Writing from the South: Public Literary Readings

Giramondo authors Brian Castro, Mariana Dimópulos, Martin Edmond and Nicholas Jose will feature in this unique event, in which the State Library of NSW partners with the Writing and Society Research Centre (Western Sydney University) and the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice (Adelaide University) to present two evenings of readings by writers from across the global South.

Presenting writers from South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina, the event celebrates the ‘South’ as a special zone of literary production and introduces audiences to luminaries of poetry and prose. The public readings accompany a colloquium for international and Australian writers on the inventiveness and creative skills of the South; they offer a rare occasion to hear some of the finest writers working in our hemisphere.

All are welcome and the readings are free.

List of participants for April 10th:

Brian Castro is the author of eleven novels, a volume of essays and a poetic cookbook. His novels include the multi award-winning Double-Wolf and Shanghai Dancing. He was the 2014 winner of the Patrick White Award for Literature and the 2018 Prime Minister’s Prize for Poetry. (image: Annette Willis)

Stuart Cooke is a poet, scholar and translator based on the Gold Coast, where he is a senior lecturer in creative writing and literary studies at Griffith University. His books include the poetry collections Opera (2016) and Edge Music (2011), and the critical work, Speaking the Earth’s Languages: a theory for Australian-Chilean postcolonial poetics (2013). His translation of Gianni Siccardi’s The Blackbird was published last year.

Ceridwen Dovey’s debut novel, Blood Kin, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Award and selected for the U.S. National Book Foundation’s prestigious ‘5 Under 35’ honours list. The Wall Street Journal named her as one of their ‘artists to watch’. Her second book, Only the Animals, won the inaugural 2014 Readings New Australian Writing Award. Her new novel, In the Garden of the Fugitives, was published in 2018, and her short non-fiction book, Writers on Writers: On J.M Coetzee has recently been published by Black Inc.

Gail Jones is the author of two short-story collections, a critical monograph, and the novels Black Mirror, Sixty Lights, Dreams of Speaking, Sorry, Five Bells, A Guide to Berlin and The Death of Noah Glass. Her fiction has won many literary awards and has been translated into nine languages.

Tina Makereti writes essays, novels and short fiction. Her latest novel is The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke and she co-edited Black Marks on the White Page (2017), an anthology that celebrates Māori and Pasifika writing. Her first novel Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings won the 2014 Ngā Kupu Ora Aotearoa Māori Book Award for Fiction. Tina teaches creative writing and Oceanic literatures at Massey University. Her collection of personal essays, This Compulsion in Us, will be published early 2020.

Anna Kazumi Stahl is a fiction writer based in Argentina. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, with a dissertation on transnational (East-West) identities in South American, U.S. and German literatures. Her current research explores South-South and East Asian-South American transnational cultural expressions in literature and visual media.

Anthony Uhlmann is Director of the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. His first novel, Saint Antony in His Desert, was published by UWAP in 2018. He is the author of two monographs on Samuel Beckett, and most recently Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov. His work focuses on the exchanges that take place between literature and philosophy and the way in which literature itself is a kind of thinking. Besides Other Worlds he is currently working on a project on Spinoza and Literature with Moira Gatens.

Marlene van Niekerk was the first South African author to be shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and is best known for her award-winning novels Triomf and The Way of Women.

List of participants for April 11th:

J.M. Coetzee was born in South Africa in 1940 and educated in South Africa and the United States. He has published sixteen works of fiction, as well as criticism and translations. Among awards he has won are the Booker Prize (twice) and, in 2003, the Nobel Prize for Literature. He lives in Adelaide, South Australia.

Mariana Dimópulos is an Argentinian writer and translator. She has published three novels, many short stories and recently an essay on the German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin. As a cultural journalist, she contributes to the feuilleton of the most popular newspaper in Argentina. At the University of Buenos Aires she is a lecturer on Translation Theory. She has translated Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Robert Musil and J. M. Coetzee, among others.

Martin Edmond was born in Ōhākune, New Zealand and now lives in Sydney. He has worked as an actor and stage manager, lighting designer and as a screenwriter. His books include Luca Antara: passages in search of Australia (ESP, 2006); Dark Night: walking with McCahon (AUP, 2011), and Battarbee and Namatjira (Giramondo, 2014). He is a past winner of the New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Non-fiction. His most recent book is Isinglass (UWAP, 2019).

James Halford is a writer from Brisbane, Australia. He is the author of Requiem with Yellow Butterflies (UWAP 2019), a Latin America travel memoir. The recipient of a 2016 Sydney Review of Books Emerging Critics Fellowship, his critical writing 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 also studied Spanish in Argentina, Mexico and Spain.

Eva Hornung’s most recent novels are DogBoy and The Last Garden. DogBoy won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award in 2010 and has been published in 17 languages worldwide. The Last Garden won the Festival Award for Fiction, the SA Premier’s Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin in 2018. She is, among other things, a farmer in country SA.

Nicholas Jose has published seven novels, including Paper Nautilus (1987), The Red Thread (2000) and Original Face(2005), three collections of short stories, Black Sheep: Journey to Borroloola (a memoir), and essays, mostly on Australian and Asian culture.  He was Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy Beijing, 1987-90 and Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University, 2009-10. He is Professor of English and Creative Writing at The University of Adelaide, and Adjunct Professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University.

Pedro Mairal is an Argentinian novelist, travel writer, poet and screenwriter whose work has been translated and published across five continents. He has authored a collection of short fiction, three volumes of poetry, a collection of newspaper columns and five novels, including El gran surubi, which is composed entirely of sonnets, and The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra.

Yewande Omotoso is an architect, with a masters in creative writing from the University of Cape Town. Her debut novel Bomboy (2011 Modjaji Books), won the South African Literary Award First Time Author Prize and was shortlisted for the Etisalat Prize for Literature. She was a 2015 Miles Morland Scholar. Yewande’s second novel The Woman Next Door (Chatto and Windus) was published in May 2016. It was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, the Aidoo-Snyder Prize, the Barry Ronge Fiction Prize, and the UJ Literary Prize.

Kim Scott’s most recent novel is Taboo (Picador, 2017).  Proud to call himself Noongar, Kim is also founder and chair of the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Story Project (www.wirlomin.com.au). He is Professor of Writing in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University. (image: Janine Boreland)