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Claire Aman

Claire Aman

Claire Aman grew up in Melbourne and settled in Grafton, New South Wales as a young woman, finding work as a town planner. She started writing in her forties. Now sixty, she is buoyed by the imaginative, expressive, and tempering properties of writing. Text published her short story collection Bird Country in 2017. Her stories have been published in Australian journals and anthologies and have won the E.J. Brady, Wet Ink and Hal Porter prizes. Her early writing life was nurtured by Varuna.

Jolley Prize 2018 (Shortlisted): 'Vasco' by Claire Aman

August 2018, no. 403 25 July 2018
Before I learnt the language of map-making, the word cadastre sounded like a timbre or a cadence. It was a momentous drum, a hollow ratatat. Bone, fire, dirt, stone. Like a shout, a ring, a knock, a blow. But when I learned maps, I discovered cadastre meant the legal boundary. There was no sound to it at all, only lines. The lines are normally black, but I have a range of colours and hatchings to ... (read more)