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.

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

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

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

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

Translating His English into English

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Judges’ comments, Monument by Bonny Cassy

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

Judges’ comments, rock flight by Hasib Hourani

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

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

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

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

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

Read more about the shortlisted books and their authors below.

How to Live Together by Rey Conquer

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

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

Touch Me Now by Neal Amandus Gellaco

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

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

Porcupine by Nick Holdstock

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

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

Ruins, Child by Giada Scodellaro

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

Giada Scodellaro was born in Naples, Italy and raised in the Bronx, New York. Giada’s writings have appeared in the New 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.

Moss House by Hollen Singleton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read Ken Bolton’s launch speech in full.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The judges praised the novel in the following terms:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading

• The Guardian
• ABC Arts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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