Nikos Papastergiadis’s debut literary non-fiction work John Berger and Me has been shortlisted for the 2025 National Biography Award. The announcement was made on 9 July.

Read the judges’ comments below.

The substance of John Berger and Me is implicit in its title. In an original hybrid form, Nikos Papastergiadis recounts the regular visits he made in the 1990s to John Berger’s home in the French village of Quincy. This unusual friendship began when the author was a doctoral student at Cambridge, writing his dissertation on Berger, the English cultural theorist, artist and novelist, whose still-relevant Ways of Seeing (1972) transformed the art world.

Nikos Papastergiadis, the son of immigrants from a Greek peasant village, offers a warm tribute to his mentor in John Berger and Me. He describes his book in painterly terms as a ‘likeness’, which takes the form of ‘a sequence of anecdotes … fragments’. The gifted storyteller explores the two men’s shared love of motorbikes, rembetika and the grind and sweat of hay-making, and creates vivid portraits of Berger’s family, the villagers and the author’s own parents. The broader conversation covers migration and belonging as well as the existential problems facing an agrarian peasantry in the modern world.

Nikos Papastergiadis studied at the University of Melbourne and University of Cambridge. His current research focuses on the investigation of the historical transformation of contemporary art and cultural institutions by digital technology. Learn more here.

Raaza Jamshed reflects on her debut novel What Kept You? (1 July 2025), a feminist anti-tale that explores survival, metamorphosis, and the radical freedom of choosing one’s own ending.

The conception of this novel began with my short story titled Concinnity: Some Awkward Digressions, which posed, in oblique ways, the question of return. What can return look like, not just to a place, or a life interrupted, but to a self? What Kept You? is, in many ways, a series of responses to that question. Each chapter could be read as an answer to a different dimension of what keeps us away, or stands between us and the path home.

I grew up on my grandmother’s stories, some steeped in folklore, others pieced together from black-and-white headlines read aloud at breakfast. Often, these were stories about girls who left home and never returned. Girls whose mothers and grandmothers longed to ask: What kept you? There were other stories too – the slow collapse of the reef in Cairns and blue plumes rising from Pakistan’s largest landfills – that formed a background weather as I wrote this book. The sense of loss was monstrous, cumulative and hovering, beyond containment. It was in the face of this monstrous grief that I found myself returning to a line from Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching: “Please tell a story about a girl who gets away.” I wanted a girl in my story to get away. I wanted her to survive, even if that survival looked like wreckage.

But I was also asking: How does someone face the monstrous and not become monstrous herself? What does it take not just to endure, but to return?

This is a coming-of-age novel, but not in the conventional sense; it’s not as a flight into individuation but a return to a self, shaped by inherited multiplicities. And in this novel, that return is not clean; it arrives through rupture. At times, all three selves – what Márquez called the public, the private, and the secret – collapse into one another. This novel is, in many ways, a story told at the mouth of catastrophe, where fairy tales meet headlines, where frogs kissed become dogs, and girls sucked by shadows reappear elsewhere. But it’s also a love song to return, to storytelling as survival, to metamorphosis. If Kafka imagined metamorphosis as a man waking up a bug, I wanted to ask: What does metamorphosis look like for women who change slowly, imperceptibly, under the grind of history, migration, grief?

There is a grandmother at the heart of this novel. Or perhaps a meditation on the denial of death. The difference didn’t matter by the end. What remained was the intimacy of speaking to the dead, a spectral and semantically slippery presence that offered its own language of knowing. I kept returning to the idea of manzil, the act of chanting words until they slip past meaning and land in intuition. I wanted this novel to unfold that way, a story told and retold, arriving somewhere new in the old.

I also carried with me the myth of my foremothers – Kashmiri women who vanished into jungles and returned bearing new language. They did not return to the same world; they remade it in new words. The idea that poetry should not imitate the world but create one, central to Vicente Huidobro’s poetics, felt essential to my understanding of their stories of survival. In writing this book, I’ve tried to do the same: to create a self, braided from exile and return, a concinnity where each fracture carries the shape of the whole.

What can return look like, not just to a place, or a life interrupted, but to a self? What Kept You? is, in many ways, a series of responses to that question.

