AustLit

'Miles Franklin winner Sofie Laguna fought off her fears to write the most disturbing novel of her life. She talks to Stephen Romei

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times … Charles Dickens may have a trademark on that line but other writers have artistic authority to borrow it now and then. When actress turned writer Sofie Laguna won the 2015 Miles Franklin Literary Award for The Eye of the Sheep, the night was marked not with Bollinger but with barf.' (Introduction)

'Georgia Blain’s fiction has always observed the effects of disruption on the domestic lives of her urban middle-class characters. Her novels and short stories often have drawn on her experiences. But, as a writer of cool restraint, she was aware that tragedy and coincidence were piling up in her life with a clumsy lack of credibility.

Towards the end of The Museum of Words, she summarises the “plot line” of her memoir as if it were a novel being assessed by her editor:

The central character has just put her mother in a home with Alzheimer’s, her mentor and best friend has terminal brain cancer, she has written a book about terminal brain cancer, and now she has it too … Maybe a little too much?' (Introduction)