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Eli McLean

Eli McLean

Eli McLean is Production Editor at Meanjin. He has also worked for Melbourne University Publishing and Australian Book Review. He lives and works on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin nation.

Eli McLean reviews ‘Nock Loose’ by Patrick Marlborough

July 2025, no. 477 26 June 2025
Australia is a weird place. A backwater colonial outpost settled by racist squatters and their indentured convict servants, it is a country forever defined by its isolation, in every sense, from the rest of the world. Faster than Barron Field could say ‘kangaroo’, an Empire crashed onto the shores of the First Peoples who had been cultivating a narrative tradition since time immemorial, and se ... (read more)

Eli McLean reviews ‘Appreciation’ by Liam Pieper

May 2024, no. 464 22 April 2024
‘There are only so many ways to make a story work.’ So begins Liam Pieper’s new novel, Appreciation, a hyper-contemporary chronicle of one artist’s vain attempt to redeem his reputation in the eyes of a disappointed public. Drug-addled, egomaniacal, and hopeless, Oli Darling – an enfant terrible of Australian art – is in desperate need of rehabilitation. And the advice of his equally d ... (read more)