Cirrus@Austlit

'The Red Queen’s impossible rule offers a striking allegory of the biographer’s dilemma. While your subject is still alive, it seems reasonable to get to know them and build a relationship of trust with them. In this way you might be better able to understand their private and intimate worlds. If your subject is a writer, you might become more confident in your ability to weave closer correspondences between their life and work. But if you then become privy to their secrets, and perhaps even come to love them as a dear friend, it becomes almost impossible to write about them dispassionately: to ‘cut’ them with your knife and fork.' (Introduction)

'Hannah Gadsby’s show Nanette (2017–18) starts out funny but then shifts to long, angry monologues that refuse its audience the release of laughter. By breaking the conventional contract between a comedian and her audience, Gadsby rejected her own former practice of turning her traumatic experiences into jokes. Nanette’s international run and subsequent release as a Netflix special spanned the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey, which gauged public support for marriage equality, as well as the international #MeToo movement against sexual assault. As high-profile performers such as Louis C.K. and Bill Cosby respectively admitted to and were tried for sexual misconduct, comedians became important figures in public debates about the relationship between artists and their work. Gadsby brought to these debates the perspective of a gender non-conforming lesbian and sexual assault survivor from rural Tasmania. Nanette became an emblem of queer and feminist anger or – depending on one’s point of view – of the humourless, politically correct ‘cancel culture’ many comedians rail against.'  (Introduction)

'In the chaos that opened the Trump administration in 2017, foreign governments were looking for any and all insiders for information. Australia turned to Joe Hockey, who turned to golf. In this very readable account of the former treasurer’s four years in Washington (2016–20), Hockey tells us how he navigated ‘TRUMPAGEDDON’. This is a story replete with funny anecdotes and unsettling observations. Diplomatic leaves the reader convinced that diplomacy is more about art and luck than about science and process. It is also oddly reassuring about the vicissitudes that the Australia–United States relations can weather, even under the most weird leadership.' (Introduction)

'When Ann-Marie Priest wrote to me in 2015 asking whether she might talk to me about her proposed biography of my mother, and requesting my permission to examine some correspondence in the Fryer Library, which I, as Gwen Harwood’s literary executor, had placed on restricted access, I replied with a terse refusal to cooperate. Since my mother’s death in December 1995, I had kept tight control of her vast correspondence, nearly all of which she had donated to various research libraries over the last two decades of her life, and I saw no reason to change my ways.'  (Introduction)

'What happens when we die? Human curiosity about the afterlife has inspired countless artists and storytellers from the earliest myths through to Dante and Boccaccio. More recently we’ve had Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002) and George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), as well as sitcoms like Netflix’s philosophical The Good Place and Amazon’s capitalist dystopia Upload, and now Steve Toltz’s alternately bleak and bonkers take in Here Goes Nothing.'  (Introduction)

'Winner of the University of Tasmania Prize for best new unpublished work in the 2019 Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prizes, The Signal Line is Brendan Colley’s first book. As it happens, my review copy arrived just as I launched into Rhett Davis’s Hovering (2022). Although fundamentally different, both novels open with a fraught return to a family home and a resident resentful sibling. Both protagonists have built a new life in Europe, but where Hovering suggests the possible remaking of the old house into some version of home, The Signal Line seeks to relinquish it.' (Introduction)

'At the beginning of 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write (2014), author, mother, and playwright Sarah Ruhl notes: ‘At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life. And life, by definition, is not an intrusion.’ Ceridwen Dovey and Eliza Bell’s Mothertongues embraces, embodies even, this collapse of the boundaries between living and writing. Rather than extolling the proverbial ‘room of her own’, Bell and Dovey are asking us to heed the kinds of knowledge that come from being embedded in the everyday. A hybrid, genre-defying book about contemporary motherhood, Mothertongues is woven from fragments based on the authors’ own lives, from texts both historical and literary, from imagined conversations and family histories, from the act of friendship itself. It is intimate, moving from levity to depth, the corporeal to the cerebral, in the space of a page, a paragraph, a breath. It is a collection of ephemera – a stray thought, the contents of a handbag, breastfeeding diary excerpts, book lists, text message exchanges – that, taken together, form a living archive of twenty-first-century motherhood.'  (Introduction)

'The Burnished Sun by Mirandi Riwoe, Danged Black Thing by Eugen Bacon, and Sadvertising by Ennis Ćehić are powerful, inventive, and self-assured short story collections that traverse fractured and contested ground through their often displaced and alienated narrators.' (Introduction)

'Reading craft manuals may be another mode of procrastination for aspiring writers, but Lee Kofman’s latest book, The Writer Laid Bare, is well worth the time. Her sage advice, interwoven with an intimate account of her own creative development as a migrant writer, makes fascinating reading.'  (Introduction)

'The lyric subject, literature’s most intimate ‘I’, has vexed critics for centuries. Is it the poet? Is it a fiction, a device? Or is the relation between author and speaker, as Jonathan Culler suggests, ‘indeterminate’, such that ‘any model … that attempts to fix or prescribe that relationship will be inadequate’? Two new award-winning Australian poetry collections offer fine-grained considerations of personhood and the poem’s capacity to represent it.'  (Introduction)

'I first encountered Sarah Holland-Batt’s poem ‘The Gift’ in The New Yorker. It begins, ‘In the garden my father sits in his wheelchair / garlanded by summer hibiscus / like a saint in a seventeenth-century cartouche’ – an unremarkable opening, I thought, to a poem of personal anecdote, a genre too ubiquitous among our contemporaries. Rereading the poem in the context of her third collection, The Jaguar, I became acclimated to her style and manner, and admired the alertness of its verbal performance. If the new book remains a personal memoir, narrating the devastating illness and death of her father, it is also charged throughout with a strong writer’s intelligence and vulnerability. ‘I will carry the gift of his death endlessly,’ she writes, ‘every day I will know it opening in me.’' (Introduction)

'Since his first collection, Letter to Marco Polo (1985), Adam Aitken has been at the forefront of the diversification of Australian poetry as it moved, slowly but irreversibly, to incorporate multicultural and transnational voices. Aitken has always been a world citizen. He was born in London in 1960 to an Anglo-Australian father and Thai mother, with his childhood thereafter spent between the United Kingdom, Thailand, Malaysia, and Australia. As a young man, he attended Sydney University and embarked upon a long career as a poet, editor, and teacher which was recently recognised with the 2021 Patrick White Award.' (Introduction)

For at least the first half of the twentieth century, Australian playwrights were not held in high regard by their compatriots. Popular opinion was summed up by fictional theatre manager M.J. Field in Frank A. Russell’s novel The Ashes of Achievement (1920):

‘I’ve got a play,’ commenced Philip, plunging.
Field jumped from his chair, hands spread out in defence.
‘Help!’ he yelped. ‘Anything but that. Not a bloody play, I ask you.’
‘What are you frightened of?’ he asked, when Field had resumed his seat.
‘I’ll tell you, Lee, on the understanding it goes no further. Australians can’t write plays; there you have it in a nutshell.’ (Introduction)

'Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert was arrested at Tehran International Airport on 12 September 2018 as she prepared to return home to Australia. A lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne, she had visited Iran for a seminar on Shia Islam. Her captors were the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, or the Sepâh, a powerful militia that protects Iran’s Islamic system. She was bundled into a car and driven to a secret location. As interrogations began, she was also served a large piece of chocolate cake. The nature of this first encounter, terrifying and strange, would typify her coming dealings with the Sepâh, an outfit that seemed as haphazard and amateurish as it was menacing.'  (Introduction)