Cirrus@Austlit

'Shelf Reflection is our series where we explore the bookshelves and reading habits of some of our favourite authors. In this latest instalment, Nam Le talks to us about poetry, re-reading books and why his latest release, 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, is the book he has been writing his whole life.' (Introduction)

'Fifteen years after his best-selling, award-winning collection of stories The Boat, Nam Le returns to his great themes of identity and representation in a virtuosic debut book of poetry

'36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, says Le, a Vietnamese refugee to Australia, is ‘the book I need to write. The book I've been writing my whole life’. This book-length poem is an urgent, unsettling reckoning with identity and the violence of identity, embedded with racism, oppression and historical trauma. But it also addresses the violence in those assumptions – of being always assumed to be outside one’s home, country, culture or language. And the complex violence, for the diasporic writer who wants to address any of this, of language itself.

'Making use of multiple tones, moods, masks and camouflages, Le’s poetic debut moves with unpredictable and destabilising energy between the personal and political, honouring every convention of diasporic literature – in a virtuosic array of forms and registers – before shattering the form itself. Like The Boat, 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem conjures its own terms of engagement, escapes our traps, slips our certainties. As self-indicting as it is scathing, hilarious as it is desperately moving, this is a singular, breakthrough book.' (Publication summary) 

'Jaya Savige was born in Sydney, raised on Bribie Island, and lives in London. Jaya has lived overseas since 2009, when he received a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to read for a PhD on James Joyce at the University of Cambridge (Christ’s College). Since 2013 he has lectured in English Literature and Creative Writing at the New College of the Humanities in Bloomsbury, a block from the British Museum, where he founded the Creative Writing degree. His first poetry collection, Latecomers (UQP, 2005), published when he was 26, won the New South Wales Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for a number of other awards; his second, Surface to Air (UQP, 2011) was shortlisted for The Age Poetry Book of the Year and the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Poetry. He is the long-standing poetry editor for the Weekend Australian, the recipient of travelling fellowships from the Marten Bequest and Brisbane Lord Mayor, and Australia Council residencies at the B R Whiting Studio, Rome, at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.' (Introduction)

'We were delighted to have bestselling author Stan Grant in Melbourne for one night only to talk about his two new books, Australia Day and On Identity. Grant is in conversation with Nam Le, author of The Boat.'  (Production summary)