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Dead Like You is the sixth book in the Roy Grace series. Detective Superintendent Grace is a professional whom a lot of readers can probably relate to: he’s decent and dedicated. But he’s suffered tragedy in his life – his wife’s disappearance – and also uses some quite unusual methods. Where did the idea for Roy Grace come from?

Roy Grace was inspired by a real life police officer, Dave Gaylor. The first time I met him was 15 years ago, when he was a Detective Inspector in Brighton. I went into this office and the floor was covered in piles of blue and green crates crammed with manila folders. I asked him if he was moving and he replied, deadpan, “No, these are my dead friends.” I thought, great, I’ve just met the only weirdo in Sussex CID! He then went on to explain that he just been put in charge of reopening unsolved cases – what we now call ‘cold cases’for Sussex Police. He said that each crate contained the principal case files of an unsolved homicide. Then he said something that had a big impact on me: “I am the last chance the victims have of justice, and the last chance the families have for closure.” I thought these were incredibly human words, and when my publishers asked me some years ago if I would like to create a new detective character, I immediately remembered this.

The great thing is that Dave Gaylor, who rose to the rank of Detective Chief Superintendent, knows he is the career model (but not physical model) for Roy Grace and loves it! He and I have become very close friends over the years. He reads each book as I go along, normally in 150 page chunks and we talk through all aspects of the police activity in the story and who in the force it would benefit me to talk to, and we travel overseas to police conferences together and meet other police contacts around the world – most recently to New York, and to the International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague.

I wanted to make Roy Grace different to other fictional detectives. I thought really hard about what it is that detectives actually do, and I realised that first and foremost what they do is to solve puzzles! Every major crime, whether a murder, a rape, a big robbery or a fraud, is a puzzle, to be solved in steady, painstaking steps. I thought it would be intriguing to create a detective who had a personal puzzle of his own that he could not solve, and I came up with the idea that Roy Grace has a missing wife. Almost nine years before we meet him, we learn that he came home on his 30th birthday to find his wife, Sandy, whom he loved and adored, had vanished. And he has not had any sighting of her or word from her since.

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Anna Krien’s book, Into the Woods: The Battle for Tasmania’s Forests has just been released.  Her work has appeared in The Monthly, Going Down Swinging, The Age, Colors, The Best Australian Essays, Frankie, The Best Australian Stories, Griffith Review, Voiceworks and Dazed & Confused. I spoke to Anna about writing the battle over Tasmania’s forest in Into the Woods.

Anna, the focus of your book Into the Woods is the battle over Tasmania’s forests. What first drew you to this divisive issue?

Actually it was this footage that first drew me to Tasmania’s forest issues. A warning – it makes for some ugly viewing.

The video (filmed by a forest activist hiding in a tree) shows Tasmanian logging contractors smashing a gutted car that is blocking a forest access road in the Florentine valley with sledgehammers. Two young activists are inside the car. The loggers are yelling and grabbing them through the broken glass, trying to pull them out of the car.

An activist friend of mine working on the island sent me the footage and I booked a ticket within an hour of watching the video. I intended on staying only five days – I was still there a month later.

In such a longstanding and multidimensional dispute, there are sure to be multiple viewpoints. What did you want to find out about the forestry war, and what did you unearth?

Yes – there are multiple viewpoints. At times it seems like everyone has an opinion on the island’s forests. And if we’re going to refer to it as a forestry ‘war’, then like all wars, a significant proportion of the fight is propaganda and spin. So in short – I ‘unearthed’ a lot of bullshit. I found that I had to create a few ‘touchstones’ to return to when people overwhelmed me with information and obscure terminology. One of these touchstones was simply ‘woodchips’. I had to remind myself that this was the main product that had divided families and towns; the entire island was torn to its core over a low value, high volume product. The way people spoke, the drama as they described impending economic doomsdays and starving families – it was easy to forget that the problem was woodchips, albeit cargo ships laden with the stuff.

