AustLit

'The bills were mounting up when an email slid quietly into my inbox: a mutual friend had given my name to a publisher. Was I interested in ghostwriting a memoir? The book's subject was a community arts worker. The name rang a bell.' (Publication abstract)

'How can you feel centred when you have no place to call your own? Australia has a large shadow population of people who have survived homelessness – whether couch-surfing, staying in a refuge, boarding house or caravan park, or sleeping rough. Too often they are dismissed or blamed. They are spoken for, and about, rarely get to speak for themselves.

'Edited by former The Big Issue deputy editor Meg Mundell, We Are Here is a vibrant and moving collection of stories showcasing the creative talents of people with experience of being homeless. From cold city doorways to lonely bush camps, dodgy boarding houses to the humid hell of Manus Island, these are powerful, defiant and illuminating stories that will make every reader question their place in the world, and the world created in their place. Profits from the sale of this book will be donated to charities working with homeless communities.

'Contributors include both undiscovered talents and already-celebrated authors such as Behrouz Boochani, Krissy Kneen, Claire G. Coleman, Josiane Behmoiras, and Gregory P. Smith.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Fleeing their pandemic-stricken homelands, a shipload of migrant workers departs the UK, dreaming of a fresh start in prosperous Australia. For nine-year-old Cleary Sullivan, deaf for three years, the journey promises adventure and new friendships; for Glaswegian songstress Billie Galloway, it’s a chance to put a shameful mistake firmly behind her; while impoverished English schoolteacher Tom Garnett hopes to set his future on a brighter path. But when a crew member is found murdered and passengers start falling gravely ill, the Steadfast is plunged into chaos. Thrown together by chance, and each guarding their own secrets, Cleary, Billie and Tom join forces to survive the journey and its aftermath.

'The Trespassers is a beguiling novel that explores the consequences of greed, the experience of exile, and the unlikely ways strangers can become the people we hold dear.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This paper examines the how of literary wheres. As makers of literary works, creative writers are tasked with evoking place on the page. While the nexus of place and literature is increasingly recognised as fertile scholarly ground, the specifics of how writers actually “make” literary places remain opaque and under-researched. I seek to address this gap by exploring how literary place is constituted through creative practice. Focusing on the work of Australian writer Tony Birch, I document a range of generative tools creative writers may use to produce what I call “literary sense of place”. Drawing on interview-based case studies and key concepts from human geography, I analyse how these practitioners harness various “off-page” modes of enquiry to evoke place compellingly in textual form. While my main focus is creative practice, I also examine the resultant literary texts to help illuminate how process manifests in content. By profiling a range of “place-oriented experiential techniques (POETs)” – including site visits, memory, direct encounters, sensory attentiveness, “vicarious emplacement”, socio-cultural understandings, and happenstance – I present a fine-grained account of literary place-making from a practitioners’ perspective. I conclude that producing literary place is a generative, cumulative and associative process, in which writers mobilise a rich array of lived sensations, emotions, memories, understandings and actions. In foregrounding these “backstage” modes of creative labour, this paper helps clarify how writers deploy both personal and shared experiences to render literary place in resonant ways.' (Publication abstract)

'Tally and Grace are teenage sisters living on the outskirts of society, dragged from one no-hope town to the next by their fugitive father. When an explosion rips their lives apart, they flee separately to the city.

The girls had always imagined that beyond the remote regions lay another, brighter world: glamorous, promising, full of luck. But as each soon discovers, if you arrive there broke, homeless and alone, the city is a dangerous place — a place where commerce and surveillance rule, and undocumented people like themselves are confined to life's shady margins. Now Tally and Grace must struggle to find each other — or just to survive.' (From the publisher's website.)

'He is the man who brought you the award-winning Choir of Hard Knocks - made up of the homeless and the disadvantaged - the judge on Battle of the Choirs, a highly renowned opera singer and conductor who has worked with some of Australia's most talented performers.

But Jonathon Welch's own story is less well known, and here he tells it in his own words for the first time. His modest beginnings in suburban Melbourne where he exhibited early 'theatrical' tendencies, his life at the centre of a family falling apart, his coming to terms with his sexuality and the rifts that caused, the discovery of his singing talent, his stellar career in the heady worlds of opera and theatre and the crisis which caused him to question his life's direction and to walk away from it all.

In this warm and candid memoir, Jonathon reflects on the forces which shaped him and made him an advocate for social change - and how music was at the centre of helping him put his own life - and that of many others - back together again.' (Publisher's blurb)