Sydney

‘It is the subtle duty of literary festivals and their variations to assure writers, with a vague but potent authority, that they are – despite their knowing self-doubts and anxieties – “writers”.’ Novelist Luke Carman on the festival circuit.’

The voices and stories of Ahmad, Polites and Carman work incredibly well together to create an interwoven picture of the lives of these young men in the suburbs of their youth. In this respect, Three Jerks cuts through the homogeneity of media images by introducing us to characters from distinctly different backgrounds, occupying the same streets and engaging in different ways.

The decision to write in a semi-autobiographical style raises inevitable questions. Is this fiction or autobiography? To what degree can we speak of the narrator ‘Luke Carman’ as a ‘character’ in the author Luke Carman’s collection of vignettes?

At first glance, the hero-figure of both Louis Nowra’s ‘biography’ of Kings Cross and Tony Moore’s history of Australia’s bohemians is the urban flâneur, but their approaches to this chameleon subject are as disparate as their divergent purposes.