DOCSLIB.ORG

City Space and Urban Identity a Post-9/11 Consciousness in Australian Fiction 2005 to 2011

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
City Space and Urban Identity a Post-9/11 Consciousness in Australian Fiction 2005 to 2011 City Space and Urban Identity A Post-9/11 Consciousness in Australian Fiction 2005 to 2011 By Lydia Saleh Rofail A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences The University of Sydney 2019 Declaration of Originality I affirm that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work and I certify and warrant to the best of my knowledge that all sources of reference have been duly and fully acknowledged. Lydia Saleh Rofail i Abstract This thesis undertakes a detailed examination of a close corpus of five Australian literary novels published between 2005 and 2011, to assess the political, social, and cultural implications of 9/11 upon an urban Australian identity. My analysis of the literary city will reveal how this identity is trapped between layers of trauma which include haunting historical atrocities and inward nationalism, as well as the contrasting outward pull of global aspirations. Dead Europe by Christos Tsiolkas (2005), The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan (2006), Underground by Andrew McGahan (2006), Breath by Tim Winton (2008), and Five Bells by Gail Jones (2011) are uniquely varied narratives written in the shadow of 9/11. These novels reconfigure fictional notions of Australian urbanism in order to deal with fears and threats posed by 9/11 and the fallout that followed, where global interests fed into national concerns and discourses within Australia and resonated down to local levels. Adopting an Australia perspective, this thesis contextualises subsequent traumatic and apocalyptic trajectories in relation to urbanism and Australian identity in a post-9/11 world. As a cultural and political artefact based on literary analysis, this study captures a particular moment in time within the decade after 9/11, in order to contextualise political, social, and cultural implications upon a multi-layered Australian identity as reflected in the selected examples. To articulate this complexity, I forge an approach and methodology from the foundational framework of trauma theory, which brings together a constellation of traumas that resonate in collective or individual memory or are projected onto the Australian urban landscape. They include global terrorism and the legacy of settler colonial violence in Australia, as well as other mass-mediated catastrophes of the twenty-first century, which fed into a worldwide post-9/11 mood of anxiety that resonated on national and local levels within Australia. Although separate from each other, these traumas operate in a multidimensional matrix which I extend in the second part of this thesis to incorporate apocalyptic landscapes. ii Contents Acknowledgements iv Dedication v Introduction Global, National, and Local Trauma 1 Part A: Traumatic Topographies: The Post-9/11 City and the Damaged Psyche 44 Chapter 1 The Malignant City: Breath by Tim Winton 45 Chapter 2 The Conflicted City: Five Bells by Gail Jones 85 Part B: The Apocalyptic Metropolis After 9/11 119 Chapter 3 A Hellish Necropolis: Dead Europe by Christos Tsiolkas 120 Chapter 4 Apocalypse Now: The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan 148 Chapter 5 Dead City, Fortress City: Underground by Andrew McGahan 175 Afterword 205 Bibliography 217 iii Acknowledgements I acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, the traditional owners of the land on which we live, and where the study for this thesis took place. I pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and future. I am sincerely grateful for the guidance, patience and outstanding knowledge of my supervisor, Professor Robert Dixon, who has provided me with invaluable insight and encouraged me to develop my voice in my work. I could not have asked for a more dedicated mentor. I am indebted to Professor Vanessa Smith for her support and wisdom, particularly during her tenure as Postgraduate Coordinator. To my treasured friend Dr Timotheos Roussos: thank you for your meticulous editing and proofreading, as well as your expertise in postcolonial studies. Thank you for always being my champion. To my past and present university cohort and friends: Helen Young, Kieryn McKay, Michelle Kelly, Jason Chen, Sara Fernandes, C.B. Johnson, Niklas Fischer, Patrick Cronin, and Nathalie Camerlynck, thank you for being generous and supportive friends. To my wonderful family, I am thankful to my father Nashid Saleh for his unwavering support and faith in me. To my father-in-law Wadie Rofail, thank you for your ongoing prayers and support, your optimism and love of life is infectious. To my beloved sister Sandra Matthews and my brother-in-law Michael Matthews, I appreciate your patience with me and forgiving me for missing Aunty duties, and for looking after family matters in my absence. To my lifelong friend Caroline Fisher, and John Fisher and their