
Please bear in mind that this card was being edited to correct spelling errors and other issues when I added it here, and a current version may be different.
This introduction on this page was updated 25/10/22.
The list below was last updated 17/9/22.
Inspired by the Diversity Bingo game card… but diverging from it because I don’t like to label authors by their skin colour or their disability…
I wanted to monitor the diversity of my reading, but looking at the complexities and the risk of offence in using terms like People of Colour, or BAME and BIPOC etc I have decided to follow the British guidelines and use ethnicity but only where this identification is in the public domain and acknowledged by the author as part of their identity.
I’m mindful of the problem of identity politics and culture wars. In the Weekend Australian Geordie Williamson reviews Nam Le’s On David Malouf: Writers on Writers (Black Inc, 2019), and argues that:
A true work of art, irrespective of its author, deserves to be granted oxygen and space—it deserves to be engaged with in a realm beyond the Twitter squabbles that would delimit and proscribe our literary engagement. Yes, Le acknowledges, the history of literature is the history of systematic exclusion of stories by those who do not conform to a narrow range of acceptable voices. But, he continues, to damn those legitimately precious works that have survived despite that exclusionary urge is to disrespect art in toto. Those works are our lever to raise other voices up.
What Le [of Vietnamese heritage] admires about Malouf [of English/Lebanese heritage] is his low-key determination to celebrate all that is worth preserving in the Western tradition. He writes that “Malouf owns his Occidentalism, in all its contradictions and culpabilities.” He sides with the older author in accepting that the barbarism on which Western culture is built should not be used to poison those documents that rise above our collective failings.
“Nothing complex is pure,” Le argues. “Those who crave purity — who would tell us what may be read, and by whom, and who may write what, and how, would sort us into silos of identity, and then, worst of all, vacate the ‘good’ for the ‘correct’ should, by their own argument ad absurdum, have nothing more to do with the written word.” (‘A Poetic Prose’ by Geordie Williamson, in Review, Weekend Australian, April 27-28, 2019, p.16-17)
I don’t read to anybody’s agenda, but for those interested in the diversity of Australian writing, this page notes the multicultural heritage of the Australian writers that I’ve read and reviewed here on this blog. I’m using the word ‘heritage’ loosely: it can mean that the author was born in Australia of immigrant parents, or it can mean that they migrated here or came as refugees. However I’m not going to trace beyond first generations to, for example, Irish forebears who came to Australia in colonial times.
There is obviously potential to get this wrong, and multicultural heritage isn’t always obvious or straightforward. I welcome corrections if I’ve made mistakes, but I am deliberately confining myself to information that is already in the public domain.
NB Indigenous authors are indexed on the ANZ LitLovers Indigenous Reading List and you can also find them by searching the Category List in the RHS menu under REVIEWS.
Algeria
Dominique Wilson:
Anglo-Bangladeshi
Lesley Jørgensen:
Armenia
Ashley Kalagian Blunt
Katerina Cosgrove
Marcella Polain (Armenian/Irish)
- The Edge of the World (2007)(on my TBR)
- Driving Into the Sun (2019)
Austria
John Tesarch
Cambodia
Sovannora Ieng and Greg Hill
- Surviving Year Zero (2014)
Caribbean
Maxine Beneba Clarke
- Growing Up African in Australia (2019) (Editor)
Sienna Brown (Jamaica/Canada)
China
Vivian Bi
Andrew Kwong
Ouyang Yu:
Wong Shee Ping
- The Poison of Polygamy (first published as a serial in 1909-1910 in the Chinese Times, Melbourne)
Croatia/Germany
Marija Peričić
Sofija Stevanovic
Cuba
Olga Lorenzo:
Egypt
Waleed Aly
Maher Abou Elsaoud:
Mohammed Massoud Morsi
- The Palace of Angels (2019)
Finland
Emily Brugman
- The Islands (2022)
France/England
Catherine de Saint Phalle
Germany
Kenneth Arkwright (Jewish)
Evelyn Juers:
Manfred Jurgensen:
T.G.H. Strehlow
Glenice Whitting
Greece
George Alexander
- Mortal Divide (1997, reissued 2022)
Michalia Arathimos (Greek-Kiwi)
- Aukati (2017)
Katerina Cosgrove
- Bone Ash Sky (2012)
Vrasidas Karalis
Antigone Kefala, of Greek-Romanian heritage
- Late Journals (2022)
Maria Papas
Christos Tsiolkas
Hongkong:
Brian Castro (of Portuguese, Chinese and English parentage):
- Drift, (1994)
- The Bath Fugues (2009)
- Street to Street (2012)
- Blindness and Rage, a Phantasmagoria (2017)
Melanie Cheng
- Room for a Stranger (2019)
Hungary
Inez Baranay:
- The Edge of Bali, (1992)
Sved, Miriam
Iceland
Kári Gíslason
India
Suneeta Peres Da Costa
Aashish Kaul:
Bem Le Hunte
Rashida Murphy
Christopher Raja:
Subhash Jaireth:
- After Love (2012)
- Spinoza’s Overcoat, Travels with Writers and Poets (2020)
- Incantations, by Subhash Jaireth (2016)
- Aflame (2021)
Indonesia
Dewi Anggraeni
- My Pain, My Country (2017)
Lily Yulianti Farid
- Family Room (2010)
Intan Paramaditha
- Apple and Knife (2018), on my TBR
- The Wandering (2017)
Mirandi Riwoe (Chinese Indonesian)
- The Fish Girl (2017)
- Stone Sky Gold Mountain (2020)
Ireland
- Marcella Polain (see Armenia)
Iran
Shokoofeh Azar
Ali Alizadeh
Iraq
Munjed Al Muderis, with Patrick Weaver
- Walking Free (2014)
Italy
Venero Armanno:
Rosa Cappiello
- Oh, Lucky Country! (1984)
Enza Gandolfo
Moreno Giovannoni
Raffaela Torresan
Korea
Silvia Kwon
Lebanon
Michael Mohammed Ahmad:
David Malouf:
- Harland’s Half Acre (1984)
- Antipodes (1985)
- Child’s Play (2007)
- An Imaginary Life (1978)
- Ransom (2009)
Macedonia
S.K. Karakaltsas
Malaysia
Micheline Lee:
Shelley Parker-Chan (Chinese-Malaysian)
New Zealand (this one is tricky, this page is for writers who’ve made Australia their home. Let me know if I’ve got any of these Kiwis wrong).
