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Gillian Bouras Gillian Bouras i(A24650 works by)
Born: Established: 1945 Melbourne, Victoria, ;
Gender: Female
Expatriate assertion
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Works By

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1 Lost Boy in a Land of Terror and Beauty Gillian Bouras , 2024 single work column
— Appears in: Eureka Street , 15 January vol. 34 no. 1 2024; 'Fiona McFarlane is an award-winning Australian writer whose first novel, The Night Guest, was acclaimed for its re-creation of the onset and development of dementia in the 75-year-old protagonist. It won the Voss Literary prize in 2014 and was shortlisted for others. While not every writer can produce short stories as well as longer work, McFarlane excels at both, with short stories appearing in prestigious journals such as The New Yorker. Her debut collection The High Places was lavishly praised, winning the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2017.' (Introduction)
1 Another Melbourne Gillian Bouras , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: Eureka Street , 16 October vol. 33 no. 20 2023;
— Review of The Diplomat Chris Womersley , 2022 single work novel

'Set in a Melbourne bursting with bohemian allure, Chris Womersley's The Diplomat is a book of despair and the agony of regret. Intertwining the worlds of art, drug addiction and deception, the author confronts us with the question: how well can we truly know another? '
1 The Magic of Dessaix's Abracadabra Gillian Bouras , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: Eureka Street , 17 April vol. 33 no. 7 2023;
— Review of Abracadabra : I've Said It Before and I'll Say It Again ... Robert Dessaix , 2022 selected work prose autobiography

'While our lives plod along in an ordinary groove, the great writers astound us and lift us on to another plane. The state of reading, Dessaix believes, is one of intense attention: in every true reading of literature in adult life, we revert to that early attitude of plasticity and innocence before the text.' (Introduction) 
1 The Book Corner : The Jane Austen Remedy Gillian Bouras , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: Eureka Street , 6 March vol. 33 no. 4 2023;
— Review of The Jane Austen Remedy Ruth Wilson , 2022 single work autobiography
1 The Book Corner : Telltale Gillian Bouras , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Eureka Street , 28 August vol. 32 no. 17 2022;
— Review of Telltale : Reading Writing Remembering Carmel Bird , 2022 single work prose
1 The Value of Novels Gillian Bouras , 2021 single work essay
— Appears in: Eureka Street , 18 July vol. 31 no. 14 2021; 'Like many other privileged people, I learned to read before I was five, and have hardly stopped reading since. That was the way things were in that long-ago pre-TV world, when we children read fiction mainly per courtesy of writers like Enid Blyton and Mary Grant Bruce, who had not then come under a cloud of anachronistic criticism.' (Introduction)
1 A New View of Exile Gillian Bouras , 2021 single work essay
— Appears in: Eureka Street , 09 May vol. 31 no. 9 2021;

'The matters of migration and exile haunt me continually. I’ve always had great sympathy for post-war displaced persons, and how people manage to survive detention in today’s Australia is simply beyond me. In my case six months’ holiday became a lifetime when my Greek husband, desperate to return to his home village, unexpectedly secured a job nearby.'

Source : Introduction
1 Families and Black Holes Gillian Bouras , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Women's Book Review , vol. 29 no. 1 2019; (p. 44-47)
— Review of Man Out of Time Stephanie Bishop , 2018 single work novel 'It is a brave writer who tackles the subject of mental illness, sufferers of which still labour under the stigma of being “different”: most “ordinary” people fear and dread mental illness and find it hard to comprehend. But Stephanie Bishop, author of Man Out of Time, a novel in which the protagonist is clearly disturbed, is on record as stating that her father was plagued by depression for much of his life. Thus, she also runs the risk of readers taking her novel as a factual account, but it is definitely a work of the imagination, despite the parallels with Bishop’s life. In her second novel, the much-lauded The Other Side of the World, she also draws on her family background while constructing a gripping novel.' 

