Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Typhoon Kingdom by Matthew Hooton

by
June–July 2019, no. 412

Typhoon Kingdom by Matthew Hooton

UWA Publishing, $29.99 pb, 282 pp, 9781760800307

Typhoon Kingdom by Matthew Hooton

by
June–July 2019, no. 412

In the May 2019 issue of Quadrant, its literary editor, Barry Spurr, inveighed against the ‘inane expansion of creative writing courses’. Professor Spurr’s scholarly accomplishments in the study of poetry and Australian fiction do not include creative writing. (His resignation from the University of Sydney was accepted in December 2014.) While many Australian authors have spectacularly succeeded without degrees in creative writing, such courses have certainly helped others – including Nam Le, Ceridwen Dovey, and Matthew Hooton – to write prize-winning fiction. Before studying creative writing in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia, where he now teaches in the course at Adelaide University, Hooton worked for four years as an editor and teacher in South Korea. Typhoon Kingdom is his second novel about Korea, following Deloume Road, which won the Guardian’s ‘Not the Booker Prize’ in 2010.

The US forces who arrived in Korea in 1945 and fought there in 1951–53 called it ‘the hermit kingdom’, and the label stuck. God created war, Mark Twain proposed, so that Americans would learn geography. History too, perhaps. But Korea was never hermetically sealed. Centuries earlier, Koreans returned from China with foreign knowledge; the Manchu brought more outside influences; Scots, Australians, and Americans were there from the late nineteenth century as missionaries; and Japanese invaded and colonised the peninsula.

Alison Broinowski reviews 'Typhoon Kingdom' by Matthew Hooton

Typhoon Kingdom

by Matthew Hooton

UWA Publishing, $29.99 pb, 282 pp, 9781760800307

From the New Issue

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.