Hasib Hourani’s debut collection rock flight has won the 2025 Mary Gilmore Award, a prize given for the best first book of poetry published in the previous calendar year. The announcement was made on 30 July, a little over a month after the book won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry at the 2025 NSW Literary Awards.

Read the judges’ comments below.

‘rock flight is an extended poetic negotiation with certainty: the certainty of colonial violence, of dispossession, of the forces that degrade home and homeland, and of the suffering to self and family and collective identity that comes of these modern conditions. rock flight also performs the certainty of witnessing, of testimony, of the bonds of family and memory… It is a profound honour to nominate this book as the winner of the Mary Gilmore Award.’

Hasib Hourani is a Lebanese-Palestinian writer, editor, arts worker and educator living on Wangal Country in Sydney. Learn about upcoming events featuring Hourani here.

Brian Castro’s latest novel Chinese Postman has been shortlisted for the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award. The announcement was made on 25 June by Perpetual, the award’s trustee. Castro has been nominated for award now seven times, with three shortlistings and three longlistings for previous books.

When asked by InDaily about his hopes for a win, Castro said, ‘I think it was John Cleese who famously said he could take despair, but it was hope that was the killer. So I’m not hoping at all, just running as an outsider in the mud!’

An autofictional meditation on the experience of old age, Chinese Postman centres the character of Abe Quin and his epistolary relationship with a woman in war-torn Ukraine. It has also been shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal.

Read the Miles Franklin judges’ comments on the book below.

Brian Castro’s Chinese Postman transpires in the shadowlands of mortal life. It asks how someone whose life has been haunted by a terminal homelessness of spirit can reconcile themselves to the finality of their destination. As Abe Quin, the anti-hero of this novel, finds his life running in ever diminishing circles, he reaches into himself for the sources of his consternation. There he finds a taunting judgment that all his life, all his effort and the honours of his literary achievement, seem in the end to count for nothing. They have not taken him one step closer to a home that seems forever lost. Looking back at his career and relationships he finds that he has, despite certain outward appearances, never been anything other than utterly alone. In this unprepossessing terrain, Castro has crafted a fine and profound novel. Abe does not always find language consoling, but the lyric beauty of Chinese Postman, its restless wisdom and bitter comedy, bestow a rare gift on readers.

The winner of the 2025 Miles Franklin will be announced on 24 July 2025.

Giramondo Publishing, Fitzcarraldo Editions and New Directions are pleased to announce the Poetry in Translation Prize, a new biennial award for an outstanding poetry collection translated into English. 

Opening to submissions on 15 July, the Poetry in Translation Prize is open to living poets from around the world, writing in any language other than English. The winners will receive an advance of $5,000, to be shared equally between poet and translator, followed by simultaneous publication in Australia and New Zealand with Giramondo, in North America with New Directions, and in the UK and Ireland with Fitzcarraldo Editions.

The Poetry in Translation Prize will run alongside the Novel Prize, a biennial award for a book-length work of literary fiction written in English by published and unpublished writers around the world, launched by Giramondo, Fitzcarraldo Editions, and New Directions in 2020. Since 2016, Fitzcarraldo Editions has also run an annual Essay Prize for unpublished authors. Previous winners of these prizes include Jessica Au, Anne de Marcken, Polly Barton and Marianne Brooker.

Nick Tapper, associate publisher at Giramondo, commented: ‘We are really pleased to join with our friends at Fitzcarraldo Editions and New Directions in this unique award, which brings poetry from around the world into English, and foregrounds the essential role of translation in our literature. Its global outlook will bring new readers to poets whose work deserves wide and sustained attention.’

Fitzcarraldo Editions poetry editor Rachael Allen said: ‘Using the model of the already established Novel and Essay prizes, we wanted to open our doors to new poetry in translation to give space and gain exposure to poetries we may not be aware of. There is no other prize like this that we know, and we’re excited to work together to offer this opportunity to translators and poets. It will be a privilege to encounter new poetry in this way.’

Jeffrey Yang, editor-at-large at New Directions, added: ‘New Directions is super excited to make the leap from novel to poetry prize with Fitzcarraldo and Giramondo in this historic venture, with the hope of highlighting new work by living poets from around the world through the wondrous transformations of passionate translators.’