You spent some time at the Camp Florentine blockade, which is 90 minutes west of Hobart. How long did you spend there, and what did you learn?

I learned that it doesn’t matter what kind of camp you’re at – be it school camp or a long-running forest blockade – the worst job is always the same. Digging the shit pit. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times I go camping, I always return to the porcelain dream – the bathroom – with a renewed sense of awe at the genius of plumbing. This was doubly so when I learned my second blockade lesson – that eating food rescued from the dumpster is bound to give an amateur like myself gastro. Now that was a fun few days.

But enough with the poo, what else did I learn out there?

I learned that the Sassafras tree is a kind of bush milk bar – the leaves are sweet to chew and considered a ‘pick me up’ by the Tasmanian Aborigines. I learned that Australia has its own special type of Robin – the Pink Robin bird. A male with a hot pink chest visited the camp daily to flirt with some plain brown female robins.

I also learned that trees will fall down if you cut everything around them – that they lean on one another and that a forest is like a house, buffeting its inhabitants from the wind. One of the last times I visited the blockade, it had just been busted by police, many of the activists had been arrested and about 40 hectares had been cleared. The trees that had been left on the edges of the coupes were just falling over. They weren’t able to stay standing on their own.

In an article you wrote for The Big Issue in April, you wondered if Tasmania’s forests would be missed by those who had never seen them. How did seeing these famed forests affect you?

It’s funny – but I’m not really a ‘forest’ person. People wax lyrical about Tasmania’s Tolkienesque trees and Middle Earth forests while I am far more likely to be moved by rugged plains, beaches, hot bushy scrub and vast red deserts.

But having said that, I couldn’t help being affected by Tasmania’s forests.

Victoria, the southernmost mainland state of Australia, is my home state and it’s not hard to imagine Tasmania breaking off from the Victorian coastline all those thousands of years ago. It’s as if the spectacular southern wilderness I grew up with (such as the Sherbrooke forest in the Dandenongs Ranges, the Otways and Wilsons Promontory) flourished on the small isolated island.

At one point during my journey, I was driving along the highway after an interview with a local who had pleaded with me not to use her name and I realised just how hard it is for a local to speak out in such a small community, let alone write the story I was aiming to tell about Tasmania’s timber industry. Things like getting a job, a government grant, feeling safe and welcome, all of these things would be at risk. I had to pull over and have a little cry on the side of the road at that point – because I realised that I too, was risking my relationship with the island and even though I wasn’t dependent on the place, I had definitely fallen in love with it.

You’ve written about diverse social issues, including ‘white collar’ drug users, women’s prisons and Australia’s ‘dry’ communities. What is your approach to journalism and to story?

Bizarrely, I found the most difficult place for me to get a story was when I worked at The Age. For me, there was something about being cooped up in a newsroom that stifled my journalistic sense of smell. For example, the women’s prisons story you mention came about when I was waitressing and a group of interstate prison officers came into the restaurant for dinner. Being the highly unprofessional waitress that I am, I got involved in their conversation as the night wore on and ended up swapping contact details with them.

My approach to journalism is unfortunately the antithesis of making money. I write a story because I want to understand the issue and the motives of the key people involved. I rarely line up an editor or a publication until I’ve completed it because I’m wary of outsiders trying to shape a story before it has taken its own form. So I tend to work backwards – I follow a story, live it, talk to everyone, read everything I can get my hands on, write it and then ask for the green light from an editor. I’m a publication’s finance department’s dream and my accountant’s nightmare.

Anna will discuss Tasmania and its stories with Amanda Lohrey and Nicholas Shakespeare in Small Places, Big Ideas at 1pm on Sunday, September 5.

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It was dark. Stories and memories were shared. Images remain.

DBC Pierre warned us not to go drinking with lizards and snakes (before shedding his own skin).

Carmel Bird and her grandson shared some fun buns, surrounded by guns.

Josephine Rowe and her father were talking about birds and weren’t talking about birds.

