Gregory Day
Gregory Day is a novelist, poet and composer from the Eastern Otways region of southwest Victoria, Australia. He is a winner of the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, the Elizabeth Jolley Prize, and the Manly Artist Book Award. His latest novel A Sand Archive was shortlisted for the 2019 Miles Franklin Award and his essay Summer on The Painkalac was also shortlisted for the 2019 Nature Conservancy Nature Writing Prize. Gregory is a regular contributor to the literary pages of The Age and The Australian. He is also a footy coach and a mushroom hunter.
All essays by Gregory Day
Betraying the Loch: Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane
It is a quandary of the currently abounding place-literature that by bringing such softening frames to so-called ‘wild’ places, and by writing so charmingly about them, authors are in fact robbing these places of the ‘wildness’ and the psychogeographical freedom they purport to love. Or are they?
The submerged moon: Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín
Intrinsic to Tóibín’s work, from The South and The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe through to Nora Webster, is a social realist reformulation of what were known in Catholic circles, once upon a time, as ‘holy mysteries’. You will find no cheap irony in Tóibín about this. He has made himself a conduit for the concept, with its rootedness in ordinary human failure, loss and vulnerability.