AustLit

'Jelena Dinic’s In the Room with the She Wolf was the winner of the 2020 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature Unpublished Manuscript prize. Unpublished no longer. Here it is in another handsome production by Wakefield Press. Congratulations Jelena you’ve worked hard and long for this. It’s no small thing to achieve this level of poetry in a new language and a new culture.' (Introduction)

'On my job application to the ABC in 1983 I mentioned that I was a poet, even though the job advertised was for a purely technical position as a trainee sound engineer. Positions for technicians were all that were on offer at that time in Adelaide. Landing a job as a sound engineer was a way into the monolith.' (Introduction)

'I first met Gillian in 2004 on a sparkling November day. She was staying at a cabin at the Brown Hill Creek Caravan Park in the Adelaide foothills. I’d suggested the location because I knew she’d prefer it to a city hotel room. In the caravan park she would have birds, a creek, fresh air, and rates an artistic writer could afford. Gillian had come over to plan her move to South Australia to write her novel Foal’s Bread. There were several reasons behind the move: she wanted the peace and obscurity of the Adelaide hills and she found the cool winters and dry summers less aggravating to her multiple sclerosis than the steamy warmth of her native Grafton. There was also a guru she was attracted to here – someone who promised an alternative way to treat her disease, or even cure it. With Gillian, there was often a guru in the picture somewhere.'  (Introduction)