Cirrus@Austlit

'In conversation with the Guardian’s Paul Daley in the final days of 2021, Tony Birch addressed the recurring presence of both strong women and violent men in his work. Citing the Sydney writer Ross Gibson, Birch said he likes to think of the common themes that a writer revisits across his or her body of work as ‘reiterations’. In Birch’s oeuvre, perhaps chief among these reiterations is the impact of male violence on family and community life – from ‘The Butcher’s Wife’ in Shadowboxing (2006) to the Kane men in The White Girl (2019). His latest book, Women and Children, brings this theme into sharp relief.' (Introduction)