sons, Joshua, Zachary, and Benjamin, thank you for your support and patience. Thank you also to Andrew Botros, Christine Guirguis, Gigi Lombardi, and Dr Leo Van Biene for their support. Finally, thank you to my husband Stephen who is my scholar, editor, and love, and whose encouragement means everything, I thank you for believing in me. If I have overlooked anyone, it is not intentional. iv Dedication To my mother Madeleine Saleh. Until we meet again, and you remember… To my niece Isabella Marie Matthews who is still too young to truly understand how much she means to me. v Introduction Global, National, and Local Trauma As the twin towers of the World Trade Centre collapsed, the world looked on in real time. For America and her allies, it was to become a predominant image of urban destruction with unforeseen permutations of trauma and cultural damage that resonated decades after. At 8.46 am on 11 September 2001, a hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 ploughed into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre in New York City. Seventeen minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower. Two other American Airlines planes were also hijacked: one crashed into the Pentagon and the other into fields in Pennsylvania en route to crash into the White House. The 9/111 terrorist attacks were comprised of this series of coordinated airline collisions into key symbolic buildings of the United States establishment. The Islamist terrorist group Al-Qaeda, led by Osama Bin Laden, claimed responsibility. The spectacle of the imploding World Trade Centre towers was to become emblematic of 9/11. Syndicated media reports and online news stories captured every catastrophic moment: As firefighters and police rushed to help those inside the burning buildings, both towers imploded on themselves and collapsed in rapid succession, killing between 2,000 and 3,000 people who were unable to get out in time … in addition to those who already had been instantly vaporized from the impact of the planes or had jumped off the building to avoid incineration.2 1 For the rest of this thesis, I will use this popularised form of the date to refer to the events of 11 September 2001. 2 Tom Pyszczynski, Sheldon Solomon, and Jeff Greenberg, In the Wake Of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2003), 3. 1 The death toll from 9/11 was nearly 3000 people, with approximately 6000 physical injuries. The immediate short-term aftermath of the attacks cost at least 10 billion American dollars in property damage and approximately 3 trillion American dollars in total costs.3 For the first time in the modern history of commercial aviation, all flights over America were grounded to prevent further attacks. The military was put on high alert, and then president George W. Bush (2001-2009) and other government personnel were shuttled to heavily secured locations. Commentators remarked that, “In a matter of moments, the United States had become a gravely disorientated country tottering on the brink of chaos.” Theorists from the American Psychological Association observed that “nothing like this had happened before on home soil, in the United States.”4 Reflecting on the catastrophe, American academics have claimed that the repercussions will continue to reverberate well into the future. It felt as if 9/11 changed everything and now America and her allies had to face what seemed “an interminable string of terrorist attacks, that killed dozens of people at a time despite a wholesale upgrading of security measures worldwide.”5 Although there had been a previous attempt to destroy the World Trade Centre in 1993 by a group of Middle Eastern Islamist terrorists, as well as several foiled plots to bomb US airports, 9/11 was thought to be different. Up until the fall of the twin towers, “Americans still felt safe at home and believed that no one could penetrate … [their] … defenses and perpetrate the type of large-scale terrorism … experienced on 9/11.”6 The American media did not fail to point out repeatedly that “America came under attack” and that “the homeland was no longer secure … no longer home.”7 In light of these statements, the question arises as to whether 9/11 was a truly transformative moment of urban catastrophe around the world and whether the world had changed significantly after 9/11. Although it undoubtedly changed the lives of those directly affected by it, those in the American military, and American foreign policy, the question 3 Sandro Galea, “Fifteen Years Later: Learning from 9/11,” News and Events, Boston University, School of Public Health (11 September 2016), Accessed 12 June 2017, https://www.bu.edu/sph/2016/09/11/fifteen-years-later-learning-from-911/. 4 Pyszczynski, et al., In the Wake of 9/11, 4. 5 Galea, “Fifteen Years Later.” 6 Pyszczynski, et al., In the Wake of 9/11, 4.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Culture Report Eunic Yearbook 2011 Culture Report Eunic Yearbook 2011
