
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 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:
Anglo-Bangladeshi
Lesley Jørgensen:
Armenia
Ashley Kalagian Blunt
Marcella Polain (Armenian/Irish)
- The Edge of the World (on my TBR)
- Driving Into the Sun
Austria
John Tesarch
Caribbean
Maxine Beneba Clarke
- Growing Up African in Australia (Editor)
Sienna Brown (Jamaica/Canada)
China
Ouyang Yu:
Vivian Bi
Croatia/Germany
Marija Peričić
Sofija Stevanovic
Cuba
Olga Lorenzo:
Egypt
Maher Abou Elsaoud:
Mohammed Massoud Morsi
- The Palace of Angels (2019)
France/England
Catherine de Saint Phalle
Germany
Kenneth Arkwright (Jewish)
Evelyn Juers:
Manfred Jurgensen:
T.G.H. Strehlow
Glenice Whitting
Greece
Christos Tsiolkas
Michalia Arathimos (Greek-Kiwi)
- Aukati (2017)
Vrasidas Karalis
Hongkong:
Brian Castro (of Portuguese, Chinese and English parentage):
Melanie Cheng
- Room for a Stranger (2019)
Hungary
Inez Baranay:
Sved, Miriam
India
Suneeta Peres Da Costa
Aashish Kaul:
Bem Le Hunte
Rashida Murphy
Christopher Raja:
Subhash Jaireth:
Indonesia
Dewi Anggraeni
- My Pain, My Country (2017)
Ireland
- Marcella Polain (see Armenia)
Iran
Shokoofeh Azar
Ali Alizadeh
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:
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
- The End of Longing (2011)
- The Mind’s Own Place(2015)
Netherlands
Paul Gardner
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
Alex Skovron:
Sara Rena Vidal
Romania
Madeleine St John: (St John’s mother was Romanian, but she reinvented herself as pseudo-French once in Australia).
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
Singapore
Simone Lazaroo:
S.L. Lim
South Africa
Shelley Davidow
Sisonke Msimang
Ceridwen Dovey
Hayley Katzen
South Sudan
Majok Tulba:
Alaak, Yuot A
Sri Lanka
Michelle de Kretser:
Rajith Savanadasa:
Channa Wickremesekera:
Swaziland
Malla Nunn:
Anglo Swedish
Kristina Olssen
Sweden
Anna Solding:
Turkey
Alice Melike Ulgezer:
United Kingdom
Martin Boyd (born in Switzerland, educated in Australia, but identified as Anglo-Australian and spent most of his line in England)
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):
Robert Lukins (Wales)
Alex Miller (England):
Drusilla Modjeska:
Catherine Helen Spence (Scotland)
Patrick White (England):
USA
Linda Jaivin:
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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