Submissions will be open from 15 July to 15 August, with Giramondo Publishing, Fitzcarraldo Editions and New Directions reading all submissions concurrently. A shortlist will be announced in late 2025, with the winner announced in January 2026 and publication scheduled for 2027.

For any PR enquiries, please contact publicity@giramondopublishing.com.

In June 2025, Michael Farrell traveled from Melbourne up to Sydney for the second launch of The Victoria Principle, held at Better Read Than Dead bookshop. Here, we publish a transcript of host Astrid Lorange’s brief reflection on this debut book of fiction by an acclaimed Australian poet.

Hi everyone. I’d like to acknowledge that we are on sovereign Gadigal country tonight. This always was and always will be Aboriginal land.

I am not launching this book, but hosting its launch event. So I will restrain myself, as possible, and only say a few words before I invite Michael here to read from The Victoria Principle.

Many of you will know Michael as a poet, and rightly so: he’s one of the best. You will know Michael’s poems to be full of wit, surprise, humour; a love for games, treats, and music; attention to histories of poetry within and against nationhood, and, especially in the last few collections, narrative.

Some of you will know Michael as a scholar, whose work on poetry and poetics is prodigious for its close reading. Michael’s critical capacities are underscored by intimate, expert knowledge of the poem as a cultural object worked by hand, ear, and chance.

You may also know Michael as a visual artist: over the last four years he’s made more and more works on paper, culminating in an exhibition. If we recall, and we should, Break Me Ouch from 2006, a work of poetry manifest in a comic strip, we might be reminded that Michael’s visual practice is early canon, as the fans say: yet his more recent foray is animated with his poetic subjects and methods: pop, punk, dada, and so on.

All of these different Michaels culminate, I think, in The Victoria Principle, which is both his ‘first’ work of fiction but also in many ways a continuation of what he is and does as a poet, scholar, and artist. The stories are emboldened by the counterrational possibilities of poetry, they profess criticism and judgement in the manner of a very fine essay, and they inaugurate new aesthetic encounters like an artwork might. Above all, they push, extend, and intensify a narrative impulse at work across all these other forms.

Let’s say that the ‘short story’ here affords Michael a new relationship to the sentence. In the stories collected here, each sentence is utterly surprising in its reach, music, reference, and possibility. Things happen in the stories, but they are less plot-driven than shaped by a pleasure in plottiness, a sense that what happens is less important than the wild processes through which what happens is mediated, represented, remembered, repressed. In this sense, my feeling is that a reader is finally left with something of a narrative theory, but a theory of the best kind: immanent in each sentence, full of life and mystery and possibility.

The following excerpt is from Joss: A History (June 2025), Grace Yee’s follow-up to her triple-award-winning poetry collection, Chinese Fish.

I have heard

that the price of a pound of gold has gone grey 
       over the last couple of months
that the first sovereign lord beheaded his grandson
that chinese market gardeners in suburbia shipped out 
       after decades of fasting and purification
that evil-intentioned hooligans penetrated the palace gardens, 
       ran amok and torched every tree
that all the animals – except the amphibians and one in every five 
       humans – perished
that those who remained were photographers and craftsmen, 
       whose splendour proved to be a waste of lime and quicksand
that all they wanted to do was sugar-coat everything,  
       including the sloppily referenced poorly constructed
       sentences on the shelves of high-street shops that broadcast 
       terra nullius radio
that due to the special enmity between men,
       the gates were hastily closed and a carbon racquet  
       bestowed on the king at the same time that ten mosquito bites 
       were extracted from his super-complex yoga routine
that the real problem is people are so consumed 
       with the manufacture of lacquer and glass 
       they no longer respond to the teachings of the universe:
all they want to do is sip cold-brew mochaccinos,  
       talk about coloured girls through a wall of built-in bookshelves, 
       and move to new zealand for a better life.

Jenny Grigg’s poetry cover series has won Best Designed Series at the 2025 Australian Book Design Awards. The announcement was made on Friday 23 May in Sydney.

The judges commended the ‘evocative and very elegant design’; the ‘uniformity across the series’; and ‘the quotes on the back.’ ‘You just want to own these,’ they concluded. ‘Great format, and beautiful production.’