 (Introduction)
1 Negotiating with the Dads Gillian Bouras , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Women's Book Review , vol. 28 no. 1 2019; (p. 27-29) 'IN 2006, Helen Nickas, a Greek-Australian, published an anthology titled Mothers from the Edge, a collection of tributes by twenty-eight Greek-Australian women to their mothers. Nine years later, Fathers from the Edge appeared: in this anthology both men and women, twenty-four in number, write about their fathers, who are or were invariably immigrants to Australia. Some of these men were twice displaced, and many were witnesses to unspeakable horrors, being of the generation whose childhood and youth were deeply affected by the German occupation and the Greek Civil War. Both anthologies feature writing that is simply and directly expressed, while being often deeply introspective. In recollecting their relationships with their parents, the writers wrestle with problems both past and present.'  (Introduction)
1 The Life I Owe Gillian Bouras , 2018 single work autobiography
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 78 no. 2 2018; (p. 17-30) 'I had two very good chances of never being born, and I suppose I've always been conscious of the fact. Of course there were more than two, as that's the way life is, but two, even when I was quite a young child, were immediately obvious to me. My grandfather served four years with the AIF during the First World War, and saw action in both Belgium and France. His luck (and mine) held, however, for he was in the artillery, and so had some protection against the wholesale slaughter of trench warfare. My father's Second World War was entirely different. Sent to Darwin when the Japanese were bombing it regularly, he later took part in an amphibious assault on Borneo, and became forward scout in the jungle: at one point he walked over an enemy soldier who was hidden in the undergrowth. Although the Pacific War ended in August 1945, my father could have been killed or wounded during the interval afterwards, as enemy soldiers refused to capitulate and kept on fighting for at least another six weeks. he was finally demobbed in February, 1946.'

 (Publication abstract)
1 Remembering My Friend Beverley Farmer Gillian Bouras , 2018 single work prose
— Appears in: Eureka Street , 22 April vol. 28 no. 8 2018;

'We learn, in the normal run of things, that we have to part from our parents and their generation, whether early or late in our own lives. But somehow we nourish the belief that our friends are going to be with us until a kind of joint ending occurs.' (Introduction)
1 Bringing the Classics Back to Schools Gillian Bouras , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Eureka Streeet , 22 October vol. 27 no. 21 2017; (p. 20-22)

'We live in troubled times, but some shocks are more unexpected than others. Amanda Foreman, a writer and academic most notable for her best-selling biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, sustained a great shock recently.' (Introduction)
1 Confessions of a Literature Addict Gillian Bouras , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Eureka Street , 13 August vol. 27 no. 16 2017; (p. 66-67)

'Was Harry Potter's 20th birthday to blame? Or the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen's death? Or merely the ageing process? It's hard to decide, but in a life quite possibly ruined by literature, I have started remembering some of the books I read in childhood.' (Introduction)
1 Ghosts of Ministers Past Gillian Bouras , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Eureka Street , 2 July vol. 27 no. 13 2017; (p. 51)

'Like Shakespeare's Earl of Salisbury most of us occasionally want to call back yesterday, but it sometimes happens that yesterday calls us back instead, in a kind of collision of time. This happened to me last week when I received a letter from a widow who happens to read Eureka Street: I knew her when I was very young, but have met her only once in 60 years.' (Introduction)
1 The Epic Life of the Real Iphigenia Gillian Bouras , 2016 single work prose
— Appears in: Eureka Street , 13 March vol. 26 no. 5 2016;
1 1 y separately published work icon Seeing and Believing Gillian Bouras , Athens : Gialos Publishing , 2016 11304265 2016 single work autobiography

'What happened next? What happened to the boys? Once upon a lifetime, twenty-five years ago or more, I wrote a book called A Foreign Wife. In it I recorded my experiences during my first five years in the Peloponnesian village to which I had unexpectedly migrated in 1980. Life in the Peloponnese continues to delight and challenge Gillian Bouras: Seeing and Believing resumes the narrative as her sons create their own families and time delivers a fresh crop of joys and heartaches, to which she tries to adjust. Acutely responsive to what she calls the conspiracy of beauty in Greece, she celebrates the natural world in prose that indicates a lifelong engagement with words. Global events send her to historians for enlightenment, while tragedy closer to home fire, unexpected death prompts reflection on the solace of contrasting creeds. In between she observes the human comedy with dry humour.' (Publication summary)
1 Grandchildren Are Your Children Twice Over Gillian Bouras , 2016 single work prose
— Appears in: Eureka Street , 14 August vol. 26 no. 16 2016;
1 Thoughts on a Lonely God Gillian Bouras , 2015 single work prose
— Appears in: Eureka Street , 3 August vol. 25 no. 15 2015;
1 Thorough Pictures of the Heart Gillian Bouras , 2015 single work prose
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 29 no. 1 2015; (p. 216-225) 'Bouras describes two works of art: E. Phillips Fox's The Letter and Johannes Vermeer's Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. Separated in time by more than two centuries and were painted in very different places, both works depict women reading letters. Among other things, Bouras laments on the ever-hastening disappearance of letters. She notes that a love email can never be the same as love letter.' (Publication abstract)
1 Speak of the Devil No Longer Gillian Bouras , 2015 single work prose
— Appears in: Eureka Street , 11 May vol. 25 no. 9 2015;
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