Kalinda Ashton’s shopgirl character was perhaps misinterpreting the signs.

Tiffany Murray discovered music and father figures.

David Carruthers was thrust into a position of fear and responsibility.

And, because of a crush, Elif Batuman judged a unique contest and sat with a canoe.

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Bernard Caleo has been making – writing, drawing and publishing – comics since 1990. He collaborates on comics with friends, creates solo books and – since 1997 – has compiled, edited and published the giant Australian romance comics anthology Tango via his own imprint, Cardigan Comics. He also runs comic classes and workshops. You can visit his website at www.cardigancomics.com. Bernard shared his MWF itinerary with MWFblog.

So, okay, I’m pretty much always reading comics or making comics or talking about comics or thinking about comics (that is, when I’m not making theatre for museums), but this week is HUGE!

On Wednesday and Thursday I will be sharing MWF stages with other fine makers of comics, as part of the Schools Program.

From 12.30 to 1.15pm, Pat Grant and I will be discussing the topic of ‘Seeing the World Differently‘ in an illustrated talk.  Pat is one of the most dedicated cartoonists I know, both in the time he spends at the drawing board but also in his thinking about comics: comics theory, I guess.  It’s no surprise that he is doing postgraduate study through Macquarie University and that a long comic book (‘graphic novel’, if you’re a fan of the term) will be the outcome, with a thesis examining the process of making the book submitted alongside.  Go, Pat!

We’ll be talking about the way that the mode of drawing things in a comic – the simplifications involved – can amplify meaning. Also the way that the sequencing of pictures (we call them ‘panels’) in a comic builds a world in a different way to a single complex picture.

We’ll be talking about the difference between drawing:

And comics:


(two versions of me by me)

These are interesting questions for cartoonists but also for people who read comics: just how do these things WORK? So, a bit of comics theory for kids…

On Thursday 2 September at 11:15am, I will be discussing The Alternative Hamlet with Nicki Greenberg. Nicki’s graphic adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (2006, Allen and Unwin) was a knockout, and her version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (published this year) – as the cover says, ‘staged on the page’ – will literally knock you out if it is hurled at you. 420 pages! Massive! And she has created incredible worlds on those pages, both of the action of the play and of the inky actors who play the parts. It is the connection between these two worlds which I particularly look forward to discussing with her.

From the great speech. Words by William Shakespeare, pictures/comics adaptation by Nicki Greenberg © 2010

I’m striking out on my own with an MWF presentation called Picture This!‘ at ArtPlay from 12.30 to 1.15pm.  In this one I’ll be show-and-telling about the different forms of comics – comic strip, comic book, graphic novel. These formalities out of the way, I’m hoping that we’ll be able to make a large comic strip together, with me drawing up the front on a big piece of paper. My experience with these things is that they usually end up being about death or poo, sometimes both, so I’m looking forward to that.

Later that very night it’s off to the launch of Going Down Swinging #30. This is of interest because GDS has been incorporating comics into its lit lineup for many a year, and good on them for that, and this issue features the ‘graphic novella’ (I like the humility of that term, whereas ‘graphic novel’ seems a bit jumped-up and fancy-pants, don’t you think?), Itinerant Fighting Monk by Michael Camilleri. Now yes, Michael is a very close friend, but that does not influence me in the slightest when I say that this story/comic/illustrated fictional blasphemous autobiographical tale is the greatest statement on fatherhood and subjectivity that I have ever seen.

On the Saturday afternoon for MWF, I will be launching a long comic book by Gregory Mackay, Francis Bear, which is also being published in French this year by, well, by a French comics publisher, The Hootchie Kootchie.  Fear not however, my monolingual friends: the version I am launching is in English. And pictures. The venue is Feddish, in Federation Square, launch time is 2.30pm, with me doing a bit of a hoo-hah around 3pm. Come and pick up this book, ‘an intriguing study of an inventive drunken bear’s pathway to oblivion’. Gregory has been drawing the misadventures of Francis for many a year, and doing some fine work with comic book rhythms along the way – I can’t wait to see Francis tackle oblivion. It will no doubt be hilarious.

