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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Brian Castro, 2024

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

How time-honoured custom reverts to ruin!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From pages 1-4

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

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

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

Read the judges’ comments on The Cyprian below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Judges’ comments, In the Photograph

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

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

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

Judges’ comments, The Cyprian

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

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

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

Judges’ comments, The Drama Student

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

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

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

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

The winners will be announced on 12 September 2024.

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

So why didn’t they buy it?

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

From pages 30-36

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

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

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

The judges praised the novel in the following terms:

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

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

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

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

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

Media coverage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Xi Xi, June 1992

Nikos Papastergiadis reflects on his new memoir, John Berger and Me, a memoir to the great English writer, poet and painter, and a tribute to an individual who was mentor, father figure and friend to the author. 

John Berger was an artist, critic, novelist, playwright, essayist, film script writer, and actor. He was brilliant with words. He struggled passionately while he drew. When he was a presenter on television, he was utterly compelling and mesmerising. But it was uncomfortable watching him trying to inhabit other characters in films.

John lived in a peasant village in the French Alps. 

His essays on art and politics and his stories on migrants and peasants hit me to the core of my being. Thirty years ago, I wrote my doctoral dissertation at Cambridge on the theme of exile in his writing. We met just as I was completing my conclusion.

A year later he rang: ‘Nikos, I had a little accident on my motorbike, and we might need some help to bring in the hay this summer. Can you come and stay?’

That was the beginning of an annual pilgrimage from Manchester to his village. When I arrived on my motorbike he would hug and dance with me like a big bear. 

The kitchen was also a studio and an office. The outlines of portraits and drafts of novels were tested there. I witnessed earth shuddering phone calls with film producers and visits by artists and neighbours. The delight for hospitality in John’s eyes was a joy to behold. However, I also craved to steal him for myself. 

In the morning, we would go to a local market. Later, we would help with the haymaking and do some repairs around the house. In the evenings we would cook and share stories. When he listened all the mountains were silent behind him.  

After the cows were back in the barn I would look up at the stars and wonder if my father would have enjoyed such nights. This book reflects my time with John and seeks to explore the parallels with my own father, who was also called John. 

John Berger left London after winning the Booker Prize. He went to find solidarity and comfort with the last generation of peasants in France. My father was a peasant and sought to find freedom and progress for his children. He became a factory worker in Melbourne. Through these two men I saw my life as a journey on a helix curve. 

John Berger and Me began as a talk on friendship at the Greek Centre and unfolded into a reverie about the traces left by others. I feel as if I have been talking to John all my adult life. He has been a touchstone to all my thoughts. It still aches whenever I go into a bookshop and realise that there is no new book by John.

— Nikos Papstergiadis, May 2024

Alexis Wright has won Australia’s oldest literary award, the ALS Gold Medal, with her epic novel, Praiseworthy.

She joins Patrick White and David Malouf to be the only writers who have received this honour three times, having won it previously for her novels Carpentaria and The Swan Book. The medal is bestowed annually in recognition of an outstanding literary work in the preceding calendar year.

Since its publication in early 2023, Praiseworthy has won the Stella Prize, the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction, and the University of Queensland Fiction Book Award, and has been a finalist for many more Australian and international literary prizes, including the Dublin Literary Award.

Read the ALS Gold Medal judges’ citation below.

Alexis Wright’s astonishing novel Praiseworthy is a novel for and of our time; where time immemorial intersects with time running out. It is a political novel that deals directly with ‘The Intervention’ into First Nations communities from 2007 to 2012, which had been justified by government on the basis of widespread child abuse in First Nations communities in the Northern Territory. The novel turns an unflinching eye onto the irreparable damage done by these attacks on the psyche, body, soul and communities of First Nations peoples. The internalisation of degradation and disgust, which fractures both individual and community plays out with devastating effects in the Steel family and the town of Praiseworthy, as it battles the environmental catastrophe of climate change. In the wake of this broken, sacred covenant of people and place, both country and culture are fundamentally threatened, in extremis. The monumentality of the novel summons the scale of these betrayals and its voice recalls William Blake’s just prophet who ‘roars and shakes his fires in the burden’d air’ of a corrupted world. In the cosmology of the novel, the ancestors, the atmosphere, the land and the water are in open revolt.

Praiseworthy is hilarious, furious, poetical and painful, and all in large order. This depth and range does not effect a mediation or tempering of its rage. Praiseworthy refuses assimilation and insists that traditional custodians alone know how to inhabit in and with this place.

The monumentality of Praiseworthy is testament also to the duration of writerly attention and care, to an ethics of a sustained focus on painful injustice. The formal originality and scale of the novel stands as a response to the enormity of need but also to the depth of resources that survive. 