    CULTURE REPORT EUNIC YEARBOOK 2011 CULTURE REPORT EUNIC YEARBOOK 2011 Cultural relations are the glue that holds alliances together. The geopolitics of the 21st century mean we need to see a revival of cultural diplomacy. China and India are already expanding their external cultural policies. Despite Europe‘s huge cultural diversity, the EU has still not developed an adequate cultural strategy for its foreign policy. The establishment of the European External Action Service (EEAS) provides an opportunity to tighten up and co-ordinate the EU‘s existing cultural foreign policy. In this edition of the Culture Report, 30 authors from 20 different countries examine what this all means. Foreword: Crisis and new awakenings by Sebastian Körber 4 CHAPTER 1: EXTERNAL PERSPECTIVES A Brave New World - Globalisation as Europe’s touchstone by Yang Lian 8 All talk and no action by Mai’a K. Davis Cross 20 Art at the heart of mainstream entertainment – an interview by Regis Debray with Frédéric Martel 28 Seizing the day by André Azoulay 38 The cultural revolution by Reem Kassem 45 A gateway to two worlds by Julie Chénot 48 Welcome to the real world by André Lemos 54 A union of double standards by Mahir Namur 60 2 Contents Moving the chairs in the global boardroom by Rajeef Balasubramanyam 64 Europe‘s forgotten fringes by Jurko Prochasko 70 Peeking through the open window by Hela Kamarou 78 CHAPTER 2: EUROPE IN THE WORLD THE WORLD IN EUROPE Now is the time by Robert Palmer 86 Common spaces by Gerhard Sabathil 96 A necessity, not a luxury by Marietje Schaake
    [Show full text]
  • Representations of Sex in Australian Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009, 361Pp
    Xavier Pons. Messengers of Eros: Representations of Sex in Australian Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009, 361pp. AU$ 44.95 ISBN: 1 4438 0523 8 (pbk) From early convict narratives to contemporary literary fiction, Australian writers have consistently represented a diverse range of sexual behaviours, scenarios, desires and identities. Notwithstanding such an intriguing and bountiful array of sexual narratives and a rather sophisticated range of analytical approaches made available by psychoanalytic, postmodern, feminist, gay, lesbian, and queer scholarship, Australian literary critics have been relatively silent or perhaps even coy when it comes to thinking about sex. Back in 1998, Dean Kiley chastised ‘OzLitCriture’ for its reluctance to adequately address the queerness of Australian literature: Despite the gloriously disproportionate over-representation of queer writers and writing in whatever you might call an OzLit canon, the cybernetic industry of Australian Literature and its critical machinery (OzLitCriture for short) continues to occlude, defuse, diffuse, evade and domesticate queer issues. In the years since Kiley’s critique a body of work about Australian literature and sexuality has developed but book-length studies have failed to emerge. In this sense Xavier Pons’ Messengers of Eros can claim the title of being the first full length critical study of the representations of sex in Australian literature. Xavier Pons has been contributing to Australian literary studies, and been one of its chief proponents in Europe, since the late 1960s. Pons has published on an extensive range of Australian authors and themes and is perhaps best known for his critical study on the work of Henry Lawson, Out of Eden (1984).
    [Show full text]
  • ABR Favourite Australian Novels
    Announcing the top ten ABR Favourite Australian Novels Of the 290 individual novels that were nominated in the ABR FAN Poll, below we list the top ten. At the foot of page 25 we simply name the ten titles that followed. We don’t have room to list all of your favourites. A complete alphabetical listing now appears on our website: www.australian- bookreview.com – a fillip to further reading and to a deeper appreciation of the range of Australian fiction, which was our shy hope when we polled our readers. Cloudstreet im Winton’s books attract international kudos, pres- 1 tigious awards and massive sales. Winton won the Australian/Vogel National Award with his first novel andT last year became only the second person to win the Miles Franklin Award four times. Cloudstreet, published in 1991, holds a unique place in Australian readers’ affections. Winton’s tale of the Lambs and the Pickles from the end of World War II to the 1960s won the 1992 Miles Franklin Award and was dramatised by Nick Enright and Justin Monjo. Presciently, in 1994, The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature predicted that ‘it seems certain to establish itself as one of Australia’s best novels’. Countless voters agreed. One of them, Carla Ziino, described it as ‘the quintessential Australian novel’. The Fortunes Voss of Richard atrick White, 2 3 Australia’s first Mahony Nobel Laureate Pfor Literature, dominat- enry Handel’s ed Australian literature grand trilogy from the 1950s to his – Australia death in 1990. Voss, his HFelix (1917), The Way fifth novel, published Home (1925) and Ultima in 1957, won the first Thule (1929), first col- Miles Franklin Award.