Says Grigg: ‘This is the third series of Giramondo poetry books for which I have created cover designs. In an increasingly intangible world, the covers in this third series treat books as physical items that are turned over in people’s hands, as they read them, consider reading them, or pass them on to other people. The artworks were created by painting my fingers and handling blank paper wrapped around already published A5 Giramondo books. Digital tools were used only for reproduction purposes, in fact care was taken to resist all types of visual modifications available in graphic design software. The fingerprints are actual size.’

The six-book series, published over 12 months, begins with Kate Fagan’s Song in the Grass and ends with Grace Yee’s Joss: A History. The four other titles are Tintinnabulum by Judith Beveridge, rock flight by Hasib Hourani, The Prodigal by Suneeta Peres da Costa, and In Your Dreams by Šime Knežević.

Grigg, who was inducted into the Design Institute of Australia Hall of Fame in 2020, has won numerous awards for her work. Learn more on her website.

Hasib Hourani’s debut collection rock flight has won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry at the 2025 NSW Literary Awards. The announcement was made on Monday 19 May by the State Library of NSW as part of the Sydney Writers’ Festival.

Now published to critical acclaim in three continents, this debut collection by the Lebanese-Palestinian writer, editor, arts worker and educator is a powerful testament to the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people.

‘Narratives of occupation, grief and resistance are difficult to capture straight-forwardly,’ said Hourani in his acceptance speech. ‘I wrote rock flight in order to explore both historical and speculative acts of liberation in Palestine. And so rock flight is both a book about protests, and one that acts as a protest for Palestinian liberation.’ 

Read the judges’ comments below.

rock flight is a conceptually inventive collection that weaves together the political and deeply personal to create a powerful voice speaking against the moral, military and bureaucratic violences of colonialism. Unconventional forms combine with free verse to create a multilayered call to action, mobilising disparate fields of relationship, reference and understanding to form a cohesive whole that compels attention and empathy. 

Hasib Hourani’s work is grounded in the history and personal experience of Palestinian dispossession, detailing connection to land and people. The writing locates the human and immediate in events that have been distorted, ignored or manipulated by government and media. The poems are rich with symbolic suggestion, crafted to speak against cruelty and legal incoherence. rock flight is a rendering of crimes, a guide for survival, and a recognition of the disruptive potential of paper, voice and stone.

rock flight was also shortlisted for the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing. You can watch Hourani’s acceptance speech on the State Library’s livestream, as well as a recording of him reading from the book on the Giramondo Instagram. He will be appearing at three Sydney Writers’ Festival events this week.

Michael Farrell reflects on The Victoria Principle (1 May 2025), a debut work of fiction that follows six poetry collections the acclaimed Melbourne-based writer has published with Giramondo.

The first three stories of The Victoria Principle were an attempt to write aspects of my life (clinical depression and breakdown; my childhood experience of farmlife; Catholicism in its intense relationality with Jesus) at a level of fictional remove. In other words, they are experiments in autofiction. 

‘“The Invisible Paddocks”’ uses the tropes of storytelling, and imagination, to parody the extremity of Australian settler farm life in the tradition of Steele Rudd: but using an amount of magical realism to depart from his mode. I try to counter the notion of a white bubble through the structure of the character’s adopted sister. 

‘“Thinking About Ornithophobia”’ inaugurates a structure which recurs in  The Victoria Principle, of a creative person who has a particular project in hand, in this case, an ecopoetics feature in a journal (something which I have experience of). It highlights the relation of this protagonist to birds during the human-deficient months of lockdown in Melbourne. 

Some [stories] are purely fictional, some are partly autobiographical, or give clues – and red herrings – about my life, or rather gestures towards the narration and representation of it: as quotidian, magical, emotional, comedic. 

The following seventeen were written later, and more quickly. They explore aspects of my own thinking about poetics as subject matter, lending a metacritical, as well as metafictional element; they try different metafictional devices; they try to work in different ways in terms of the structuring effects of voice. One aspect is trying to sustain a level of irony towards the stories throughout; another is taking a fragment of narrative, from conversation, or from a movie, and taking it somewhere else. Overall, the stories try out things that haven’t been possible in poems in over twenty years of publishing books of poetry: some are purely fictional, some are partly autobiographical, or give clues – and red herrings – about my life, or rather gestures towards the narration and representation of it: as quotidian, magical, emotional, comedic. 

