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'When I was young I learned to be present with trauma. I grew up in a house of ghosts and photographs of people who were no longer alive. My grandparents were murdered during the Holocaust. My father was almost the sole survivor of a large family, and my mother was just one of a couple of surviving sisters, and so I lived the experience through them.' (Publication abstract)
In Sydney I grew up with my parents' stories as the ghostly backbone of the city, the warmth of the vanished art and drug culture shimmering just out of reach in the laneways behind Oxford Street or somewhere in the sandstone prison walls of East Sydney Tech. A decaying Martin Sharp print, a wedding present from the artist, leaned up against the wall of my dad's shed; he would tell stories about taking me as an infant to visit Robert Klippel, who burst into tears when he heard my name. My mother would invoke her time spent in the hippy-era Greek Islands, tales complete with run-ins with Leonard Cohen as well as a man who was later arrested as part of the Manson Family Killings.
'You may know Margo Lanagan as one of Australia's most beloved writers of fiction. She is also, The Lifted Brow can confirm, an absolute delightful delight. Michelle Law sat down with Margo over tea and macaroons at the Melbourne Writer's Festival to talk travel, rites of passage, language, and lost toenails.' (Publication abstract)
'Now the daylight was easing, and the birds wheeled and called for the last time before going to roost. The shadows that had pooled in the undergrowth began to clamber slowly upwards into the moss-hung trees...' (Publication abstract)
