ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

This introduction on this page was updated 31/7/20

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…

… and also acknowledging that 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.

The list below was last updated 28/5/20.

Algeria

Dominique Wilson:

• The Yellow Papers, and
• That Devil’s Madness

Anglo-Bangladeshi

Lesley Jørgensen:

• Cat and Fiddle

Armenia

Ashley Kalagian Blunt

• My Name is Revenge, and a reflective essay

Marcella Polain (Armenian/Irish)

• The Edge of the World (on my TBR)
• Driving Into the Sun

Austria

John Tesarch

• The Philanthropist
• Dinner with the Dissidents

Caribbean

Maxine Beneba Clarke

Growing Up African in Australia (Editor)

China

Ouyang Yu:

• Loose,
• The English Class
• Billy Sing

Vivian Bi

• Bright Swallow, Making Choices in Mao’s China, a memoir

Croatia/Germany

Marija Peričić

• The Lost Pages

Sofija Stevanovic

• Miss Ex-Yugoslavia

Cuba

Olga Lorenzo:

• The Light on the Water

Egypt

Maher Abou Elsaoud:

• Cairo Paris Melbourne

Mohammed Massoud Morsi

• The Palace of Angels (2019)

Germany

Kenneth Arkwright (Jewish)

• Beyond Survival

Evelyn Juers:

• The Recluse,

Manfred Jurgensen:

• The Other Wife

T.G.H. Strehlow

• Journey to Horseshoe Bend

Glenice Whitting

• Pickle to Pie

Greece

Christos Tsiolkas

• The Slap

Michalia Arathimos (Greek-Kiwi)

• Aukati (2017)

Vrasidas Karalis

• The Glebe Point Blues

Hongkong:

Brian Castro (of Portuguese, Chinese and English parentage):

• Drift,
• The Bath Fugues
• Street to Street
• Blindness and Rage, a Phantasmagoria

Melanie Cheng

• Room for a Stranger (2019)

Hungary

Inez Baranay:

• The Edge of Bali,

Sved, Miriam

• A Universe of Sufficient Size

India

Suneeta Peres Da Costa

• Saudade

Aashish Kaul:

• The Queen’s Play

Bem Le Hunte

• Elephants with Headlights

Rashida Murphy

• The Historian’s Daughter

Christopher Raja:

• The Burning Elephant

Subhash Jaireth:

• After Love
• Spinoza’s Overcoat, Travels with Writers and Poets

Indonesia

Dewi Anggraeni

• My Pain, My Country (2017)

Ireland

• Marcella Polain (see Armenia)

Iran

Shokoofeh Azar

• The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree (2017)

Ali Alizadeh

• The Last Days of Jeanne d’Arc (2017)

Italy

Venero Armanno:

• Black Mountain
• Burning Down

Rosa Cappiello

• Oh, Lucky Country!

Enza Gandolfo

• Swimming
• The Bridge

Moreno Giovannoni

• The Fireflies of Autumn

Raffaela Torresan

• Poetry and Ideas, text and images

Korea

Silvia Kwon

• The Return

Lebanon

Michael Mohammed Ahmad:

• The Tribe

David Malouf:

• Harland’s Half Acre;
• Antipodes;
• Child’s Play;
• An Imaginary Life
• Ransom

Macedonia

S.K. Karakaltsas

• A  Perfect Stone

Malaysia

Micheline Lee:

• The Healing Party

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 

Ian Reid

• The End of Longing (2011)
• The Mind’s Own Place(2015)

Netherlands

Paul Gardner

• The Unsung Family Hero 

Pakistan

Azhar Abidi

• Passarola Rising

The Philippines

Merlinda Bobis:

• Locust Girl
• Fish-hair Woman

Poland (many of these are by Holocaust survivors or their descendants)

Herz Bergner

• Between Sky and Sea

Anna Rosner Blay

• Sister Sister

Pinchas Goldhar

• The Collected Stories of Pinchas Goldhar

Antoni Jach

• Napoleon’s Double

Leah Kaminsky:

• The Waiting Room

Serge Liberman

•  The Storyteller: Selected Stories

Olga Lorenzo

• The Light on the Water

Zwi Levin

• A Sack Full of Memories

Morris Lurie

• Rappaport
• Hergesheimer in the Present Tense

Alex Skovron:

• The Poet

Sara Rena Vidal

• Bella and Chaim

Romania

Madeleine St John: (St John’s mother was Romanian, but she reinvented herself as pseudo-French once in Australia).

• The Women in Black
• A Stairway to Paradise;
• The Essence of the Thing

Russia

Alla Wolf-Tasker

• Three Decades On, Lake House and Daylesford

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.

• A Book of Dirt

Serbia

A S Patric:

• Black Rock White City;
• Las Vegans for Vegans
• Atlantic Black
• The Butcherbird Stories

Sofija Stefanovich

• Miss Ex-Yugoslavia

Singapore

Simone Lazaroo:

• Lost River, Four Albums;
• The Travel Writer
• Sustenance

S.L. Lim

• Real Differences
• Revenge, Murder in Three Parts

South Africa

Shelley Davidow

• Shadow Sisters

Sisonke Msimang

• Always Another Country
• The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela

Ceridwen Dovey

• Blood Kin (2007)
• The Garden of the Fugitives

Hayley Katzen

• UntetheredUntethered

South Sudan

Majok Tulba:

• Beneath the Darkening Sky

Alaak, Yuot A

• Father of the Lost Boys

Sri Lanka

Michelle de Kretser:

• Questions of Travel
• Springtime;
• The Lost Dog
• The Life to Come

Rajith Savanadasa:

• Ruins

Channa Wickremesekera:

• Asylum

Swaziland

Malla Nunn:

• A Beautiful Place to Die

Anglo Swedish

Kristina Olssen

• The China Garden
• Shell

Sweden

Anna Solding:

• The Hum of Concrete

Turkey

Alice Melike Ulgezer:

• The Memory of Salt

United Kingdom

Martin Boyd (born in Switzerland, educated in Australia, but identified as Anglo-Australian and spent most of his line in England)

• When Blackbirds Sing

Ada Cambridge (England):

• Thirty Years in Australia, (1903)

Ros Collins (Jewish)

• Solly’s Girl (2015)
• Rosa, Memories with Licence 2019

Ernest Favenc

• Tales of the Austral Tropics (1893)

Anna Fienberg

• Escape

Rodney Hall (England)

• Popeye Never Told You
• The Second Bridegroom

Elizabeth Jolley (England):

• Miss Peabody’s Inheritance

Robert Lukins (Wales)

• The Everlasting Sunday

Alex Miller (England):

• Coal Creek;
• Autumn Laing
• Lovesong:
• Prochownik’s Dream;
• Landscape of Farewell

Drusilla Modjeska:

• The Mountain,
• Second Half First

Catherine Helen Spence (Scotland)

• Mr Hogarth’s Will
• Ever Yours, C H Spence

Patrick White (England):

• Riders in the Chariot;
• Happy Valley;
• The Eye of the Storm
• The Twyborn Affair
• Voss
• The Solid Mandala

USA

Linda Jaivin:

• The Empress Lover

Eleanor Limprecht (born and raised in the US, Germany and Pakistan but now lives in Sydney, Australia)

• Long Bay
• The Passengers

USSR (Ukraine)

Maria Tumarkin

• Traumascapes

Vietnam

Hoa Pham:

• The Wave
• The Lady of the Realm
• The Other Shore

Nam Le:

• The Boat

Chi Vu:

• Anguli Ma: A Gothic Tale

Zimbabwe

Elizabeth Kuiper

• Little Stones