangdu, in Inner Mongolia, which, despite Olivia Newton-John, was also known by foreigners as Xanadu, and he may have delivered missives for a love-lorn Kubla Khan. I lost the bag once in a pub but a kindly patron returned it, saying it belonged to someone called Fidel Castro, and may have contained a bomb. Being a Castro was always going to cause trouble.

Let me give you an example of my eccentric second cousin who died recently, and who tended to annoy both Beijing and the British colonial government in Hong Kong.

Alan Castro was the Editor of The Standard newspaper in Hong Kong. A rival paper to The South China Morning Post. I’ll quote you a bit of his obituary. I know a launch is not an obituary, but those of you who read me will understand the irony: I quote:

Former Standard editor-in-chief Alan Castro, who has died aged 96, was a colossus of local journalism in an age of larger-than-life characters who helped chronicle the tectonic changes taking place in Hong Kong during the last decades of the 20th century.

Castro cut an imposing figure in the rough-and-tumble, pre-computer newsrooms of old, whether emerging from his corner office resplendent in an immaculately cut suit or a crumpled karate uniform.

Born in Hong Kong, Castro first joined the Hongkong Tiger Standard – as it was then called – in the early 1960s before spending more than 20 years reporting on Asia and working in London’s Fleet Street for a couple of years. 

He returned to The Standard as editor-in-chief in the late ‘70s and was at the helm during the unsettled 1980s amid intense negotiations between London and Beijing over the very future of Hong Kong.

There you have it: a shit-stirrer from another age and another place. But you don’t get to the age of 96 without a whole lot of vitality. At 82 he married a woman of 32. Loud gasps were heard from around the North Asian world. He was no Rupert Murdoch, but he had style and as a 9th-Dan karate man, kicked the stereotypes out of the local bowling alley. He offered me a job on his paper when I graduated. I turned it down, preferring Australia, where as they say, one could be girt by sea and drunk by lunch.

So I began a career as a dodgy postie, I did sorting, collecting, and graduated to delivering. Something I did for eight months. What I learned from the Chinese Postman Problem was an algorithm stating that one should avoid walking the same street twice in the midst of life’s many crises. I discovered that the contrafact could offer a diversion. A contrafact is a jazz composition built using the chord progression of a pre-existing song, but with a new melody and arrangement. The alto-saxophonist Charlie Parker exploited it to great affect. In both jazz and writing, you can hear previous melodies inside your DNA, the future coming out of the past, then you re-work it, going up and down the spiral staircase until you grow dizzy. You become a copy of yourself and you remake yourself every day. As someone once said, existence is plagiarism. Quin is masquerading as Castro. Like Tom Ripley, he’s probably read about Castro in a biographical dictionary. He’ll see to it that I become autobiographical from the biographical. I’m happy to let him live on when I disappear. But then again, what do I know about posterity? I’m just the postman for other people’s fantasies.

Bernadette Brennan generously calls this withdrawal from subjectivity my late style. Late style is a concept Edward Said popularised, though he borrowed it from Theodor Adorno.

‘In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes,’ Theodor Adorno wrote in his Essays on Music. He said this positively. Age bids farewell to the Ego. In old age, sensitivity and the self explode into fragments without subjective intention, leaving crystals of truths which are only assimilable by chance, by some aleatory jig-saw puzzle. If you’re good, only luck could save you, because no one is going to read that closely in the tram going to work … except Einstein of course. The reader has to do some work at the speed of light, but time is not on the novelist’s side. Quin is discovering relativity through fragments and through negatives. Bitter and twisted as he is, he’s inviting you into his house for a drink, and we know where the conversation will be heading. And if you look at the word ‘catastrophe‘ you’ll find there’s only a short distance between it and the name ‘Castro’.

But of course, there is no getting away from death. As Anne Carson says about life:

‘There it is before you – possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map – let’s say you’re 25, then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks, have triumphs, become someone, a bus driver, a professor of Indo-European linguistics, a pirate, a cosmetologist, years pass, maybe in a family maybe not, maybe happy maybe not, then one day you wake up and you’re seventy. Looking ahead you see a black doorway. You begin to notice the black doorway is always there, at the edge, whether you look at it or not.’

My doorway is always blue, because that’s the colour of the interior life. And though I may play the blues, I hope you will always hear an irresponsible laughter emanating from the wings.

So contrary to my protagonist, that curmudgeonly Quin, may you take the levity of flight and the pen of thought to even greater heights. The ‘you’ to whom I’m referring, are my younger colleagues, those who still think in terms of aesthetics. In aesthetics you can discern the butterfly of beauty enjoying a momentary splendour in the grass before being captured in a rational net. Beauty trapped within reason sounds unfortunate, but it’s a brutish instinct with which the human mind is both cursed and endowed. Intellectual pleasure is always going to be bitter-sweet, a mixture of empathy and doubt, involving a degree of sado-masochism. There’s a very Portuguese term for it: the word saudade, which is untranslatable into English. You can hear it in Brazilian music, the chorinho, which means ‘a little cry, or a lament’. But it’s full of syncopation and counterpoint and there’s no time to linger in lamentation. So this book is a chorinho, which I hope will make you laugh as well as lament; whether you laugh at, laugh with, or laugh along. Laughter in the minor key is a form of deep empathy, because if you can still laugh, you are actually breathing in thought, and breathing out feeling.