Read an excerpt from Ivor Indyk’s introduction to Poetry (April 2025), a commemorative edition bringing together all the published poems by Antigone Kefala.

In all, Kefala’s poetic oeuvre comprises little more than 200 poems. Most of the poems are short, finely honed scenes, like moments suspended in time, usually less than a page in length, and remarkable for the minimalism by which they achieve their expressive effects. They are also often combined in sequences, to allow for a more intense exploration of the situation, or the state of mind, which is their subject. Composed of three, four, five or even six parts, the sequences are dramatic in form, epic in their scope. Time loops and parades, threatens and transforms – it is here that one feels most strongly the torment and tragedy of Kefala’s own experience as a migrant.

This does not mean that the poems are to be read simply in personal terms. From the beginning they open large perspectives, through suggestion and implication, no matter how precise their focus. They portray a world, one whose logic has become altered or fractured, its features transformed in both magical and threatening ways. In The Alien, as in Kefala’s subsequent collections, dreams and memories present their own strangely ordered realities, signs and shadows point to what is absent, to abandoned, desolate or haunted places. Death lurks in the interstices. The experience of migration is not necessarily given as the reason for this heightened awareness, though its impact is keenly felt. It is a world populated by survivors, ‘newcomers from old countries’, but not only by them. The peanut vendor and the acrobat, the concert goers in furs, the solitary at the motel window – all feel the precarity of existence.

…

Kefala’s poetry may be rooted in the experience of migration, but there is something in this experience, the crossing of borders, the traversing of realities, the shifting of identities, which propels her poetry to the extremities of emotion – to terror, fear and desperation – and also, because the effects are so magical and strange – to wonder, awe and release.

Read an excerpt from Mireille Juchau’s introduction to Fiction (April 2025), a commemorative edition collecting novellas, short stories and more by Antigone Kefala.

A recent claim about art’s beneficial properties suggests that the artist’s experience of exile forges works of wisdom, ethical purity, special insight. Antigone Kefala’s austere and radiant fiction splinters this totalising vision. Her searching narrators describe exile’s irredeemable complexity, how loss of language and culture undoes and remakes the self. Throughout Kefala’s distinctive project, the individual contends with longing, thwarted creativity and fate. Everyone needs something to protect them from ‘a direct contact with life’, says one of her characters in The First Journey. ‘If he does not have faith, which is the best protection, then he invents something else, imitates, takes a vice.’ 

Kefala’s protagonists are alert to received wisdoms, banalities, cant. They enfold us instead in shared existential experience. In the novella Intimacies, Helen dissects private and public customs. At work, she takes a lift with a Tasmanian accountant. A man ‘frozen some millenniums ago…and now being defrosted by the office’, he hasn’t yet reached ‘human consistency’. In Conversations with Mother, the second-person ‘you’ addresses a trinity – narrator, reader, and the mother who has died. The dead, or frozen in time, take modern and mythical forms in Kefala’s heightened yet spare realism. The living are not so much haunted as animated by their dead, still ventriloquising their longings and regrets. In all her work the past is both void and guide.

…

Reading backward, or so I’ve come to think of my reading from Late Journals to the earliest novella – is to encounter Kefala’s striking, authoritative voice as it was honed through exile from a war-ruined Europe, Soviet-occupied Romania and the southern countries that became her home. None of her works of decreation can morally purify the reader, since that is the job of homilies. Kefala doesn’t aim to comfort. Still, I’m consoled by her exhilarating attention to life’s contradictions, and the ceaseless mystery of ourselves.

The following excerpt is from a sequence featured in Poetry, one of two commemorative editions bringing together the work of Antigone Kefala published in April 2025.

Absence

I

The coffin arrived
full of polished brass
then the priest
giving instructions.
The first
bent down and kissed it
but the second
kept eating earth from
the golden top of the coffin
munching it
I could see straight
into the cavernous mouth.

II

Then from this height,
greater than I imagined,
they threw me in.
The water heavy
with no feel to it
just this fear on all sides,
the waves held in the air
solid marble
glossy in the ashen light.

I was swimming in a sea
of tombstones
as far as I could see
the surface crowded with
these frozen waves
tombstones to the horizon
ambushed by lifeless bodies
floating in the night.

The following excerpt is from ‘The Island’, a short story featured in Fiction, one of two commemorative editions bringing together the work of Antigone Kefala published in April 2025.

