Podcasts

‘I am really interested in the language that my family speaks, and one day, in my head, I’d like to write a book around all of the idioms I’ve been taught, because Turkish idioms are so much more complex, as well as profane, than English words.’

‘I really wanted especially to have a voice for those kids who think they’re weird, think they’re strange, and there’s always going to be kids like that.’

‘When my collection, An Elegant Young Man came out, I think it virtually sent me around the bend.’

Introduction Six Degrees from the City is a podcast about writing in Western Sydney, hosted by the writer and critic…

‘Going back and living in South-West Sydney is very much in keeping with the way I have this very fluid relationship with Bankstown, with the Western Suburbs, I’m part of it but also not part of it too.’

‘That’s how I write: from place. And it’s the place itself that drives who the characters become, and how the narrative shapes itself.’

It’s a truism about suburbia that it’s defined by the distance between work and home. But that distance, for me, became a conceptual distance, and artistic distance, one that I thought I’d like to try and overcome somehow.