From there I will go to work (I’m a projectionist) on Saturday night – and, you know, relax.

What a week: comics, comics and comics – pretty darn fine.

I presented my pass to the awkward looking volunteer manning the door of the BMW Edge Theatre. He seemed puzzled that I should want to go inside to watch the next event and asked me if I was really sure if I wanted to. I told him I did. He shrugged, scanned my pass, and I walked through the door and into a wave of kid stink.

It was a year since I had been around so many children and I forgot just how much they smell. In small packs they’re fine, but en masse, they reek, offending nostrils with a sour playdough odour. I decided to move to the front of the theatre in the hope I could avoid the worst of it. I found a gap about mid-way through the first row. It’s an odd sensation sitting in on the Schools’ Program. I’m not used to being around that many people who still have hope and joy in their lives.

The teachers continued feeding their children into each row of the theatre, until they reached the first row. They seemed hesitant to let their young wards sit next to me. I was glad I had shaved my moustache off a few weeks prior to the festival, as it would only amplify the creepiness of the one adult male sitting next to a group of kids. After all, there are only ever three responses to a moustache:

Your mum – “Shave it
Your girlfriend – “Shave it
Everyone else – “You look like a sex offender

One teacher conceded and ushered some kids in next to me. A small Indian boy sat down, sizing me up with the blunt perspective of the young. He asked if I was a teacher and I told him I wasn’t. Then he asked what I did for a living. I explained that I was a writer. He sat on this thought for a moment before asking what type of books I wrote. I informed him that I haven’t written any books, only articles, columns, and comedy. Without missing a beat he said “Oh… so you’re not a real writer. Just an unemployable guy with a keyboard

My grandmother’s words falling out of the mouth of an 8-year-old.

I did the only mature thing I could think of and crossed my eyes while poking my tongue out at him. My vision uncrossed to a teacher with crossed arms and a crosser face. She sent me to the ‘sin bin’, a space up the back of the theatre where I found myself grouped with a chubby kid who habitually crammed his fingers into his ears, taking far too much joy from licking the tangy wax off his finger tips. He proffered a stubby finger tipped with his head excretion that I politely declined. He seemed pleased that I said no and contentedly sucked at his own goo. I can’t believe after all these years I’m still sitting at the back of the classroom, ever the troublemaker.

On the stage, Andy Griffiths and Ursula Dubosarsky delighted their audience by discussing the international language of comedy – farts. All the kids were terribly excited at the prospect of reading more books about bottom burps. Perhaps this was a sign. Maybe I could find work writing about bums and the noises they make. While I sat there thinking of a title for my first big book about bums, I failed to notice the event had finished and the school children had mostly left. The Indian kid walked past me grinning. “Say hi to Centrelink for me

I wanted to exact revenge against his smug remark, instead I smiled, knowing that in a few years the horror of puberty would be punishment enough.

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Argh! My computer was playing up, now I have limited time, and so much to blog!

In short:

* the universe is expanding
* some people have alien hands
* Michael Robotham and I went to the same highschool

I really enjoyed being introduced to physicist, astronomer and philosopher Marcelo Gleiser yesterday, in conversation with Cosmos editor Wilson Da Silva. Gleiser spoke about the problems with, and reasons why, scientists for years have been going after a theory that incorporates ‘oneness’, a synchronicity to the universe, a ‘theory of everything’ (one reason being of course a religious cultural hangover). Gleiser’s book Imperfect Creation partly argues the evidence for a much more chaotic universe – it’s a kind of antithesis to super string theory. He says matter, and life itself, both came about through’ asymmetries and imperfections’ – a bit of chance, in other words. But on a philosophical level, this is something to be celebrated – ‘life is an amazing phenomenon, but its extremely rare’, and life existing for such an extended period that it can complexify, this is even more of a fluke. So this means we can rethink our role in the universe – as our being here is rare and precious.

