Shannon Burns

Shannon Burns is an Early Career Research member of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice. He has published short fiction, reviews and academic articles. He lives in Adelaide.

Works By Shannon Burns

Notes of an Anxious Son
Shannon Burns reviews André Dao’s novel Anam, a self-reflexive exploration of the ethical and formal quandaries that attend the writing of family history and inheritance.
15 Oct. 2023
A Tour through Memory
In a sense, the narrator of He plays the role of tour guide through Murray Bail’s memories, addressing his subject’s life retrospectively while exhibiting a more intimate, but not total, knowledge of his thoughts and experiences.
22 Aug. 2021
The Drowned and the Saved: Axiomatic by Maria Tumarkin
The work of ‘proving a hypothesis’ could hardly be more alien to Tumarkin. Instead, she is concerned with examining difficult events and experiences: paying attention, being emotionally and intellectually active, while refusing to let the conseque...
16 Nov. 2018
Swaying Ground: The Restorer by Michael Sala
The Restorer is dramatically immersive, thematically confronting and — despite its flaws — moving. Like The Last Thread, it is in large part about difficult reckonings with family histories, and the challenge of wresting back control of a precario...
2 May. 2017
The Writers We Deserve: Their Brilliant Careers & Wood Green
I suspect that, like me, most readers are inclined to approach any new work of fiction that explores the writing life with a kind of wariness verging on dread, but two recent Australian books prove that metafiction can still be stimulating, and th...
18 Oct. 2016
The Rings of Saturn: A Lasting Chronicle of Mourning
‘Rings of Saturn is not a novel in the standard form; it is part travelogue, part memoir, part essay-meditation and part fiction. It's a riff and an improvisation on found and obsessed-over material, and a close reading of place, territories, time...
11 Dec. 2015
Gerald Murnane: An Idiot in the Greek Sense
‘The question will arise: did I live this imaginative life because I didn’t find my real life satisfactory? That’s a question that I can’t answer, that no one else can answer. You can’t answer these questions definitively. In some respects I was i...
30 Oct. 2015
What it is to be human: The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
The Book of Strange New Things is immersive, lightly surrealist and carefully plotted. It features well-realised characters and delicately carved sentences. The narration is more restrained and focused than in Faber’s epic bestseller, The Crimson
25 Nov. 2014
Monstrous Maternal: On Clarice Lispector
For those who happen upon Clarice Lispector’s fiction without the benefit of a critical or biographical introduction, or any sense of the author’s developing international reputation since her death in 1977, the encounter can be as mystifying as i...
22 Aug. 2014

Works Featuring Shannon Burns

Saved by Books
In Childhood, Shannon Burns quickly turns to speculation about why he, ‘a child of the welfare class’, managed, after his tumultuous early years, to find an exit route into the educated middle class, especially where many of his family members hav...
11 June. 2023

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Shannon Burns

Works By Shannon Burns

Notes of an Anxious Son

A Tour through Memory

The Drowned and the Saved: Axiomatic by Maria Tumarkin

Swaying Ground: The Restorer by Michael Sala

The Writers We Deserve: Their Brilliant Careers & Wood Green

The Rings of Saturn: A Lasting Chronicle of Mourning

Gerald Murnane: An Idiot in the Greek Sense

What it is to be human: The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber

Monstrous Maternal: On Clarice Lispector

Works Featuring Shannon Burns

Saved by Books