'Birch’s new novel is an allegory of good, evil and the legacy of Australia’s colonial past – with strong black women at its core.'

'Tony Birch has appeared on The Garret before, and in this episode we are going to do something a little different. Our host Astrid Edwards had the honour of reading The White Girl (2019) before publication, and this interview represents Tony's first in-depth public discussion of the work.

Tony is an acclaimed writer. His short story collection Common People (2017) was shortlisted for both the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and the Indigenous Writers Prize in the 2018 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Ghost River (2015) won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing and was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Blood (2011) was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Tony is a frequent contributor to ABC local and national radio. He taught creative writing at Melbourne University for many years and was the inaugural Bruce McGuinness Research Fellow within the Moondani Balluk Centre at Victoria University.'

Source: Garret website.

'In critical appraisals of Tony Birch’s fiction, certain adjectives appear again and again. Of the prose: “spare”, “concise”, “uncluttered”; the characters “vivid” and rendered with “compassion”. Perhaps it is true that good novels, like Tolstoy’s happy families, are all alike, yet it could just as easily be true that critics, by and large, tend to repeat themselves. Or perhaps, as I suspect, there’s an element to Birch’s writing that makes him both readable and difficult to define.'  (Introduction)