Laguna, the Serbian publisher of Cold Enough for Snow, interviews Jessica Au on her 2022 novel.

Lucy Dougan’s poetry collection Monster Field was launched in late November 2022 at The Balmoral Hotel in Perth, Western Australia. Here, we publish the launch speech given at the event by Josephine Wilson.

Antigone Kefala speaks with Giramondo Publisher Ivor Indyk about her books, her experiences, and her conceptions of poetry and prose.

‘I am full of admiration for Patrick White, and for the encouragement he has given to Australian writers. I met him several times and liked him. I am very honoured to receive this prestigious award given in his name, and the recognition it offers, as for a long time my writing has existed outside the major lines of Australian literature.’

‘Just as “quotation” and “appropriation” are fundamental tenets of my work, so too is “repetition”. Also, as Mallarmé once declared: “All the Great masters, ancient and modern, plagiarized Homer, and Homer plagiarized God.”‘

‘The judging panel reflected on, rather than judged, how each title gave us a new insight into our humanity. To that end, Jessica Au’s quiet contemplative prose about a mother and a daughter traveling was considered the needed juxtaposition to the past year.’ – Judges’ report

‘I think it is a common experience, a kind of haunting in a way, the sense that you are close to something that is significant but that nevertheless eludes you. Slippages could be a good word to describe it. It’s the intersection between the absolutely ordinary and the occult.’

‘The first sounds I heard – I tell my friends – were the clatter of dice cubes and ice cubes. Between his chef-ness and his cigars he used up all the oxygen in the room, and so was happiest with women who breathed shallowly and aspired only to excellence in the art of devotion.’

Ahead of the Sydney launch of Bon and Lesley, Shaun Prescott presents an annotated playlist of songs he loved while writing the book. Tracks include those by OneFour, DJ Loser, Blue Divers, Bell Witch, and Troth.

‘While experimentalism, as a framework, can defuse the impact of specific experiments, for myself, in this case, it keeps the writing alive to poetry’s possibilities: not just in terms of form (in its various aspects), but in terms of what can be said, and the range of voice deployed: the positions and positioning of voice.’

A poem from Googlecholia, a 2022 collection by the winner of the Judith Wright Calanthe Award.

‘Unlike other fictions I’ve worked on in my adult life, I felt like I had to see this through to completion, that I could not write anything else until it was out of my way. Now that it’s finished, I feel like I’ve been evicted from a cold but nevertheless sheltering home.’

A poem from Mirabilia, a 2022 collection by the acclaimed Australian poet and author, Lisa Gorton.

‘These poems are crowded with quotes, events, anecdotes, inventories, and fragments of myth, because I was trying to bring into poetry that heteroglossia (raznorechie, ‘varied-speechedness’) which Mikhail Bakhtin found only in the novel: a clash of different voices, different conceptions of world.’

‘The limited-consensus reality ignores the strangeness of most lives, of the consciousness that lives in us. Who was I then? Who am I really? Am I “George” or “Yiorgos”? Angel or devil? Well, both, of course.’

The award judges described Human Looking as a ‘sharp and brilliant collection…with powerful poetic skill and infinite compassion, this book illuminates the world differently and gives us a new way to see.’