    [Show full text]
  • Refugees in Europe, 1919–1959 Iii Refugees in Europe, 1919–1959
    Refugees in Europe, 1919–1959 iii Refugees in Europe, 1919–1959 A Forty Years’ Crisis? Edited by Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc LONDON • OXFORD • NEW YORK • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Matthew Frank, Jessica Reinisch and Contributors, 2017 This work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives Licence. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the authors. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-8562-2 ePDF: 978-1-4725-8564-6 eBook: 978-1-4725-8563-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Cover image © LAPI/Roger Viollet/Getty Images Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the
    [Show full text]
  • 'What's Haunting Dead Europe?'
    ‘What’s haunting Dead Europe?’ Trauma fiction as resistance to postmodern governmentality MICHAEL VAUGHAN University of Sydney Dead Europe is a novel that has been described as unsettling, disturbing, poisoned, repellent. The text, by most accounts, has the capacity to haunt readers as much as it tracks the diegetic haunting of its protagonist. This paper argues that we can read Dead Europe as an example of trauma fiction, where the painful past is first accessed through its haunting and troped echoes in the present, and that the trauma Tsiolkas writes of is the blood-soaked history of 20th century European history. Indeed, most critics are either implicitly or explicitly in agreement about this first point, whether or not they situate the text specifically within the framework of trauma theory. However, the argument here will be that the purpose of Tsiolkas’ trauma fiction is as resistance to postmodern governmentality, the omnivorous neoliberal democracy beyond the ‘end of history’. In doing so, this paper will draw on Derrida’s concept of hauntology, a product of his reading of the role of Marxism after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Derrida, and arguably Tsiolkas, maintain the usefulness of the spirit of Marx not in the dogmatic belief in his specific theories (such as dialectical materialism) but rather as an ongoing spirit of critical reflexivity, a spectrality which acts as a reminder of the ideological contingency of the present moment. Tsiolkas writes trauma fiction to challenge the totalising discourse of postmodern governmentality, to assert the impossibility of an end to history, and to construct a way of writing and reading fiction ethically which can haunt its readers.
    [Show full text]
  • Yaffa Eliach's Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust
    Navigating the Kingdom of Night: Writing the Holocaust Amy T Matthews Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing Discipline of English School of Humanities University of Adelaide April 2007 2 Contents 1. Abstract 3 2. Statement of Originality 5 3. A Brief Outline of the Debate over Fictionalising the Holocaust 6 Literary Risk and Moral Peril 7 The Case of DM Thomas’ The White Hotel 10 Holocaust Endings and the Right to Write 13 4. Fantastic Narrative Strategies: the Use of the Hasidic Tale, Magic Realist Folk Tale and Fable in Holocaust Literature 20 Yaffa Eliach’s Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust 21 Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated 28 John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas 36 5. Contracts with the Reader: Writers Who Break the Reader/Writer Contract 43 Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird 44 Helen Darville’s The Hand That Signed the Paper 52 6. Addressing the Moral Minefield Self-Reflexively: the Case of Art Spiegelman’s Maus 66 7. Navigating the Kingdom of Night: My Journey as a Writer 75 8. Works Cited for ‘Navigating the Kingdom of Night’ 87 9. Bibliography for End of the Night Girl and ‘Navigating the Kingdom of Night’ 95 3 Abstract End of the Night Girl and ‘Navigating the Kingdom of Night’: End of the Night Girl Nothing seems to go right for Molly – she’s stuck in a dead-end waitressing job, she’s sleeping with a man she doesn’t even like, and she’s just been saddled with a swarm of goldfish and a pregnant stepsister.
