AustLit

'Nada Awar Jarrar was born in Beirut in 1958, and left Lebanon to go and live in Australia when the war broke out in Lebanon. She writes in English and belongs to both the Lebanese women's writing tradition on the subject of war and to the literary corpus of Anglo-Lebanese women's literature in exile. Here, Balaa analyses Jarrar's novel Dreams of Water, which is set during the civil war in Lebanon, and attempts to look at this text from another perspective. ' (Publication abstract)

'Horakova talks about Kim Mahood's memoir "Craft for a Dry Lake," one of the most complex representations of the Australian Outback, one that offers a "new history of the frontier." Framed as a homecoming journey to the Tanami Desert northwest of Alice Springs alter her lather's death in a helicopter crash, Mahood's narrative begins as a biography of her parents. She reflects on a childhood spent on the homestead among her family and both Aboriginal and white staff, and her eventual departure to the city in order to pursue an education and later her artistic career. Among other things, Horakova discusses the memoir's complexity consists in its ability to simultaneously build upon and write back to several well-established literary traditions. ' (Publication abstract)