Interviews

‘I do commercial translations, literary translation doesn’t pay the bills and requires a lot more work. I translate insurance forms, information leaflets for medication, instructions for prostate operations… It’s a repetitive job and in general very boring. But I think about Kafka, about how his job at an insurance office may have pushed him to immerse himself more fully in his fiction, and that gives me some consolation’ – Fabian Martinez Siccardi.

‘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.’

‘In this world of literary agents and commercial prizes that many times just replicate names and books that sell all right, being translated is pretty much a matter of luck: the luck of being successful or the luck of finding almost by chance the right reader in another language.’ J.M. Coetzee in conversation with Argentine writers and translators Mariana Dimópulos and Ariel Magnus.

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.’

‘If you become too pleased with yourself, you can become lazy as a poet. It’s dangerous to feel self-satisfied. You have to always have a critical eye on your work.’

‘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.’

A lot of my trajectory has been determined by work. A lot of the influences that came into my work from radio, from Europe, from working in the music and sound poetry scenes in Europe, and a little bit of poetry, were also for making a living. So, I’m incredibly badly read now. And, of course, a lot of my life has been flying by the seat of my pants doing gigs.’

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.