Meg Mundell
- Black Glass(2011)
- The Trespassers (2019)
- We are Here, Stories of Home, Place and Belonging (2019) editor
Ian Reid
- The End of Longing (2011)
- The Mind’s Own Place(2015)
Netherlands
Paul Gardner
Michael Sala
Pakistan
Azhar Abidi
The Philippines
Merlinda Bobis:
Poland (many of these are by Holocaust survivors or their descendants)
Herz Bergner
Anna Rosner Blay
Pinchas Goldhar
Antoni Jach
- Napoleon’s Double (2007)
- Travelling Companions (2021)
Leah Kaminsky:
Serge Liberman
Olga Lorenzo
Zwi Levin
Morris Lurie
Joe Reich
Alex Skovron:
Sue Smethurst
Sara Rena Vidal
Romania
Madeleine St John: (St John’s mother was Romanian, but she reinvented herself as pseudo-French once in Australia).
Antigone Kefala, of Greek-Romanian heritage
- Late Journals (2022)
Russia
Alla Wolf-Tasker
Ruthenia
Bram Presser (who explains his grandfather’s birthplace like this: There once stood a village that had been in Poland, then Hungary, then Subcarpathian Ruthenia, then Czechoslovakia, then Slovakia, then Hungary again, then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, then the Ukraine and now cannot be found on any map.
Serbia
A S Patric:
- Black Rock White City (2015)
- Las Vegans for Vegans (2012)
- Atlantic Black (2017)
- The Butcherbird Stories (2018)
Sofija Stefanovich
Filip Vukašin
Singapore
Simone Lazaroo:
S.L. Lim
South Africa
Shelley Davidow
Sisonke Msimang
Ceridwen Dovey
Hayley Katzen
South Sudan
Deng Thiak Adut, with Ben McElvey
Majok Tulba:
Yuot A Alaak
Sri Lanka
Michelle de Kretser:
Para Paheer, with Alison Corke
Rajith Savanadasa:
Channa Wickremesekera:
Swaziland
Malla Nunn:
- A Beautiful Place to Die (2008)
- Blessed are the Dead (2012)
- Present Darkness (2013)
- Sugar Town Queens
Anglo Swedish
Kristina Olssen
Sweden
Anna Solding:
Tanzania
Eugen Bacon
Turkey
Alice Melike Ulgezer:
Ukraine
John Hughes
United Kingdom
Martin Boyd (born in Switzerland, educated in Australia, but identified as Anglo-Australian and spent most of his line in England)
Paul Burnam
- The Grease Monkey’s Tale (2010)
Ada Cambridge (England):
- Thirty Years in Australia, (1903)
Ros Collins (Jewish)
Ernest Favenc
- Tales of the Austral Tropics (1893)
Anna Fienberg
Rodney Hall (England)
Elizabeth Jolley (England):
- Miss Peabody’s Inheritance (1983)
- For other titles, see the Elizabeth Jolley page in the top menu.
Robert Lukins (Wales)
Alex Miller (England):
- Coal Creek (2013);
- Autumn Laing (2011)
- Lovesong (2009)
- Prochownik’s Dream (2005);
- Landscape of Farewell (2007)
- The Passage of Love (2018)
- Max (2020)
Drusilla Modjeska:
- The Mountain (2012),
- Second Half First (2015)
Catherine Helen Spence (Scotland)
Patrick White (England):
- Riders in the Chariot (1961)
- Happy Valley;
- The Eye of the Storm (1973)
- The Twyborn Affair (1979)
- Voss (1957)
- The Solid Mandala (1966)
- The Aunt’s Story (1948)
- A Fringe Of Leaves (1976)
- The Tree of Man (1955)
- The Burnt Ones (1964)
USA
Linda Jaivin:
Joyce Kornblatt
Eleanor Limprecht (born and raised in the US, Germany and Pakistan but now lives in Sydney, Australia)
USSR (Ukraine)
Maria Tumarkin
Vietnam
Hoa Pham:
Nam Le:
Chi Vu:
Zimbabwe
Elizabeth Kuiper
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