Finally, Praiseworthy, like Wright’s other novels, teaches us how to read. When Carpentaria was first published in 2006, many elements were unfamiliar and required readers to question existing parameters of literary worlding and the relationship between form and meaning. The Swan Book also challenged us in these ways and more some. Reading Praiseworthy teaches us how to read Praiseworthy. We need to attend and listen to this literary elder about the need for literary creativity, ancient and new ways of literary sympathy, and the intimate connection of both to justice.

Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy and Sanya Rushdi’s Hospital have been selected as finalists for the 2024 Miles Franklin Literary Award. There are six books on the shortlist, which was announced in on 2 July.

A few hours later, Praiseworthy was named the winner of the ALS Gold Medal, Australia’s oldest literary award. Wright now joins Patrick White and David Malouf in winning the ALS Gold Medal three times, having previously won it for Carpentaria and The Swan Book.

Wright and Rushdi were also both shortlisted for the 2024 Stella Prize, with Wright going on to win.

Judges’ comments, Praiseworthy:

Everything about Praiseworthy is expansive: its themes, its imagery, its vibrant demotic prose. The novel is at once an epic of classical proportions and a wild comedic romp. Set in a fictional town permanently enshrouded in a mysterious haze, the story takes a quirky Indigenous family and renders them in mythical terms. The patriarch, a crackpot entrepreneur and visionary called (among other things) Cause Man Steel, hatches a harebrained scheme to preempt impending environmental collapse by cornering the donkey market. The ructions this generates within the small community of Praiseworthy and his exasperated family develops into a monumental, swirling and often brilliantly funny narrative that grapples with the largest issues of our time: climate change, the internet, capitalism, the devastating consequences on Indigenous communities of colonialism and ongoing political paternalism. A stylistic tour de force, its tone capable of switching in an instant between the lyrical and the wickedly satirical, Praiseworthy triumphantly assesses its themes against the ultimate measures: the timelessness of Country and the indomitable spirit of Aboriginal Sovereignty.

Judges’ comments, Hospital:

Hospital is a fictional flourish of poetic utterance that is, in turns, affecting and absorbing in its disquisition upon the nature of psychosis. Based on the experiences of the Melbourne-based Bengali writer, the work is an illustration of what the narrator identifies as “someone’s picture turning out superbly, accurately representing a social system.” psychosis takes us through the corridors of treatment regimes of psychotic illness, while evoking the philosophical and political underpinnings of what constitutes the individual and the social. As the narrator navigates her way through these communities, she brings to us a world peopled with every rung of society. The short narrative is autofiction and testimonial, delineating the gap between normative family structures and friendships that are formed in medical establishments. The chronicle makes us wonder about the slippage between reality and fantasy, thought and language, humour and pain, defeat and joy. Ultimately, it is a feat of imagination undertaken by an utterly original voice rooted in contemporary Australia’s multicultural, multilingual ethos. Originally written in the author’s mother tongue, the book was translated by Arunava Sinha and retains the sparse economy and piercing psychotic insights of the source text.

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

The 2024 winner will be announced on 1 August 2024.

Further reading

‘Miles Franklin award 2024: Alexis Wright continues dream run as shortlist announced’ Guardian Australia

‘First timers and indie publishers dominate Miles Franklin shortlist’ Sydney Morning Herald

‘Book experts on the surprises and likely winner of Australia’s biggest literary award’ ABC Arts

The renowned Australian poet Judith Beveridge reflects on her much-anticipated new collection of poems Tintinnabulum (1 July 2024), the first since her prize-winning Sun Music in 2018. Read an extract from the book here.

Tintinnabulum explores what poetry can uncover through musicality and analogy, how these elements can open up sacred spaces. I have chosen Tintinnabulum as the title (which means the ringing of little bells) to suggest celebration and to indicate that many poems in the collection engage in an almost ritualised observance of precise aspects of the physical world. I look specifically at animals, landscapes, and at people in certain environments. 

Sacred spaces, I believe, come into being when we perceive relationships and apprehend interconnections. I have always been interested in the ways in which similes and metaphors can create relations that formerly might have been unnoticed. My poetry has centred around this core aspect of poetic language and Tintinnabulum continues this with perhaps more urgency and power, but also with humour and surprise. 

I also love to use language that is distinctly focussed on sound as a way of enhancing meaning and providing pleasure for the reader. My animal poems, which make up the book’s first section, delve into how we often interact with cruelty and insensitivity to non-human animals, but I also look at ways in which encounters with animals throw their ‘otherness’ into stark relief such as the distinctly alien lives of cicadas, leeches, bluebottles. 

