AustLit

'In a recent interview with Alice Allan, James Jiang laments the ‘prize culture’ that permeates Australian literature, arguing that readers who avoid ‘bad’ books may be left with a superficial sense of what’s ‘good’.¹ At present, what’s considered worth reading—by mass audiences, at least—is limited to a select handful of gold-stickered texts, deemed palatable by institutional marketing, with snappy quotes on back covers. A triumph, they say. Dazzling. A fresh new voice! In the age of social media, readers are eager to read the right books and have the right takes, which makes reaching for a prize-winning text a no-brainer. To be sure, many of these texts are well worth reading—take Evelyn Araluen’s Dropbear (2021) and Shastra Deo’s The Agonist (2017), for example. The problem isn’t that judges have bad taste. Rather, as Jiang highlights, selecting all your reading material in this manner takes the element of adventure out of reading. For me, reading only prize-winning books is a form of algorithmic reading, which prevents us from thinking critically about literature, and potentially limits the future of #ozlit itself.' (Introduction)

'In his review of Lucy Van’s The Open, Gareth Morgan writes that Van writes ‘against the impulse to ponder dutifully about the sins of the past and present.’ This fucked me up for some time. What is it to ponder dutifully? But perhaps more importantly, how do we ponder in a way that’s more … metal? Gareth’s first full-length collection, When A Punk Becomes a Spunk, illustrates this anti-impulse vividly, as a refusal to think too seriously, or perhaps too appropriately. Not because we don’t need to think carefully about our complicity in the big ‘-isms’ like neo-colonialism or climate change. Rather, under present politics, these ubiquitous problems demand a constant, weary moral attention which blunts critical thought and meaningful change beyond meagre representation. This book suggests we should be suspicious of western imperialism, of cringe, of the Australian refusal to accept complicity, and of bad art. It views apprehensively anyone who ponders too dutifully, too loudly, who doth protest too much–though thankfully, these poems are gloriously and critically unsuspicious.' (Introduction)