Diversity


diversity-bingo

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)

Austria

John Tesarch

Cambodia

Sovannora Ieng and Greg Hill

Caribbean

Maxine Beneba Clarke

Sienna Brown (Jamaica/Canada)

China

Vivian Bi

Andrew Kwong

Ouyang Yu:

Wong Shee Ping

Croatia/Germany

Marija Peričić

Sofija Stevanovic

Cuba

Olga Lorenzo:

Egypt

Waleed Aly

Maher Abou Elsaoud:

Mohammed Massoud Morsi

Finland

Emily Brugman

France/England

Catherine de Saint Phalle

Germany

Kenneth Arkwright (Jewish)

Evelyn Juers:

Manfred Jurgensen:

T.G.H. Strehlow

Glenice Whitting

Greece

George Alexander

Michalia Arathimos (Greek-Kiwi)

Katerina Cosgrove

Vrasidas Karalis

Antigone Kefala, of Greek-Romanian heritage

Maria Papas

Christos Tsiolkas

Hongkong:

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

Melanie Cheng

Hungary

Inez Baranay:

Sved, Miriam

Iceland

Kári Gíslason

India

Suneeta Peres Da Costa

Aashish Kaul:

Bem Le Hunte

Rashida Murphy

Christopher Raja:

Subhash Jaireth:

Indonesia

Dewi Anggraeni

Lily Yulianti Farid

Intan Paramaditha

  • Apple and Knife (2018), on my TBR
  • The Wandering (2017)

Mirandi Riwoe (Chinese Indonesian)

Ireland

  • Marcella Polain (see Armenia)

Iran

Shokoofeh Azar

Ali Alizadeh

Iraq

Munjed Al Muderis, with Patrick Weaver

Italy

Venero Armanno:

Rosa Cappiello

Enza Gandolfo

Moreno Giovannoni

Raffaela Torresan

Korea

Silvia Kwon

Lebanon

Michael Mohammed Ahmad:

David Malouf:

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

Ian Reid

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

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

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:

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:

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

Ada Cambridge (England):

Ros Collins (Jewish)

Ernest Favenc

Anna Fienberg

Rodney Hall (England)

Elizabeth Jolley (England):

Robert Lukins (Wales)

Alex Miller (England):

Drusilla Modjeska:

Catherine Helen Spence (Scotland)

Patrick White (England):

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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