    [Show full text]
  • Pommy Media Causing a Stir in Australia
    Pommy media causing a stir in Australia blogs.lse.ac.uk/polis/2014/10/25/pommy-media-causing-a-stir-in-australia/ 2014-10-25 The Australian media landscape is becoming a little heated as recent British entrants continue to carve out new digital territory in the Land Down Under. Colleen Murrell reports on the increasing levels of distrust both between the players – The Australian versions of The Guardian, the Daily Mail and the BBC – and between those players and the tough local media groups, Fairfax Media and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Australia. Last Thursday the chief executive of Guardian Media Group, Andrew Miller, gave the annual Polis lecture in London in which he didn’t appear to welcome the BBC’s expansion into Australia. He disputed that this should be a “core part” of the BBC’s mission and said it did not “benefit UK licence fee payers or meet the requirement of the BBC to provide news in parts of the world where there are limited alternatives”. He added. “It threatens a distortion that is not in the interests of audiences or other UK news providers”. Alluding to the ‘licence fee payers’ is disingenuous as the expanded website venture isn’t funded by the licence fee but is a commercial enterprise that will be financed by advertising. It is therefore the second part of the allegation – that it is not in the interests of “other UK news providers” – that really bothers the Guardian. Earlier this month the BBC recruited The Sydney Morning Herald’s Chief of Staff Wendy Frew, showing that it is committed to serious newsgathering.
    [Show full text]
  • Janine Hauthal
    Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2019 Europe as Alternative Space in Contemporary Australian Fiction by Carey, Tsiolkas and Jones Janine Hauthal Abstract: This article investigates imaginings of Europe in contemporary Australian fiction in order to explore whether (traveling to) Europe provides alternative points of reference to discourses on nation, belonging, and identity beyond the (settler) postcolonial. The article sets out to compare recent works by Peter Carey, Christos Tsiolkas and Gail Jones who narrate Europe against a wide range of backgrounds, covering diverse diasporic, migratory and expatriate experiences, in order to explore the role of Europe as an alternative space, and of European modernities in particular, in the Australian literary imagination. Concentrating on Jack Maggs (1997), Dead Europe (2005) and A Guide to Berlin (2015), the article has a threefold focus: Firstly, it analyses the representation of European spaces and explores how the three novels draw attention to multiple modernities within and beyond Europe. Secondly, it demonstrates how all three novels, in their own way, reveal European modernities to be haunted by its other, i.e. death, superstition, ghosts, or the occult. Thirdly, these previous findings will be synthesized in order to determine how the three novels relate Europe to Australia. Do they challenge or perpetuate the protagonists’ desire for Europe as an ‘imaginary homeland’? Do references to Europe support the construction of national identity in the works under review, or do these references rather point to the emergence of multiple or transnational identities? Keywords: contemporary Australian literature; fictions of Europe; multiple modernities; Peter Carey; Christos Tsiolkas; Gail Jones Introduction This article sets out to compare works by Peter Carey, Christos Tsiolkas and Gail Jones in order to explore the role of Europe as an alternative space, and of European modernity in particular, in the Australian literary imagination.
    [Show full text]
  • JASAL 2007 Special Edition.Indd
    52 JASAL SPECIAL ISSUE 2007: SPECTRES, SCREENS, SHADOWS, MIRRORS “Blood and land and ghosts:” Haunting Words in Christos Tsiolkas’ Dead Europe CATHERINE PADMORE La Trobe University Ah, do not ghosts prove—even rumours, whispers, stories of ghosts—that the past clings, that we are always going back … ? Graham Swift, Waterland (89) A past that clings and a sense of going back to old haunts are appropriate ways to describe Christos Tsiolkas’ Dead Europe. Released in 2005 and recipient of both the Age fiction book of the year prize and the Melbourne Prize for literature (best writing award), the novel tells the story of Isaac Raftis, a Greek-Australian photographer in his mid-thirties who returns to Europe after a ten-year absence. Europe has changed since his last visit: the Berlin Wall has come down; community demographics have shifted with tides of migration; and American dollars (and child prostitutes) flood the marketplaces. Isaac travels from Australia to Greece, then through Italy, the Czech Republic, Germany, France, Holland and the UK. After wading knee- deep through blood, spew, shit, spit and semen, he returns home a changed man. On his first trip to Europe, while in a Thessaloniki museum, Isaac photographs a photograph of Jewish resistance fighters, and he describes the image thus: “Blood and land and ghosts” (90). This short phrase captures three vital elements of the book and I will explore some of the ways—not always comfortable—that they intertwine in Tsiolkas’ most recent novel. The novel was widely reviewed and often in colourful language: my favourite describes the novel’s world as “a Judeo-Christian devil’s jumping castle submerged in excrement, blood and foul vapours” (Rosenblatt 48).
