Interviews

Alex Skovron is the author of seven poetry collections, a prose novella, The Poet (2005), and a book of short stories, The Man who Took to His Bed (2017). His volume of new and selected poems, Towards the Equator (2014), was shortlisted in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. His work has been translated into a number of languages, and he has co-authored book-length translations of two Czech poets: Jiří Orten and Vladimír Holan. His new collection, Letters from the Periphery, is now available. He was born in Poland, lived briefly in Israel, and arrived in Australia aged nine. He lives in Melbourne.

Claire G. Coleman is a Wirlomin Noongar woman whose ancestral country is on the south coast of Western Australia. Her first novel Terra Nullius (Hachette, 2017) won a black&write! Fellowship and a Norma K. Hemming Award and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the Aurealis Science Fiction Award. She writes poetry, short fiction, and essays, and has been published widely. Her latest book is Lies, Damned Lies (Ultimo Press, 2021).

Jennifer Mills is the author of the novels The Airways (Picador, 2021), Dyschronia (Picador, 2018), Gone (UQP, 2011), and The Diamond Anchor (UQP, 2009) and a collection of short stories, The Rest Is Weight (UQP, 2012).

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.

Laura Elizabeth Woollett is the author of The Love of a Bad Man (Scribe, 2016) and Beautiful Revolutionary (Scribe, 2018). She was the City of Melbourne’s 2020 Boyd Garret writer-in-residence and is a 2020–22 Marten Bequest Scholar for Prose. The Newcomer (Scribe, 2021) is her latest novel.

John Kinsella is the author of over forty books. His most recent publications include the novel Lucida Intervalla (UWA Publishing 2018), Open Door (UWA Publishing, 2018), and Supervivid Depastoralism (Vagabond, 2021). His poetry collections have won a variety of awards, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry and the Christopher Brennan Award for Poetry. His volumes of stories include Crow’s Breath (Transit Lounge, 2015), Anarchy in the Avon Valley (Liverpool University Press, 2010) and Polysituatedness (Manchester University Press, 2017). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University. With Tracy Ryan he is the co-editor of The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry (2017). He lives with his family in the Western Australian wheatbelt.

Larissa Behrendt is the author of three novels: Home, which won the 2002 David Unaipon Award and the regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book; Legacy, which won the 2010 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing; and After Story (2021). She has published numerous books on Indigenous legal issues; her most recent non-fiction book is Finding Eliza: Power and colonial storytelling. She was awarded the 2009 NAIDOC Person of the Year award and 2011 NSW Australian of the Year. She is Distinguished Professor at the Jumbunna Institute at the University of Technology Sydney.

Stan Grant is the ABC’s international affairs analyst and Vice-Chancellor’s chair of Australian-Indigenous Belonging at Charles Sturt University. He won the 2015 Walkley Award for his coverage of Indigenous affairs and is the author of On Thomas Keneally, The Australian Dream, Australia Day, The Tears of Strangers, and Talking to My Country.