AustLit logo

AustLit

Roberta Lowing Roberta Lowing i(A100770 works by)
Gender: Female
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

BiographyHistory

Roberta Lowing completed a Master of Letters at Sydney University. She has organised the monthly PoetryUnLimitedPress Poetry Readings & Open Microphone Competition in Glebe, Sydney. In 2007, she edited PULP's Ilumina Journal.

Most Referenced Works

Personal Awards

2015 shortlisted The Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize
2014 third place Melbourne Poets Union International Poetry Competition for 'Drought'
2010 Shortlisted The Newcastle Poetry Prize for ‘Freeport Mine Zone, West Papua’

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon Ruin Carindale : Interactive Press , 2010 Z1745137 2010 selected work poetry
2011 joint winner Asher Literary Award Joint winner with The Old School by P. M. Newton.
y separately published work icon Notorious Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2010 Z1732086 2010 single work novel

'She came walking out of the desert, just as the famous poet had centuries before. Impossible for them both to have survived that relentless furnace, that destroyer of all life.

Now the nameless woman lies horribly scarred and close to death in an Asylum deep in the North African desert. An Australian official, a man code-named John Devlin, has come to question her, despite the protests of her carers. It is clear that the woman and Devlin share some kind of past, and all kinds of secrets - but the greatest secret is the one she will die to protect.

As the wind calls up a deadly sandstorm, the inhabitants of the Asylum discover they are linked by a diary written by the poet Rimbaud, who in 1890 also confronted the implacable power of the desert. Over the next one hundred and twenty years, everyone who sees the diary will want it. Most will do anything to possess it.

For some, like ruthless Polish aristocrat Aleksander Walenska, the diary holds secrets that will bring him riches and power. For his troubled and religious son Czeslaw, it is a book of death, a penance to be fulfilled by sacrifice. For Czeslaw's sister, it is a book of the desert which, if returned to its rightful home, will redeem her family's name. For Devlin, broken by his own ghosts, and with one final chance to make amends, the diary is worthless; the desert not a place of revelation, but the birthplace of modern terrorism.

Only the woman, whose dark past is entwined with those who would possess the diary at any cost, sees the true worth of the book. As she surrenders to the transformative power of the desert, only she understands how it exalts the secrets mapped on the diary's precious pages.' (From the publisher's website.)

2011 shortlisted Prime Minister's Literary Awards Fiction
2011 shortlisted South East Asia and South Pacific Region Best Book
Crush Depth i "They keep saying the war is over but it is not over.", 2008 single work poetry
— Appears in: Overland , Autumn no. 190 2008; (p. 72)
2007 joint runner-up The Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize
Last amended 2 Dec 2015 09:22:55
Other mentions of "" in AustLit:
    X