Featured Writer

On Scars and Flying Horses:  Linda Christanty is an Indonesian author and journalist. Her writing has been recognized by various awards including the national literary award in Indonesia (Khatulistiwa Literary Award 2004 and 2010), award from the Language Center of the Ministry of National Education (2010 and 2013), and The Best Short Stories version by […]

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.As a […]

Dorothy Tse is the author of four short story collections in Chinese, including So Black and A Dictionary of Two Cities. Her collection, Snow and Shadow, translated by Nicky Harman, was long-listed for The University of Rochester’s 2015 Best Translated Book Award. A recipient of the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature and Taiwan’s Unitas New Fiction Writers’ […]

Ellen van Neerven is a young Yugambeh woman from South-East Queensland. She is the author of Heat and Light (2014), winner of the David Unaipon Award, the Dobbie Literary Award and Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Novelists Prize.  Photo credit: Inga Simpson       from Pearl At 3 p.m. I looked out of the window to […]

Heat and Light by Ellen Van Neerven UQP ISBN: 978 0 7022 5321 8 Reviewed by Christine Regan In Heat and Light Ellen Van Neerven tells us stories exploring ancestry and identity and the experiences particularly of Aboriginal women and girls in small Australian towns or dwelling on the metaphorical fringes of Brisbane and the […]

 Hoa Pham is an author, playwright and psychologist. Her novella The Other Shore won the Viva La Novella prize in 2014. Her play Silence was selected as a text for VCE Drama in 2010 and has been performed at La Mama in Melbourne. It also toured throughout Victoria with the support of VicHealth. Hoa was […]

The Other Shore by Hoa Pham Seizure/XOUM ISBN 978-1-922057-96-9 Reviewed by PAUL GIFFARD-FORET The Diasporic Unconscious ‘…scattered to the winds Are the seeds of my good heart Each branching connected to the source To see with the eyes of compassion…’ (Epigraph, The Other Shore) I have previously reviewed in this magazine recent Asian Australian fiction […]

Gaiutra Bahadur is an award-winning American journalist and book critic. She is the author of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (HURST, 2013). Her essays, criticism and journalism have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The (London) Observer, The Nation, History Today, The Virginia Quarterly Review and Ms. Magazine, among […]

Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture by Gaiutra Bahadur HIRST ISBN 9781849042772 Reviewed by NICOLE THOMAS   At the heart of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, is Gaiutra Bahadur’s personal quest to discover one woman’s identity amongst the mass of people relocated during the period of indenture.  Born in Guyana and immigrating to the United States […]

David Malouf was born in Brisbane in 1934. Since ‘Interiors’ in Four Poets 1962, he has published poetry, novels and short stories, essays, opera libretto and a play, and he is widely translated. His novels include Ransom, The Great World (winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ prize and the Prix Femina Etranger), Remembering Babylon (shortlisted for […]

Earth Hour By David Malouf University of Queensland Press ISBN Reviewed by LUCY VAN   David Malouf lives in Sydney. This banal-sounding fact actually tropes a major concern across Malouf’s works. What does it mean to live in a place? How do spaces inform the duration of a life, and how does time fill the […]

Merlinda Bobis is an acclaimed Filipino-Australian writer and performer who has published in three languages. Her novels, short story and poetry collections, and plays have received various awards, including the Prix Italia, the Steele Rudd Award for the Best Published Collection of Australian Short Stories, the Australian Writers’ Guild Award, the Ian Reed Radio Drama Prize, […]

Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti in 1969 and moved to the United States when she was twelve. She is the author of two novels, two collections of stories, two books for young adults, and two nonfiction books, one of which, Brother, I’m Dying, was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of […]

joanne burns is a Sydney poet. She has had many prose poems published, and is represented in The Indigo Book of Australian Prose Poems, Ginninderra Press 2011. Her most recent book is amphora, Giramondo Publishing 2011. She is working on a new poetry collection brush. ampersand  so you puff down the boulevarde huffy and patriotic as the global village idiot waving its […]