AustLit

‘Melanie Cheng’s Australia Day (2017) is the latest in the contemporary succession of engaging and innovative collections of short fiction by Australian writers from diverse backgrounds. since the 2008 publication of Nam Le’s The Boat, Australia’s young literary vanguard has announced itself with a series of ambitious volumes. These authors include Ryan O’Neill (The Weight of a Human Heart, 2012), Maxine Beneba Clarke (Foreign Soil, 2014), Ali Alizadeh (Transactions, 2013), Ceridwen Dovey (Only the Animals, 2014), Nic Low (Arms Race, 2014), Michelle Cahill (Letter to Pessoa, 2016), Tara June Winch (After the Carnage, 2016), and Fiona McFarlane (The High Places, 2016). There is something about the short story collection that seems well attuned to contemporary Australian society’s fragmentation and polyphony. Formally, it allows compressed scenes of localised intensity to set themselves within the complex striations of transnational or trans cultural experiences. Such collections have benefitted, perhaps, from readers’ shortened attention spans. But they have also been well positioned to take advantage of the material and cultural gains that are part of the churn and glory of contemporary literary award culture. Cheng and Beneba Clarke both won the Victorian Premier’s unpublished manuscript award with their collections, and Le and McFarlane have each received the prestigious international Dylan Thomas Prize for Young Writers.’ (Introduction)