Publishing

In the history of Black authors writing in French – and in Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s new novel, winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt – it turns out that authorship matters very much.

To call into question the literary value of Dalton’s fiction is not to disqualify the pleasure and imaginative release that hundreds of thousands of readers have found in his novels, especially Boy Swallows Universe; it is to take that popularity seriously.

How alienating, how jarring, to be made aware that you’re one step away from a cascading world of ones and zeros instead of live, decaying art objects. Get free of queues and tickets and blood-sugar crashes, but can’t shake the feeling that a high-quality colour book reproduction would offer a superior form of viewing. Wonder if Walter Benjamin could have dreamed of such a flaccid form of artistic replication as a virtual gallery tour.

Fryer Library at the University of Queensland is one of my favourite places. Compared with the cathedral-like reading rooms of the British Library or Sydney’s Mitchell Library, the scale of Fryer is much more welcoming, with portraits of writers from the collection gracing the walls: Peter Carey in a Hawaiian shirt perhaps – or a pugnacious Xavier Herbert glaring at the artist.

While few literary translators are truly ‘anonymous’ these days, many still move like ghosts through the world of publishing, their names omitted not only from the covers of their books but also the reviews and promotional materials that sprout around them.

It was at that moment that I knew the newsletter had crossed over from a curious experiment into a practice that was integral to who I was as a writer.

What makes a book distinct from a meme if both are dependent on a web of intertextual references, some of which are digital and some which rely on the printed page?

Instead of approaching the stage I approach Australia Post on Blacktown’s Main Street, and instead of thanking the Vice-Chancellor I thank the woman at the counter as she hands me an envelope with the certificate inside. I head out the door as the first in my family to graduate, and the first to graduate during a pandemic.

As social life becomes increasingly mediated by digital tools, it is ever more imperative to understand how people incorporate technology into their routines, as well as how technologies spark new forms of engagement, identity, and interaction.

Just as certain weather conditions must be present for a rainbow to be visible, so the environment has to be right for literary titles from Aotearoa to be seen and noticed in Australia.