My heartfelt gratitude to all of you for your presence here. Thank you to Anne Pender, Gemma Parker and The Coetzee Centre for organising this launch. It’s great too, to see some of the gang of six with whom I regularly drink lots of Guinness without guilt. Most of all, thank you to my partner Jennifer, who very early on separated fiction from fact, who understood unreliable narrators and the murky world of autofiction.

Last but not least, thanks to this wonderful establishment, Ern Malley, which sounds like a hoax, but is really the genuine article and last bastion of High Modernism left in Australia.

I now move my chair a bit further into the shade, in the way that Proust named his last volume À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. And you’ll have to translate that literally, both for its meaning, and for its wordplay, and of course, for its irony.


Read a transcript of Ken Bolton’s launch speech for Chinese Postman here.

Chinese Postman (2024)
Brian Castro. Photo: Arianna Dagnino

Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy wins 2024 Voss Literary Prize

Credit: Lily Sawenko

Alexis Wright has won the 2024 Voss Literary Prize for her epic novel Praiseworthy. This puts the number of awards the book has won at six, of which include the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Stella Prize, and the UK’s James Tait Black Prize for Fiction.

The Voss Literary Prize aims to acknowledge the best Australian novel published in the preceding year. Praiseworthy was selected from a shortlist of five; another book published by Giramondo, Hospital by Sanya Rushdi, was a finalist. The winner’s announcement was made on 2 December 2024.

The judges praised the novel in the following terms:

Praiseworthy is a work for the ages, a capacious Aboriginal epic based in the Queensland Gulf Country.  It wrestles with the universal question, how to survive in a world corrupted by greed and stupidity?

Alexis Wright’s answer lies in storytelling, in building an all-encompassing country of the mind rooted in ancient storylines but set in a continuous and recurring present where people and spirits interact, where the hell fires of colonisation hang like a grief cloud over the land, and where a culture dreamer (variously known as Cause Man Steel, Widespread Planet, and Omnicide) embarks on a quest to save civilisation (and make himself a motza) by harnessing the hauling power of five million wild donkeys.

In asserting the healing possibilities of story, Wright eviscerates its opposite, that particular Canberra narrative, amplified by social media, about the abuse of alcohol and children in Aboriginal communities. This material, which describes the breakdown of Aboriginal culture and society, is so ubiquitous that the residents of the tiny town of Praiseworthy are sucked in by it: they want to trade their integrity for the trinkets of white lifestyle and minor positions of authority.

It is here that Wright’s critique of white denial of Aboriginal rights is both stringent and plangent. Tommyhawk, eight-year-old fascist son of Cause, is obsessed by the rhetoric of the Intervention. In the absence of a counter-narrative, he believes all Aboriginal men are paedophiles and reports Aboriginal Sovereignty, his teenaged brother, to the police for marrying (in a traditional sense) his fifteen-year-old sweetheart. Tommyhawk wills Aboriginal Sovereignty to drown himself, all the while believing that the golden-haired Minister for Aboriginal Affairs will save him from his dysfunctional family and carry him off to live with her in Parliament House. 

Much has been written about Praiseworthy and the awards it has garnered for its poetic and expansive language, its exceptional mastery of craft and astonishing emotional range. Wright has gifted her readers a total life-world, a fantastical imaginary that challenges western knowledge, logic and expectations, enriches Australian literature, and gives sovereignty to Indigenous voices. 

The 2024 judging panel comprised Kate Cantrell (University of Southern Queensland), Stephanie Green (Griffith University), Elaine Lindsay (chair, Australian Catholic University), Deborah Pike (The University of Notre Dame), and Emmett Stinson (University of Tasmania).

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


The collector’s set of Alexis Wright fiction. Order here.
Praiseworthy (paperback edition)
Praiseworthy (hardcover edition)

Alexis Wright wins the Melbourne Prize for Literature

Alexis Wright
Credit: Vincent Long

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

Anna Thwaites is the new editor of HEAT magazine

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.

Anna Thwaites. Photo: Bede McKenna

A poem from The Prodigal by Suneeta Peres da Costa

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.

π.O. (Pi.O.) wins 2024 Patrick White Literary Award

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.

Read an interview with π.O. in ArtsHub.

Anne de Marcken wins Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over

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: a note on The Prodigal

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

Suneeta Peres da Costa. Photo: Tony Grech

Brian Castro: a note on Chinese Postman

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

An excerpt from Brian Castro’s Chinese Postman

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


The Cyprian by Amy Crutchfield wins Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry

Amy Crutchfield. Credit: Creative Australia

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.

Luke Beesley, Amy Crutchfield and Autumn Royal. Credit: Creative Australia
The Cyprian (2023)