AustLit

'Fusing inquest transcripts, press clippings, private correspondence, real and imagined monologues spanning five decades of anti-gay violence, and 30 years of research by local historian Tim Reeves, this joint commission between Adelaide Festival, Feast Festival and State Opera South Australia demands the embrace of all thinking audiences, but is of special importance to this city.'

Source: State Opera South Australia.

'Recently, during Victoria’s spirit-wearying sixth lockdown, I experienced resentment. As occurs when undergoing an emotional sensation, I was not immediately conscious of what I was feeling. I was aware first of the physical manifestations: a shortness of breath, an almost demonic rush of agitation, an acrid bile in my throat and on my tongue. I was reacting to an article in the newspaper, which I had read when I first logged on to the computer that morning, perusing the headlines on the web copy of the Age. Health professionals were explaining that they were sitting on stockpiles of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Those stocks were in danger of becoming out of date and useless because people were demanding the Pfizer vaccine.'  (Introduction)

'A newly single father struggles to weather the turbulence of change, in his life and in the world around him. Set in 1971 rural Australia, it is portrait of a country at a turning point and the human desire for connection.'

Source: Production blurb.

'An audacious and transformative novel about the past, the present and the power of writing and imagination from the award-winning author of Damascus and The Slap.

'Art is not only about rage and justice and politics. It is also about pleasure and joy; it is also about beauty…
In a time of rage and confusion, I wanted to write about beauty.
-Christos Tsiolkas

'A man arrives at a house on the coast to write a book. Separated from his lover and family and friends, he finds the solitude he craves in the pyrotechnic beauty of nature, just as the world he has shut out is experiencing a cataclysmic shift. The preoccupations that have galvanised him and his work fall away, and he becomes lost in memory and beauty …

'He also begins to tell us a story …

'A retired porn star is made an offer he can't refuse for the sake of his family and future. So he returns to the world he fled years before, all too aware of the danger of opening the door to past temptations and long-buried desires. Can he resist the oblivion and bliss they promise?

'A breathtakingly audacious novel by the acclaimed author of The Slap and Damascus about finding joy and beauty in a raging and punitive world, about the refractions of memory and time and, most subversive of all, about the mystery of art and its creation.' (Publication summary) 

'Chris Flynn chats with fellow author Christos Tsiolkas about his new novel, Mammoth. This is a live recording of an online event hosted via Zoom during the Covid-19 crisis.' (Production summary) 

'In 2020 we mostly had to watch films at home, and the most exciting possibilities still emerged from independent cinema. By Christos Tsiolkas.' 

'Christos Tsiolkas , the son of Greek migrants, explains his loss of faith in Europe'

'For most Australians, two events of biblical solemnity will define this year: fire and plague. How should we respond?' 

'Miranda Nation’s directorial debut, Undertow, begins with power, promise and tension, but it ends up drowning in its own contradictory styles. By Christos Tsiolkas.' 

'The 1995 debut novel from Christos Tsiolkas (The Slap, Dead Europe, Barracuda) makes its mainstage premiere 25 years after the fact.

'Ari (Roy Joseph, Five Bedrooms) is 19, unemployed and aimless. He doesn’t want to be gay. He doesn’t want to be Greek. He doesn’t want to be anything. He finds an escape, of sorts, via sex, drugs and dance clubs. But, he doesn’t really fit in with the queens at The Peel any better than with family in his theía’s backyard.

'This is the story that established Tsiolkas as a provocative master of the written word. Adapted for film in the 1998 underground hit Head On, and now, in close collaboration with playwright Dan Giovannoni, Tsiolkas rewrites Ari’s odyssey for the stage with a 21st century perspective.'

Source: Matlhouse Theatre.

'The Audition is a new multi-authored work that interrogates the protocols and power relationships of the audition process to uncover what it means to seek asylum. 

'The asylum seeker shares something in common with the actor in Australia.  They are both outsiders of uncertain status.  The asylum seeker just like the actor can become expert at being patient with a force that keeps them waiting without having their hopes dashed.  This is the liminal space that we will explore in The Audition. The stage is a country in itself. With its own rules and regulations. Or lack of them.'

Source: La Mama Theatre.

'Twenty-one years ago playwrights Andrew Bovell, Christos Tsiolkas, Melissa Reeves, Patricia Cornelius and Irine Vela came together to create Who’s Afraid of the Working Class?, a series of powerful interwoven vignettes that captured the zeitgeist of Melbourne and Australia in the 1990s. Now the same team reunite to take the pulse of our nation today, with director Susie Dee and an extraordinary ensemble of performers.

'What emerges is a funny and ferocious portrait of a country unable to reconcile its past, uncertain of its future and political vision. The colliding voices that make up this anthem might not always be in harmony, but they cannot be silenced.

'Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? was an ode to tiny struggles writ large; Anthem turns up the volume on the everyday injustices we choose not to hear.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'They kill us, they crucify us, they throw us to beasts in the arena, they sew our lips together and watch us starve. They bugger children in front of fathers and violate men before the eyes of their wives. The temple priests flay us openly in the streets and the Judeans stone us. We are hunted everywhere and we are hunted by everyone. We are despised, yet we grow. We are tortured and crucified and yet we flourish. We are hated and still we multiply. Why is that? You must wonder, how is it we survive?

'Christos Tsiolkas' stunning new novel Damascus is a work of soaring ambition and achievement, of immense power and epic scope, taking as its subject nothing less than events surrounding the birth and establishment of the Christian church. Based around the gospels and letters of St Paul, and focusing on characters one and two generations on from the death of Christ, as well as Paul (Saul) himself, Damascus nevertheless explores the themes that have always obsessed Tsiolkas as a writer: class, religion, masculinity, patriarchy, colonisation, refugees; the ways in which nations, societies, communities, families and individuals are united and divided—it's all here, the contemporary and urgent questions, perennial concerns made vivid and visceral.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'I have a suggestion. When you start reading Reason & Lovelessness, a new collection of Barry Hill’s essays, critical writings and reviews, don’t start with the introduction. Tom Griffiths’ foreword is thoughtful, expertly written and genuinely illuminating, but there is the faint archness of the academe in the tone, and it steers perilously close to sanctifying Hill’s writing and life. In the first essay of the collection, ‘Dark Star’, an interview with Christina Stead that Hill conducted in 1982 and which he revisited and rewrote in 2017, she and Hill discuss the reception to Patrick White’s then just published autobiography, and Stead says, ‘This, the autobiography, is the last thing they should read… This is his farewell, his sorrow, and everything that people would not understand unless they had read the whole life’.' (Introduction)

'Bruce Beresford’s Ladies in Black is not just a homage to classical filmmaking and 1950s Sydney, it is also a window into the cultural richness brought by post-World War II refugees. If only it had pushed darker themes further.'  (Introduction)

'When I read David Marr''s commanding biography, Patrick White: A Life, the storyteller in me was delighted to find that the young Patrick had been shipped to Cheltenham College in England as a youth, and that there he had experienced an exile from home and family that marked his character and his writing throughout his life. Marr eloquently describes the alienation the young boy felt upon being wrenched from his privileged and cocooned upbringing in rural New South Wales and bourgeois Sydney, to find himself suddenly a colonial misfit in one of the elite centres of English life.' (Introduction)

'It’s possible that of all the classic Hollywood genres, it is the western in which Australian filmmakers have done their best work. In the process of taking on the genre as their own, they have increasingly reconfigured it to examine and challenge questions of nationhood, identity, history and race.' (Introduction)