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Max Easton: a note on Paradise Estate

‘I tried to take notes and wrap a narrative around all these events, to find parallels by way of allegory, to satirise the process itself as I went, allowing the march of 2022 to dictate the progress of the book. It was much more of an experimental process than I imagined, and it took a lot of work to bring it into some kind of order.’

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Nicholas Jose: a note on The Idealist

‘Timor-Leste celebrated its twentieth anniversary as an independent nation in 2022. A new generation is writing their story now, with the future as a destination for hopes and dreams. It can be a happier ending. Let’s help with that.’ 

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Amy Crutchfield: a note on The Cyprian

‘This book is not named for an imaginary figure from myth, or a character consigned to history, but rather the force she represents. A force which persists – fierce, intractable and undiminished.’

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Transcript: Marion May Campbell’s launch speech for Chinese Fish

Chinese Fish is a brilliantly devised, comic feat of cultural resistance; a fantastically polyphonic verse novel majoring in riotously funny and heartbreaking ways, the minoritised experience of three generations of a Chinese family, who in the 1960s migrate from Hong Kong to Aotearoa / New Zealand, or, as white Australians hypocritically used to joke, the land of the wrong white crowd.’

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Transcript: Grace Yee at the launch of Chinese Fish

‘We all grew up communicating in this hybrid language that we later couldn’t teach or hand down to our own children, because it was so make-shift, transitional…I am very happy to have written a little of it down now for posterity, in this book.’

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Transcript: Sanya Rushdi at the launch of Hospital

‘I never thought I’d write a novel. But it’s the writing habit that I built up by keeping a diary, together with the help and encouragement of my beloved Tanvir Ahmed Chowdhury, my publisher and friend Bratya Raisu, and my friend Monzurul Ahsan Olee that led to the completion of the original, Bengali version of this novel called Hospital.’

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A poem by Louise Carter from Golden Repair

‘You waited for me to turn up and then when I did/we said yes to each other almost immediately/and the roof disappeared from your Lotus Elise/the sky so ecstatically blue/every pop tune a hymn.’

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Louise Carter: a note on Golden Repair

‘I see lyric poetry as humanity’s first recording device, one that can capture the sound of a person’s voice, as well as their aliveness. I’m also interested in poetry’s archival capabilities, which is why many of these poems include references specific to my suburban upbringing. I feel lucky to have grown up in a time when our gods were pop stars, singing songs of praise and lament to teenage girls; themselves gods.’ 

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‘Green mantis’: a poem by Luke Beesley from In the Photograph

‘Oh, look! There’s so and so, said the author (it was the editor of the national literary papers). I could see a review in his eyes. Recognising me, his face frowned thoughtfully in critique. But he passed on. Phew, said the author, and I felt her breath on the hairs of my forearm. My forearm moving across the page!’

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Pip Adam: a note on Audition

‘ I was interested in what happens when someone grows too big for the space society allocates them. I kept hearing my grandmother telling me I was getting, Too big for my boots.’

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