The office building was four storeys high with narrow windows. The façade decorated with flowers and garlands that hung over each window in a plaster that had become brown with time. Inside it was full of small rooms and corridors all painted light-green and smelling of disinfectant – a smell of chlorine that had permeated the whole building over the years, that had become by now second nature. Even the books, in that windowless room in which I worked, had been tinged by it.

Erik Gosse, the boss, was a myopic young man, with wild curly hair. In the morning, I could hear him open the door of his office, cut the air swiftly with the flaps of his black coat, which he seemed to wear permanently, then burst in through the door of the office, lighted by neon lights and so narrow that three people could hardly stand in the middle.

After closing the door carefully, he would remain undecided in front of the spare table, then push the papers aside and sit there dangling his legs, take out of his pockets tins of tobacco and a few pipes, and fill them greedily, his fine gold-rimmed glasses falling over his nose while he talked. And I stayed at my table pretending that I was working, listening peacefully to all that blonde noise that came in waves together with the scent of tobacco, and made no moves that could possibly alarm him. But he was more resilient than he looked, having survived in that department for so long, hiding behind a series of little mannerisms, a myopic way of looking through them, as if unaware of their existence, given to noisy outbursts which he found they would never dare interrupt.

He was doing research at the time for a book on the people who had come to the Island, in mythical times, in the big canoes, and was just discovering the tales of the ‘Great Woman of the Night’, and the ‘Wingless Bird’. He spoke of his theory with which he was trying to revolutionise the attitude of the country to its past. He claimed that in order to understand history, one needed a type of vision that only people placed at the crossroads could provide. That is, people who lived between cultures, who were forced to live double lives, belonging to no group, and these he called ‘the people in between’. This vision, he maintained, was necessary to the alchemy of cultural understanding.

It was a limited hypothesis, he agreed, useful maybe only in a country such as this, in which only now were they beginning to take an interest in their past. But not quite yet, so obsessed was everyone with the future, bringing up their children as if nothing had gone before them, so that they ate and imagined that no one had eaten before them, and they built houses as if no one had built before them. Each generation that began here lived fanatically with the idea that it marked the start of the road.

As regards the past, he said, it was kept, as I could see, in all these grey metal cabinets that filled the room and had gone mouldy now, and no one talked about it in their everyday lives. It was a substance that was being examined in a few offices and universities, a secret vice, practised like taxidermy, the products of which were shown to children on holidays. And it remained in them together with the smell of antiseptic, of dust, of a decomposition that took place under glass, surrounded by artificial lights and sawdust.

He was trying his hypothesis out on me to see my reaction. I was one of those people in between. But did I have the vision? I took the idea home to discuss it with Aunt Niki and Mina over dinner. Maybe Aunt Niki had it, she was older and had been here longer. But I was still a revolutionary. I wanted other people to understand me. I wanted them all to understand me, to like me, to admire me.

I wanted us all to do marvellous things. What? I had as yet no precise idea. Some fantastic, world-shattering act. I rushed forward to give them all the gifts I had, feeling always that I was not giving enough. I was full of longing for unknown things – for open spaces, warm people, the scent of hot stones in the sun. A longing for something that would raise us, as in Byzantine paintings, make us float through the air, disappear in shafts of light, become a line in space. I was sure that there were others who felt the same. I kept watching them attentively to discern the signs.

I watched them now as I went to work, the office my first holiday job, this other side of everyday life that I had not been directly involved in before. All these morning and afternoon teas, and the lunches. Time had been divided into two categories – work and leisure. The concepts came up frequently in discussions, over lunches in the cafeteria with the formica tables and the green lavatory tiles on the walls, where they sat segregated, the women together and the men together. The men still discussing the intricacies of such concepts as ‘Officers and Gentlemen’. Work and leisure as two separate things, with rituals that were not to be confused.

Work was an uninteresting but necessary thing, like a bitter medicine that one had to take in as small doses as possible between set given hours, say, eight o’clock in the morning and five o’clock in the afternoon. This was the sacred time of work. They all moved towards it in small faithful steps, in spite of the continuous rain, and the hail, and the wind, with neat umbrellas and plastic raincoats, and lunch boxes and an apple. Armies of them, obedient and resigned.

