James Halford

James Halford

James Halford is the author of Requiem with Yellow Butterflies (UWAP 2019), a Latin America travel memoir. His creative nonfiction, fiction and criticism have been widely published in Australia and abroad. The recipient of a 2016 Copyright Agency/Sydney Review of Books Emerging Critics Fellowship, his critical work focuses on comparative approaches to contemporary Australian and Latin American literature. He holds a literature degree and a creative doctorate from the University of Queensland, where he now teaches, and has studied Spanish in Argentina, Mexico and Spain.

All essays by James Halford

Essay: James Halfordon writing the south

Southern Conversations 2: Writing the South in Sydney

A world literature conceived as a negative ideal cannot pretend to be purely descriptive by restricting itself to mapping existing transnational literary networks. Instead, its task becomes to attend to the stubborn persistence of local literary ecologies in spite of globalisation
Feb. 2020 •
Essay: James Halfordon Judith Wright

The Lakeside House

‘Re-reading Wright’s Cooloola poems from The Gateway (1953) to The Other Half (1966) over that long, hot Queensland summer, it was hard not to hear echoes of our own anxious times.’
Oct. 2018 • •
Emerging Critics Essay: James Halfordon Coetzee in Buenos Aires

Southern Conversations: J.M Coetzee in Buenos Aires

‘What is left is the real South, the South of this real world, where most of those present in this room were born and most of us will die.’
Feb. 2017 • • •
Emerging Critics Review: James Halfordon Felix Calvino
  • So Much Smoke by Felix Calvino cover
  • So Much Smoke by Felix Calvino Arcadia
    145pp
    Published December, 2016

Felix Calvino’s Lost Galicia: So Much Smoke

Galicia is made strange through the English language; Australia is made strange by non-native English and a Galician worldview. In this collection, the teeming social world of the village takes over, threatening to spill beyond the boundaries of the short form. This collection firmly establishes Calvino as an English prose stylist. The influence of Anglophone modernist minimalism is apparent and appropriate. Through absence and implication, the stories register feelings of loss the characters themselves often lack the language to articulate. If, as Rosal√≠a de Castro wrote, to sing of Galicia in the Galician language offers ‘consolation against evil, relief from pain,’ to write of it in English implies something else entirely.’
Dec. 2016 • • •
Emerging Critics Essay: James Halfordon María Kodama and Jorge Luis Borges

Such Loneliness in that Gold: María Kodama on Life After Borges

‘You’re meeting the FIFA of Argentine literature,’ one young Buenos Aires poet said: ‘Watch out she doesn’t sue you.’ María Kodama gave me the best part of three hours of her time, describing her life with Jorge Luis Borges and discussing his work. Her generosity and warmth were at odds with everything I’d ever read or heard about her.
Oct. 2016 • • •