Events

My novella The Door is inspired by my friend Shane Jones’s painting of a very realistic door. It hung in the stairwell of his home when I went there for dinner one evening. At first, I thought he had added …

It took me some time to find my way into this profession. There was the business of a certain letter which I wrote in my thirties asking for reviewing work, which was addressed to the editor of a prestigious literary …

In real life, conflict makes me anxious. It’s more than discomfort, a natural by-product of conflict, but a deep-down anxiety: a rat nibbling the insides of my gut.

I don’t run from conflict and I’m not a pushover. But when …

This morning my children aren’t home. Instead of seizing this precious time to write, I watered the plants in the back and front yards. I noticed that my favorite, blood-red, geranium needs to be dead-headed, and that the golden hibiscus …

‘Everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.’ Oscar Wilde.

Writing sex should be easy. Few people of adult age would be unfamiliar with the basics, and there’s (surely) a finite range of variables to the act itself. …

After two-and-a-half years writing a memoir about my childhood and adolescence, I had what I can only describe as a ‘creative meltdown’. A sort of short-lived nervous breakdown induced by artistic failure. It happened during the Easter long-weekend in 2018 …

The idea that a writer must wait for inspiration is one I hear often, especially now that I mentor new writers, and it seems always to come as a shock to them when I tell them that writing—like any other …

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 …