Essays

‘Coiled loops of time.’ (Tim, part two of an undated letter, possibly begun before xmas 2019, part three finished 4…

I met this man in 2015 on the last day of our holiday in New Zealand. I don’t even know…

Many were surprised when the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature was announced. But Abdulrazak Gurnah is an inspired choice. Each of his ten novels offer terrific rewards to readers. Though scandalously unsung till now, he is a superb crafter of narrative and a transporting storyteller. He is also a writer of worlds we sorely need today.

What does it mean to be made of stardust? What does it mean to be made of stardust just like and along with everything else? In classical western ontology, to be human is to be more than mere matter. But what if all matter is more than mere matter?

In a time of no nexts, narrative is a problematic medium, but this is exactly why a number of contemporary writers have narrowed their focus to minutes and seconds. It’s high-frequency trading on cultural capital. What imaginative surpluses can literary language seize from financialised time?

I’m interested in crossing cultures – with sensitivity. There’s a risk of ‘appropriation’ or ‘projection’ and, with those camels, of a corny anthropomorphism. But without taking and managing such risks, we’d risk killing off the very possibility of fiction and the chance it offers to give an empathetic voice to creatures, human and animal, that for various reasons, have not had one.

These are the daysthat were the daysthat would be the daysthat have been the daysthat count the daysas if the…

The story of abuse and exploitation by a British firm of a small group of people from a little-known Pacific island may seem like an unremarkable one in the history of the colonial project, but it exemplifies in microcosm the fast-approaching condition of the whole world.

On the Sunday before Sydney’s lockdown tightened for the second time, my partner and I drove to Coogee Beach. We…

Any suburb, town or city that didn’t have a rugby league home ground could have been on the moon. And this notion of ‘western’ Sydney? I think I would have asked, ‘do you mean the Wests Magpies?’