The Writer Laid Bare

In his book Silence in the Age of Noise, Erling Kagge, a Norwegian polar explorer, describes how, in 1986, he was sailing along the Chilean coast in the South Pacific when, sometime between midnight and 4am, he heard “a …

I’ve been hanging around in the Australian literary world for quite a while – at least since 2015, when my first book came out. In that time, I’ve published two novels and have two more forthcoming with Affirm Press. I’ve …

‘If your hurried heartbeat did not bind you to your swift smallness, you would know that affinity binds you to stone.’ Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman

I always begin to write not knowing what I’m doing. …

When I was in my final year of literary studies at university, our professor ran a tutorial on characterisation. Half of the session was dedicated to creating likeable females. ‘Women are motivated by two things,’ he mansplained. ‘Safety and service.’ …

I never set out to write nonfiction. I’m not sure what I write is nonfiction. I don’t know what it is. I don’t really want to know. My first book, Paris or Die, contained the account of a bizarre …

As a young journalist and TV producer starting out in the misogynistic, rough and tumble world of commercial television in the 1980s, I quickly learnt that in order to survive, I had to hide any outward signs of vulnerability. Despite …