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An interview with Sheila Fitzpatrick

by
September 2021, no. 435

An interview with Sheila Fitzpatrick

by
September 2021, no. 435
Sheila Fitzpatrick (photograph via Black Inc.)
Sheila Fitzpatrick (photograph via Black Inc.)

Sheila Fitzpatrick’s most recent books include On Stalin’s Team: The years of living dangerously in Soviet politics (2015) and White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War history of migration to Australia (2020). The Shortest History of the Soviet Union will be published early in 2022. She is a professor at Australian Catholic University.


 

When did you first write for ABR?

In September 2013, six months after returning to Australia after forty-eight years away, mainly in the United States, I wrote a piece for ABR on being a returning expatriate. Actually, this wasn’t my first piece for the journal (that was a review of a biography of Ryszard Kapuściński seven months earlier), but it was a piece that had particular importance for me. Rereading it recently, I was struck both by the conversational tone, as if I already thought ABR readers were my friends, and by the underlying seriousness of the effort to explain myself. I didn’t write like that for American publications.

 

What makes a fine critic?

Probably style and personality, in addition to knowledge. The London Review of Books, the other journal I regularly write for, gives you more or less unlimited space but wants not only a critique of the book under review but also an interesting, perhaps personally inflected, essay on the topic. ‘Can’t you take it somewhere?’ they asked me once when I said the book they had offered me was too slight. But that approach only works if you have 3,000 words to play with.

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