…

The following excerpt is from the opening pages of The Seal Woman by Beverley Farmer. First published in 1992, it was released in a new edition in 2025.

White worms with lips are grazing in midair, nuzzling their way over the mounds, the boulders. The tide is out. Their white fins drift, veils and webs, gossamer, as if in water. They feed on the corruption. Shore sand, bull kelp, boulders of grey flesh, and nowhere a crab, a fly or a wasp, only the filmy-finned floaters. Over the whole shore, layer on layer of white veiling lifts and bells, flattens and hangs drifting. The boulders are great animals, diminishing slowly, torpid, already porous on the grey sand where soon not even bones will be left.

A flow across the dunes, their skin creeping in wrinkles. Tides of the sand.

Hot and swollen I wake out of an aftersleep into the late morning with a hand on his pubic hair, damp and warm like seaweed, black, stuck to the white flesh in a springy, delicate fuzz. I wake to the sound of footsteps. No one is here, I know it is only the children in the house next door running on the wooden floors before school. This is a strange house, whose? I must try to remember but I am numb all over and blind, as if stung in my sleep and the sound thumps muted beside me, a swan leaving the water, a pelican, slow beats of a paddle.

The surf beach this morning had a fleshy smell in its salt, a faint overripeness of warm fish or, sweeter still, of sweated scallops. At midday it was low tide, the sea flat calm. The rock shelf stood high out of the water, heavy with the brown grape chains of the seaweed: light filled the sandy pits and kelp forests in the pools. Umbrellas flapped at a tilt to the hot sandy wind. Naked children with shiny skins were playing in the shallows. This beach, like a child’s drawing of The Beach, always has a ship or two high on the sea line, a dark hull and smoky funnels, a yacht, a motor boat or windsurfer.

I paddled groping with the mask over the weed forest, my breaths loud, stirring the lazy light into frantic tight white loops. A shoal of silvery fish paused just beyond reach, hanging apart and turning this way and that with a flick, each eye of water gold-ringed, watchful of me. Faint shadows of them moved on the sand in a net of the noon light.

My bow wave washed over channels of rock and weed. Alone in the pools, Oooh-oh, I hooted through the snorkel, oooh-oh, on the note of the lighthouse foghorn until the sea boomed aloud and the rocks echoed. Oooh-oh, and I bobbed up through the rocking sheen and sunspatter into the air under a man who squatted suddenly by my clothes on the rock ledge, Martin, and grinned down. Tugboat Annie, he called. I waved and floated weightless, a sea grape, through the chain of deep pools into the last one before open water, rimmed with a black wall where even then the first waves of the returning tide swilled and spread out in wrinkles.

When I swam back the water was halfway up to my clothes. No one was there.

A thunderstorm last night, and hard rain and yet the heat continues to rise in wafts on this north wind, a breath from a bread oven, sweet, spiced.

One afternoon the smaller of two blond boys in wetsuits dropped on to the sand beside me: ‘You ever had a plate?’ he said.

‘A what?’

‘Plate.’ He opened his palm to show a butterfly, a spider shell, petals of pink plastic and a tooth sticking out.
‘No.’
‘I have to.’
The other boy came over and stood with his legs wide apart.
‘I seen you here,’ he said. ‘The other day.’
‘That’s my brother,’ the little one said. ‘His name’s Wayne.’
‘Mine is Dagmar.’ I squinted up. ‘I come here a lot.’
‘Us too. Do you surf?’
‘Nej.’
The older boy hoisted his surfboard. ‘You live here?’
‘Swanhaven. But mostly Norway.’
‘Norway!’ the little one hooted, and looked up for the other’s approval.
‘What you mean,’ he scoffed, ‘no where? You got to live some where.’
‘Nor-way,’ I said. ‘And Denmark.’
‘Uh?’
‘Countries, Tim. Next to Sweden. Is that right?’
‘Sweden, ja, Scotland, over the North Sea.’
‘So what’s it like? Nor-way?’
‘A bit like here. A bit different.’
‘You got McDonald’s?’
‘Ja. Everywhere. And Wendy’s. 7-11 –’
‘Bonus. You got any kids?’ Tim broke in, and I shook my head. ‘Norway’s got all snow and ice. I seen it on the TV.’
‘Ja, in winter. But now they have summer and for weeks the sun will never set.’
‘I wished it snowed in Swanhaven! I wished the sea freezed!’ ‘Dummy! The sea can’t freeze.’
‘It can,’ I said, watching Tim press the plate into his mouth and poke it with his tongue. ‘The waves freeze, and ships are trapped and icebreakers come, and the whales and dolphins and seals have to have breathing holes.’
‘Why do they stay in?’
‘Shit you’re dumb. They have to.’
‘They do not. Seals don’t.’
‘They are water animals,’ I said, ‘that live on fish. And the sea is still the warmest place.’
‘Is it?’
‘Jeeze. Poor seals.’
Wayne ran his hand through his white tufts. ‘What do they do if the hole gets freezed over?’
‘They chew the edges. Until they lose their teeth, and then they drown.’
Tim’s mouth fell open and he went red.
‘They do not.’ Wayne scowled. A silence fell, one of rebuke, while Tim stared from one to another of us. ‘They do not,’ muttered Wayne, ‘they share,’ and he loped away up the beach, Tim at his back.

