AustLit

'Across fiction and nonfiction, Palestinian–Australian author Amal Awad refuses to limit her work with reductive expectations. By Ruby Hamad.' 

'In 2008, Australian author Claire Thomas published her acclaimed debut novel Fugitive Blue. Spanning five centuries, the narrative traces the fate of a Renaissance painting, the only legacy of an inexperienced artist doomed to obscurity.' (Introduction)

'Picture it: Celtic Britain, circa 60 CE, in what is now Norfolk in eastern England. The unstoppable Roman Empire is consolidating the conquests begun 17 years earlier by Emperor Claudius. Its capital Camulodunum and vibrant settlements of Londinium and Verulamium lie forebodingly to the south-west. King Prasutagus, ruler of the Iceni and client ally of Rome, is nearing death without a male heir. Aware that Rome will likely seize his small kingdom and with it the nominal freedom of his tribe, Prasutagus, in a fit of wishful thinking, bequeaths half his kingdom to Emperor Nero and the other half to his two daughters. Nero has other ideas. He orders Prasutagus’s widow, Queen Boudica, to hand over full control of the kingdom, stripping the Iceni of their ally status for good measure. Boudica refuses. No self-respecting empire would tolerate such an insubordinate move: she is punished with a public flogging and the gang rape of her two teen daughters.' (Introduction)

'Early into his new essay collection Intimate Antipathies, the follow-up to his NSW Premier’s Award–winning An Elegant Young Man, Luke Carman shares Gore Vidal’s theory on the two kinds of writer. The first is the true wordsmith; obsessed with mastering the art of language, their passion lies not in what they write about but how they write it. The second is the writer whose chosen vocation is a kind of belated therapy; theirs is a feverish but ultimately futile endeavour not to conquer the written word but to utilise it in the vain hope of overcoming some long-ago inflicted psychic damage.'(Introduction)

'Confronting. Controversial. Unrelenting. Edgy. When The Lebs, the second and most recent novel by Michael Mohammed Ahmad, was published a year ago it was amid a flurry of these adjectives from (mostly) white reviewers and interviewers. One descriptor that did not fly so readily from their keyboards, however, was ‘coming of age’.'  (Introduction)

'Every now and then, a piece of art comes along to remind us that there is more than one way to appreciate it.'