The Writer Laid Bare

In the autumn of 2006, while still quite new to Australia, I was doing my first ever writing residency – in a yellow house in the Blue Mountains called Varuna, which once belonged to the novelist Eleanor Dark. Every night …

The 22^nd of November 2018 was a good day. It was the day Allen &Unwin signed me up for my third novel, The Deceptions. Many years earlier, I had lived next door to Fred and Eva Perger, Czech-Jewish Holocaust …

Before I wrote my second memoir Darkfall, I didn’t think I’d ever write much about my adolescence in a country town in the eighties. My memories from that time were painful to think about. They included intense episodes of …

Literary influences are an odd thing, these nebulous depositories where we pick up random ideas and then mix them with our own flavour. My influences, when I write are a weird brew. For example, my collection of poetry, Turbulence, …

While in quarantine for the plague, Shakespeare not only wrote King Lear but, according to some sources, also Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. Meanwhile, Isaac Newton, forced into isolation to avoid the same disease, used his time to hone …

One of my earlier jobs, before I moved onto writing and teaching writing full time, was working in a mental health organization. Among all else, I ran there a writing therapy group. The majority of participants shared a diagnosis of …