Seven Writers to Read After Helen Garner, recommended by Leah De Forest
It’s a funny thing, teaching writing in a country I didn’t grow up in: I’ve shucked off some identity markers (few in Boston can place the mid-sized-town-outside-of-Melbourne in my accent, for example), and I’m keenly aware of the culture that raised me. Much of what I read as a child was British: The Magic Faraway Tree and The Tale of Peter Rabbit (the foliage in those illustrations was so green). At university I read some Australian classics and many more British and American books. I still own a cinder-brick sized copy of The American Tradition in Literature, though until relatively recently I’d managed to avoid Huck Finn and The Great Gatsby. Don’t judge.
You all missed out on some gems, though. In high school, I loved Ruth Park’s Playing Beatie Bow, about a Sydney teen who travels back in time; and at university and through adulthood, I read the work of writers like Elizabeth Jolley, Hazel Rowley, Christina Stead, and Helen Garner (now well known outside of Australia).
These voices helped me develop my own. Now, to mark the publication of my debut novel, Any Kind of Known Tomorrow, I have the great good fortune to be telling you about seven contemporary Australian writers, women whose work is part of the tradition that raised me. Each in their way—in the language, the attitude of the characters, the shape of the landscape—these books feel like home.
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