Tag: Fiona McFarlane

Rediscovering Again: Christina Stead/Elizabeth Harrower Symposium

SoutherlyNews

One of our excellent editors, Dr Elizabeth McMahon, is organising a two-day symposium on Christina Stead and Elizabeth Harrower. It runs at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, at the beginning of next month. It includes two evenings of writers’ panels – Gail Jones, David Malouf, and Delia Falconer talking on Christina Stead, and Fiona McFarlane, Ivor Indyk, and Michelle de Kretser talking on Elizabeth Harrower. If those combinations weren’t exciting enough, the panels are entirely free. All the information is here and here, as well as below. We’d love to see you there. When: 3 Dec 2015, 9am…

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The Simple Act of Reading

SoutherlyBlog

by Fiona McFarlane It’s been a pleasure to blog for Southerly, and now I’m going to end my month with a shameless plug. On Redfern Street in Redfern, Sydney, there’s an extraordinary place called the Sydney Story Factory. I was invited to give a reading there one night. I was given the address and I knew to look out for ‘Sydney Story Factory’, but when I arrived in Redfern I couldn’t find it; I found, instead, a place calling itself the Martian Embassy. If the residents of Mars were to establish a diplomatic outpost on Earth it might look something…

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The Polish Elephant

SoutherlyBlog

by Fiona McFarlane In my last post, about Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa, I spoke a little about fables – Stevenson’s interest in them and his particular admiration for a translation of international fables into Samoan. I find this timely for a few reasons, the first of which is that I’m currently reading the very short fable-like stories of Polish writer Sławomir Mrożek, released by Penguin Central European Classics in a collection called The Elephant.[1] The second reason is that at the end of August I attended the third China Australia Literary Forum here in Sydney – a conference in…

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Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa

SoutherlyBlog

by Fiona McFarlane It’s family lore that, on my paternal grandmother’s side, we had an ancestor who lived in Samoa at the same time as Robert Louis Stevenson. The name of this ancestor – my great, great, great grandfather – was George Pratt. Or, more correctly, the Reverend George Pratt, who was born in Portsea, England, trained with the London Missionary Society and, with his wife Mary, set out for Samoa in 1838, calling at Hobart, Sydney and Tahiti along the way. Pratt lived at a mission station in Matautu on Savai’i Island. Mary died five years after their arrival…

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Letters From Tove

SoutherlyBlog

by Fiona McFarlane There’s been a bit of heated discussion, recently, about the public role of a writer, some of it in response to an essay in the Atlantic: Meghan Tifft’s ‘An Introverted Writer’s Lament.’[1] Tifft’s piece questions the pressure writers feel to participate in writing and reading communities in order to promote their work – public readings! Festivals! Q&As! Book tours! Conferences! Social media! Interviews! And all the other, less easily classifiable commitments that arise from the very good fortune of having been published. Tifft’s essay hovers somewhere between confession and complaint, and I admire her honesty. She approaches…

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Christina Stead in America

SoutherlyBlog

by Fiona McFarlane Christina Stead was born in Rockdale, Sydney, in 1902. Rockdale is a few stations along the Illawarra line from Hurstville, the railway station closest to my parents’ house, and I traveled through it every day as I went to and from high school. Stead sailed from Sydney to England in 1928, moved to the USA in 1937, then back to England, back to America, back to England (where her husband died), and finally, after an absence of forty-one years, returned to Sydney, where she lived in a flat above her brother’s house in Hurstville. She died in…

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September monthly blogger – Fiona McFarlane!

SoutherlyBlog, News

A huge thanks to Justin Clemens for his excellent posts. This month our blogger is Fiona McFarlane. Her bio is below. Fiona McFarlane was born in Sydney. Her first novel, The Night Guest, was published in 2013 and translated into fifteen languages. It was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Stella Prize, an LA Times Book Award, the Guardian First Book Award and a Prime Minister’s Literary Award, and it won a NSW Premier’s Prize, the Voss Prize and the Barbara Jefferis Award. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, Southerly, Best Australian Stories and Zoetrope: All-Story. Her next book,…

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