There was so much more to this session, and I apologise to Gleiser for my limited explanation. Gleiser’s discussion was animated by metaphor and gesture, so those of us in the audience without a science background could still understand everything. We got to be galaxies, for example. Which was cool. Gleiser was a beautiful speaker (with his Brazilian-American accent) and has such lovely eyes…

Moving on. It was a bit of a mistake to go from one mind-expanding session to another, I think. My lovely boyfriend and I went to see Norman Doidge and Perminder Sachdev speak with Natasha Mitchell (from ABC Radio’s All in the Mind) and it was fascinating, but our brains weren’t feeling very plastic at this stage, just a bit crammed. Doidge’s book has been extremely popular – talking about revolutionary discoveries in neuroplasticity. Sachdev’s book describes his work in neuropsychiatry and tells stories of some of the patients and cases.

Last night was the opening party of the festival - a blur of lovely faces, and so much fun.

I have an hour until my panel A Wordsmith’s Dream, which has moved from the tiny ACMI Studio into BMW Edge! A slightly intimidating thing, but a wonderful one… Can’t wait to see you there.

Whedon out the weak

I was standing in a crowd of people making mist from the chilled air with each breath taken. To stave off the cold I invaded the personal space of a giant woman in a long leather coat, nuzzling against her back as nonchalantly as I could. Her head whipped around, revealing a long neckbeard and a man’s face that shunned sunlight in favour of the glow of a computer screen.

The neckbeard told me his name was Obsidian Blackdarknightblack and introduced me to his afterlife partner Amanda. Amanda, wearing slightly less make up than her beau, asked if I was here to see Joss, placing both hands over her heart as she spoke the name Joss. I told her that I was supposed to be here to write about Joss. This time she placed her hands over her heart when I said Joss’ name. Amanda told me that she too was writing about Joss, and in fact, wrote about him in her dream journal on a daily basis. Obsidian explained they were there to sacrifice Amanda’ to Joss, so that she could bear his precious seed. I didn’t think goths could get pregnant and told them it was my theory that goths are asexual. You only ever see fat or skinny goths, so obviously when a skinny goth gets fat enough, the chunky goth splits itself into two skinny goths, and so the circle of goth continues. Obsidian said that if he wasn’t sure his make up would get smudged, he would kick the living shit out of me, and the pair spun around to face the front of the queue once more.

At most MWF events you’ll find people nodding intently at the speaker, politely bearing the appropriate amount of teeth to smile at a T.S. Elliot quote, and the occasional champagne fizz of laughter rippling through the audience. What you won’t normally see is a few hundred high-pitched Beatle-mania squeals as a writer walks on stage, and that was just from the fanboys in the crowd, the fangirls were too busy updating their twitter feeds and clawing at their multicoloured hair when Joss was introduced by Steve Grimwade and his ulcer Stephanie.

Joss Whedon walked out on stage in the robes of a standard nerd, faded jeans, a jumper, and sneakers. Someone screamed Joss and I witnessed hundreds of people place both hands over their hearts simultaneously. Joss silenced his church with a gesture. He paused for a moment before saying “I have faith…” He was cut off by a number of guys who stood up screaming “Where is she? Is she wearing the red leather pants? Please say she’s wearing the red leather pants

The main conversation of the evening seemed to revolve around a number of Joss’ television shows being cancelled suddenly. This caused howls of rage to erupt from the audience, and people started passing around effigies of Fox executives and lighting torches. I instantly regretted wearing a suit and tie and began mentally noting where my nearest exit was in case they demanded some form of human sacrifice.