    [Show full text]
  • Download MWF Digital Program
    MELBOURNE WRITERS FESTIVAL DIGITAL 7 A U G U S T – 16 AUGUST MWF.COM.AU #MWFDIGITAL WELCOME In what meaningful and transformative how we connect with each other and our environment and, importantly, they will ways do we attend to the issues celebrate their books and writing that hold of our time? A perennial question our attention despite the world in which we asked throughout history by all who find ourselves. pay attention to the world. Recent Brimming with heart, intellect and curiosity, events have bluntly highlighted that I hope this Festival is the celebration and We respectfully acknowledge that today’s concerns – the climate crisis, refuge you need. globalisation and capitalism, and racial, I hope that it captures your attention. Melbourne Writers Festival is created on cultural and economic inequity – are See you soon. the traditional lands of the Kulin Nation, all connected. To paraphrase Martin Gene Smith in particular the Wurundjeri and Boon Luther King Jr: injustice anywhere, Associate Director injustice everywhere. Wurrung people. We pay our respects Frustratingly, the conversations we’re having today about these problems are the same to Elders past, present and emerging. that were had decades ago. Jenny Odell, a guest at this year’s Festival, challenges us on this notion of repetition by declaring: ‘if you were reading a book whose pages began to seem more and more similar, until you were reading the same page over and over again, you would put that book down.’ Another SMITH perennial question: when we’re not happy with the circumstances of yesterday and today, what can we do to change those of tomorrow? Which book do we pick up next? To help you decide, this August more than 100 of the world’s most perspicacious writers GENE and thinkers will converge under the banner of the Festival’s theme, Attention.
    [Show full text]
  • Christos Tsiolkas Is, and Why We’Re Studying Him in This Course
    Who is Tsiolkas Before we get into the lecture proper, it’s probably important to elaborate on who Christos Tsiolkas is, and why we’re studying him in this course. So, let’s get the short version out of the way - Tsiolkas is a gay Greek-Australian, the son of post-war migrants. He grew up in Richmond, and went to Melbourne University, where he was the editor of the student magazine Farrago. Tsiolkas is one of Australia's more successful contemporary literary novelists. He has been awarded a number of prizes and has made it to some very significant shortlists. And his books are selling well around the world. We must be very careful to use the term literary because in overall sales he is still streets behind writers like Colleen McCulloch and Bryce Courtney, writers of popular fiction. And to emphasise this point – last year The Age’s literary editor, Jason Steger wrote You won't have forgotten that period a couple of years ago when everyone seemed to be reading Tsiolkas's book. You could hardly step into the pub or out for dinner without some bright spark buttonholing you to find out what you thought. Upon which several people commenting on the article immediately pounced on that comment and said they had never heard of the book, nor Tsiolkas, and that Steger was living in a cocoon. Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/the-slap- still-shocks-in-tv-translation-20111006-1lb2v.html#ixzz1tTPruGht Those of us who are familiar with him as a novelist may be surprised to find out that he is actually quite a prolific writer, having written or contributed to several plays, screen plays, art exhibitions, as well as writings on his love of film.
    [Show full text]
  • Christos Tsiolkas Australian Author
    Christos Tsiolkas Australian Author Message to the ASRC “I think the question of asylum and refuge is the political and ethical issue of our age. In hindsight our globalised moment will be judged by how we treated the enormous number of stateless and displaced people seeking lives free of political, religious, cultural and, just as importantly, economic oppression. At the turn of the millennium I personally felt gutted by the fanning of xenophobic and racist fears in the media and how my government was incarcerating and demonising asylum seekers, some of the most vulnerable people on the planet. It was then that I first became of the ASRC. I realised very early that the work the ASRC does is crucial in ensuring support and advocacy for asylum seekers. I feel a responsibility to offer my support any way I can. “How will we be judged by time? As a child of migrants I feel the burden of this question even more acutely. Euripides wrote over two thousand years ago that ‘there is no greater sorrow on earth than the loss of one’s native land.’ The migrant, the refugee, they most certainly know this. The truth is, whatever the lies we may tell ourselves, we all know this.” Biography Christos Tsiolkas was born in Melbourne in 1965. LOADED, his first novel was published in 1995 and later made into the award-winning film HEAD ON. In 1996 he collaborated with Sasha Soldatow on the dialogue JUMP CUTS. His novel THE JESUS MAN was published in 1999. His critically acclaimed novel DEAD EUROPE was published in 2005 and in 2008 he reached bestselling status with the bold THE SLAP which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award.
    [Show full text]