Low tide at midmorning, and I move along behind my shadow on the printed sand and on to the fretwork of low rocks studded with limpets – sea ponds and rivers under glass, grey and green glass, fern-fronded tawny forests that sway under reflections of cloud and rock – their dark overhangs, bearded snouts. Children in goggles come and lie sprawled on the surface in the channel beside a hump of rock. One calls to the others that he has found an air cavity in the hump of rock, and soon he dares to dive down and swim into it, coming up gasping. Snorkelling over the weed forest I pass the humped rock and see, diving down, parting the beaded curtain with my hands, sunlight flickering in the weeds at its heart, the bubble of air in its cavern, but I will not swim in. A parrot fish stares. A torn blue and purple tatter on the seabed is a crayfish. I come up close to where the rock shelves into the water, the convergence of the planes of glass above me and below, as if a mirror had opened away from its backing, converging lines of light. I break through, I sit on the dry rough skin of the rock and take off the mask. Hearing, and smell, and taste, all muted underwater, have come alive.

Flippers in the water, a woman sits on the rocks opposite like a mirror image, her wet hair gathered up in a red ribbon, threads of light unravelling her. The tide is heaving up sandy hawsers of the kelp and rolling them under.

Giramondo Publishing, Fitzcarraldo Editions and New Directions are pleased to announce that Giada Scodellaro has won the 2024 Novel Prize for her debut novel Ruins, Child. 

The Novel Prize is a biennial award for a book-length work of literary fiction written in English by published and unpublished writers around the world. It offers US$10,000 to the winner and simultaneous publication in Australia and New Zealand by the Sydney-based publisher Giramondo, in North America by New York-based New Directions, and in the UK and Ireland by Fitzcarraldo Editions. Selected from 1,100 submissions, Giada Scodellaro’s novel will be published in early 2026.

Set in what may be the future, and centred on six women sharing a space in some sort of crumbling apartment tower, Ruins, Child is irreducibly original. Remarkable for its irresistible sweep, wit, and prickly splintered truth, Giada Scodellaro’s debut novel is like a precious old mirror: dropped, looking up at you, flashing light and bits of the undeniable. With the pulsating sway of its liquid mosaic narrative, the novel may recall Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, but is entirely its own animal: kaleidoscopic, pointedly disorienting in its looseness, and powered along by snatches of speech from its compelling ensemble cast (often vernacular, often overheard: ‘The woman is old, I hear children saying nearby, not in the way we consider all adults to be old, but really old, ancient, she is endless’). It’s a book seemingly drawn from deep wells of Black American reality: her female protagonists push back against authority in the very vivacity of their telling, setting afoot a freeing-up and a mysterious inversion of marginalization. ‘Looseness, that is the thing people fear in a person (in women) and in objects.’ A surreal musing, Ruins, Child 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. She is a queer writer and artist whose writings have appeared in The New Yorker, BOMB, 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.

Giada Scodellaro, on being told of winning the prize, replied: ‘I am so humbled, so thrilled, so in awe of this outcome. What a dream it is for this work to exist outside of myself. A collaboration with the extraordinary New Directions, Fitzcarraldo, and Giramondo affords Ruins, Child an urgent and expansive opportunity – a life.’

Learn more about The Novel Prize.