A group of the MWF volunteers began setting up microphones within the crowd, and the audience was invited to ask questions of their lord and saviour. Of those questions, five were asking if Joss would impregnate them, there were actually six asked, but I didn’t count the 40-year-old man. There was one girl who asked what every fan had been dying to know “So is there anything about your shows that, like, you like, like?” I erupted in laughter and a security guard told me I would have to leave. I told him that I didn’t think my laughter was that disruptive. He pointed out it was for my own safety and pointed to a thousand people staring at me like I was a skid mark on a hotel towel.

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How is it possible to approach writing about Asia? It’s distant, but discoverable; it’s filled with people, but also your own experiences of it; it is the cynosure of so many eyes and stories that many fantasies, myths and clichés about it abound. In today’s Travels in Asia session, three authors discussed their relationship with Asia, and how they write about it.

Kim Cheng Boey’s essays were informed by his nostalgia for Singapore. On a year-long trip through Asia and Africa, he found upon his return to his homeland that his memories became intertwined with the new experiences. Boey read from his essay ‘The Smell of Memory’ – he considers smell ‘the most primordial of the human senses’. Singapore, with its ‘obsessive cleaning’, has removed all its smells, and installed in their place ‘anonymous sky towers’.

Simon Winchester is well known for his books on the history of the Oxford English Dictionary, among many other things, but the journalistic impulse in him has taken him to many far-flung places. The author of Simon Winchester’s Calcutta, Korea and Bomb, Book and Compass, Winchester has taken many journeys in Asia, including one from Europe through the Khyber Pass, and another to Hong Kong, where he lived for some time. As he unspooled his travel tales, casually throwing names like Ulan Bator, South Korea and Irkutsk into his telling, it became clear that his varied and rich experiences were due to his keen curiosity, as well as the endless interest offered by the expanses of Asia. There were touches of the absurd to his tales, too. Winchester recounted a story of the ‘new’, technologically advanced China. He was once stranded in the Gobi Desert, his car having given out completely, but ‘somewhere in the Gobi Desert were cell phone towers, and I was able to get onto Google’.

Ouyang Yu is a poet, novelist, translator, critic and non-fiction writer whose prolific output would have any dilatory writer seething with envy. For Yu, there are three ways of travelling through Asia – personal, cyber and imaginative – all these ways of travelling are related in some way, all referring back to the ‘text’ of Asia. In his reading, he evoked the strangeness of belonging tinged with strangeness. In one trip from Kunming, for example, Yu encountered the sound of a Chinese dialect different to his own, men smoking pipes longer than an arm, people wearing headdresses and eating grasshoppers.

When Boey suggested that what he found most compelling in other travel writers, I found myself agreeing with him: the writers he loved, like Greene and Chatwin, had vision. They were not just reporting, they were also telling a story, and whether they are liars or raconteurs, that is what we respond to.

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Surly to rise

The scraping metallic whistle signaled the approach of a train that was already apologising for any inconvenience that it’s tardiness had caused. It’s been a long time since I have caught a peak hour train, I must have put on some weight in the last six months, as this one seemed a lot tighter than I recalled. Hemmed in on all sides by commuters, I did my best to ignore the restrictive journey, but I couldn’t ignore the chirpy female voice emanating from the speakers in the carriage “Myki can now be used on all Metropolitan trains!” Yes, well, my key opens the front door of my house but it didn’t cost me $850 million.

I was supposed to meet my fellow bloggers for a caffeine baptism to start the festival off with a jitter, but no one was at the café. I bumped into a man that resembled an extremely Irish Yul Brynner. He introduced himself as Chris Flynn and asked if I’d like to see his Torpedo. I recalled the time I had dialled a number I found on a public toilet wall, despite it’s claim, there was definitely no good time had, not by me at any rate. I politely declined his offer. Chris shrugged and told me he was off for his Morning Fix. My bowels gave off a Pavlovian gurgle and I followed him into a large café called Feddish.

