Cirrus@Austlit

'Across fiction and nonfiction, Palestinian–Australian author Amal Awad refuses to limit her work with reductive expectations. By Ruby Hamad.' 

'“How to be alone yet to be in company? That,” the unnamed narrator of Travelling Companions tells us, “is the conundrum.” As a train strike throws him into travel limbo with other tourists on the Spanish–French border, he observes: “We are a group but not quite, there is a plausible deniability.” Banding together helps, he notes elsewhere, to “beat down the ontological insecurity”.' (Introduction)

'What kind of fruit would you be, and why? The unnamed narrator of Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life struggles to answer this question at a group job interview as she stands in a circle with other interviewees. It’s one of many moments that highlight the ways the surreal and absurd stitch life’s fabric.' (Introduction)

'For Virginia Woolf, it was Hamlet. A play the Modernist giant found so resonant and abundant with meaning that she thought an annual re-reading, along with a record of the reader’s shifting responses to the text over time, would form a kind of autobiography – the self coming to know itself through sustained engagement with a work of art.' (Introduction)