The second section focusses on the human world and brings to bear a sense of compassion for the difficulties that people encounter: surfers on a high sea, a waitress unhappy in her job, two brothers suffering racist cruelty, as well as elegiac poems about friends and family members. 

The third section consists of imaginative/hallucinogenic scenarios, and is my most poetry at its most weirdly inventive. This section culminates in a joyous romp through sonic repetitions and is a homage to the poetry of Wallace Stevens. 

The poet Edward Hirsch has said that ‘Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul.’ I believe the final section of the book attempts this level of worshipful attention evoking the beauty and awe to be found in landscapes. It is my aim that readers, after reading Tintinnabulum, will find the world less fragmented and more interconnected, that language can be felt as an activating mechanism for wonder, joy and revelation.

— Judith Beveridge, May 2024

Two Houses
for Stephen

I found a rental with tall trees just beyond the back fence.
It was peaceful except for the three a.m. Friday freight
train slowly pulling the weight of its wagons along the tracks,
wheels grinding, couplings shrieking, derailing our sleep
for at least that six minutes of a much longer run
to get the goods into Sydney. Wherever it had come
from—Brisbane, Casino—that train would have travelled
through the night, a two-kilometre chain rattling
sleepers awake, but we didn’t mind so much because
often at that hour, we’d hear the powerful owls
close by in the trees and we’d get up, take the torch
and wait for the light to show in their eyes, red beacons
flashing on and off like lighthouses if they blinked.
They were so close we could see the mottling and barring
of their feathers, layers of white and grey highlighted
with brown and charcoal chevrons, strong claws
gripping a branch. We’d listen for the slow, deep soundings
of the male, then the higher pitched call of the female,
a short catechism resolving territory and distance.
We watched at dusk, too, for their flight—soundless
distillations of moonlight in the shadows and the trees.
There were flocks of cockatoos also, like that freight
train shrieking us awake, taking us out into the timbered
dawn, our new haunt of astonishment. Everything
that year was new: your move from interstate, my shunting
an unsalvageable marriage to its dead-end siding, the gambit
we took in changing our lives. I’ve heard powerful owls
are the only birds that can carry more than their own
weight. No wonder they became our talismans. Once
we saw a mother owl feeding three juveniles, tearing shreds
from a dead possum. We’d find possums in the reserve
neatly eviscerated, the kills always silent… We live
elsewhere now, our own place. Sometimes, still, we hear
an owl, a male’s wooing, and territory-declaring to bring
a mate in close. But we’ve only seen an owl once,
when sitting out in our yard, it alighted on a low branch,
its pearl-ash and dusty-grey feathers made it look like a puff
of fog against the apricot blush of dusk. Watching the owl
again I thought of how far we’d come—all the actions,
workings, means, and mechanisms across time and distance
to pull to its destinations this rich consignment of love.

From Tintinnabulum by Judith Beveridge (2024).

Hasib Hourani reflects on his debut book rock flight (1 September 2024), an epic poem and a moving testament to the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people.

rock flight was originally just one poem. It was short, maybe two pages. I had a bad day and wanted to write it down but unknowingly had exposed something cursed and irreversible that demanded transcription. Two pages sprawled to become a chapter, that chapter gained another. And so on.

A book-length poem split into seven chapters, rock flight is about many things: settler violence, hyper-surveillance, birds, boycotts and my family. Parts of it are quite literally haunted. Entire sections couldn’t have been written if I hadn’t gone somewhere else to write them down. I took my computer interstate to start and finish a chapter that remained unread and untouched for a year afterwards. The final edits were done from a high stool at the laundromat. There are words we can’t bring home with us.

It’s perhaps for this reason that the book often uses inference to get the words across. Fixating on a recurring set of images—rocks, birds, water, flight—explicit language is hinted at, omitted or redacted. A gesture towards censorship and a consideration for my own safety, of course, but also a reclamation of language. The book is cheeky and combative. I want the reader to smirk. I want them to scrunch up a piece of paper and throw it across the room.

I made a lot of rock flight’s final changes in September and October 2023. We couldn’t have known then that the zionist entity would double down and massacre over 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza between the book’s completion and its release. It took four years to write this book. But the words themselves didn’t change much from one draft to the next, they simply moved around: from one line to the next, from the afterword to the body. Mimicking the relentless motion of Palestinian experience.

All of this to say, the words and stories in rock flight aren’t new. References and accounts date as far back as 1799. I wrote a contemporary poem that contains centuries of history, and fossilised within that graft is something eternal.