The café was warm to the point of stifling and the air seemed thick with pungent chemical fumes. I sat down next to a well-stubbled man and asked if there was a gas leak in the room. He gestured towards a group of pallid people seated around a table. The air above them rippled with last night’s alcohol. Two were propping their heads up with their hands while the third was grimly clutching the table like the steering wheel of an out of control big rig. I watched as the waitress placed three croissants in front of them. The table-driving lady reached into her purse, producing a large pack of Berocca that she emptied into the pastry. She caught my eye while crunching down on her Beroccroissant and apologetically mumbled “Text Publishing party last night”.

Through the wobbling booze air I listened to four authors whom all seemed worlds apart. Despite hailing from different countries, with vastly different upbringings, they all serendipitously read passages from their work that focused on recapturing and reinventing childhood memories. Their words gripped the crowd, bringing forth laughter, smiles, even tears. Although that could have been the fumes coming from table 9.

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I have this terrible habit of becoming interested in too many things, and ending up with massive lists to follow up on – Italian cinema, Australian authors, HBO TV series. One of these things is Russian literature. I’ve done a bit of Chekhov, I’m making my way through some Nabokov, I’ve done a little Tolstoy, a little Dostoyevsky and a little Gogol. Then I read Elif Batuman’s The Possessed (you’ll find my blurb in the Australian edition) and I was overcome with excitement for what I still have to discover.

Batuman as a child growing up in New Jersey was quite enchanted by the idea of Russia – a mysterious other place, a ‘wonderland’. But she was possessed by Russian literature quite by accident. The first novel she fell for was Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina - she says, ‘for the first time I had an idea of the novel that can compete with life’, that can run alongside a life. Batuman finds Russian literature richer in some ways than literature in the English or French canon - the way it can be ‘funny and sad at the same time’. Pushkin and Gogol are two of her favourites. Batuman decided to explore Russian literature as an academic, after discovering she wasn’t the kind of writer who imitated, re-enacted or re-lived the books she loved, but the kind who gets out into the world and immerses herself in ‘a metonymic, geographic way’ – like going to Tolstoy’s house, and meeting the crazy relatives of dead authors. Batuman found she enjoyed ‘going through, looking for clues to an absent person’. She added: ‘which is a lot of the time what life is like’.

Also on this panel, chaired by Judy Armstrong, were historian Sheila Fitzpatrick and author Maria Tumarkin. Tumarkin was born in the former Soviet Union, emigrated to Australia in 1989, and her book Otherland charts the journey she made back to Russia and the Ukraine with her teenage daughter. Tumarkin said she had avoided writing about Russia for years, and mentioned the fact that so many great writers only wrote insightful things about Russia after leaving. After living in Australia and inhabiting the language for a while, she then felt she could write about the place from which she came, and what was happening at the time she left. Her books are personal in style, because the journey into the past and into Russia is personal. Tumarkin didn’t want to write a journalistic book or straight historical enquiry.

Sheila Fitzpatrick grew up in Melbourne in the ’40s and ’50s, when the Soviet Union ‘wasn’t generally loved’ by most people. Her father was a socialist though, and Fitzpatrick sees her interests stemming from Cold War tensions. She wrote her final year thesis at Melbourne University on Russian music – at a time when it was difficult to get research materials. Fitzpatrick told a few stories about traveling to Russia and to Uzbeckistan in the late ’60s. ‘Unlike other people who had to get out of the Soviet Union, I had to get in’, she said. She was interested in their ‘extraordinarily uncomfortable and inconvenient everyday’. As a foreigner she was marked. The British Embassy instructed her not to make friends as ‘they’re all KGB’. The Russians, too, always thought foreigners might be spies. Fitzpatrick even started to think ‘how do I know I’m not a spy?’ Fitzpatrick is Distinguished Service Professor in Modern Russian History at the University of Chicago and an annual Visiting Professor at the University of Sydney. She has written many books on the subject.

After the session I realised I forgot to bring my copy of The Possessed to get signed. Never mind, the Russian lady was present at the Federation Square Book Market and I picked up Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which I’ve always wanted to read, and Elif Batuman kindly signed it ‘Fyodor (via Elif)’ for me…

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