AustLit

'In a publishing feat, the anthology Fire, Flood, Plague: Australian Writers Respond to 2020 appeared in the December of the very year it was responding to. Editor Sophie Cunningham brought together 25 essays originally published on the Guardian Australia website. She writes in her introduction:

as the new year dawned — violent, smoky — there were bushfires to contend with, then air quality so dangerous my … loved ones were trapped in their house. Soon enough there were hailstorms smashing into their workplaces. More fires, floods, then the plague. On it went. We understood that summer fires followed by late summer floods were considered to be part of the cascading effect of climate change. We understood that deforestation led to an increased likelihood of pandemics, but frankly, people can’t look every which way all at once and anyway it seemed that the genie was out of the bottle, the cat was out of the bag, the tipping point had tipped and now we were in the territory of the unprecedented, the territory of pivoting, the territory of grief and loss.'

(Introduction)

'A defining moment in Australian literature in 2016 involved two unlikely protagonists — an American novelist and a Sudanese-Australian engineer. It happened at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival in September when journalist and author Lionel Shriver gave the keynote address defending the right of writers to wear “different hats”, while wearing a Mexican sombrero, referencing a controversy at an American college over cultural appropriation. Fiction, Shriver said, will always involve writing about other cultures and identities, and she hit out at the way she felt identity politics made writers reluctant to do this. A number of audience members walked out of the talk and several of these wrote opinion pieces, including 25-year-old Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a mechanical engineer as well as a debut memoirist in 2016. Abdel-Magied labelled Shiver’s speech “a celebration of the unfettered exploitation of the experiences of others, under the guise of fiction” (Guardian 10 September 2016, emphasis original). The Guardian published her response and then, three days later, Shriver’s original speech (13 September 2016).'  (Introduction)