The links below are to articles reporting on the winner of the 2020 Miles Franklin literary Award, Tara June Winch for ‘The Yield.’
For more visit:
– https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/16/tara-june-winch-wins-2020-miles-franklin-award-for-her-book-the-yield-it-broke-my-heart-to-write-it
– https://www.booksandpublishing.com.au/articles/2020/07/16/153760/winch-wins-2020-miles-franklin-for-the-yield/
Catherine Harris, Sheffield Hallam University and Bernadette Stiell, Sheffield Hallam University
As people seek to educate themselves in response to Black Lives Matter protests, sales of books by black British authors, such as Reni Eddo-Lodge and Bernadine Evaristo, have topped the UK bestseller lists. Several recent prestigious awards have also been won by black writers, including Candice Carty-Williams who won book of the year for Queenie at the British Book Awards. Although proud of her achievement, she was also “sad and confused” on discovering she was the first black author to win this award in its 25-year history.
While these firsts must be celebrated, they also shine a light on publishing’s systemic practices, which have maintained inequalities and under-representation for black, Asian and minority ethnic writers and diverse books. Despite awareness of its shortcomings and years of debates and initiatives (diversity schemes, blind recruiting practices and manuscript submission processes) the industry has generally failed to achieve lasting change. This is because they fail to address the broader systemic inequalities faced by people of colour, which contribute to ongoing under-representation in the industry.
Our research on diversity in children’s publishing included an online survey of 330 responses and 28 in-depth follow-up interviews with people working across the sector. We found that a key barrier has been the engrained perception among industry decision-makers that there is a limited market for diverse books. This is a belief that books written by black and diverse authors or featuring non-white characters just don’t sell.
This perception is seen across the industry, including in children’s literature. This is despite evidence of substantial markets. For instance, a third of English primary pupils are from a black, Asian or minority ethnic background. However, a report by the Centre For Literacy in Primary Education revealed that although the number of black, Asian and minority ethnic protagonists in children’s books had increased from 1% in 2017 to 4% in 2018, there is still a long way to go to achieve representation that reflects the UK population.
Similarly, BookTrust reported that only 6% of children’s authors published in the UK in 2017 were from ethnic minority backgrounds, only a minor improvement from 4% in 2007.
What we found was that the lack of role models in the books read by children and young people of colour meant that they were less likely to aspire to careers in the sector. From those we spoke to, this was compounded by the lack of diversity, particularly in senior roles, in publishing. For those who had pursued a publishing career, experiences of everyday racism and microaggressions were widespread. This added to feelings of frustration and a sense that they were not welcome or did not belong in the industry.
This all has a knock-on effect on what gets published. Authors of colour that we spoke to expressed frustration about the commissioning process. This included quotas for books by or featuring people of colour, a perceived limited appeal for these books and a feeling that authors of colour could only write about race issues.
Reliance on “traditional routes” to publishing also disadvantages black and working-class authors. Publishers reported receiving high volumes of submissions and heavy workloads led to them relying on established writers rather than seeking out new, diverse talent. This has the impact of narrowing the pool of authors from which books are published.
Our participants – including authors, illustrators, editorial assistants and agents – widely reported that a lack of cultural understanding can also lead to the view that diverse books are a riskier investment. They explained how limited promotion and marketing budgets often resulted in lower sales, reinforcing perceptions of limited demand. From their experience, miscommunication at subsequent points along the supply chain about the demand for and availability of diverse books means that those that are published may not even reach bookshop shelves.
These interconnected factors (among others) create a negative cycle which perpetuates the lack of representation of minorities across all parts of the sector, including the lack of authors of colour being nominated for prizes and awards. Recommendations from our research include ensuring diversity on selection panels for events and awards and some good work is already taking place. However, more systematic collaboration and commitment from the sector will be required to produce lasting and meaningful changes and achieve equality and representation.
Our research participants pointed out that social media was allowing individuals to more effectively come together and raise their voices in support of diversity and representation. They expressed hope that this may help to drive forward meaningful and lasting change in the sector. There are signs that this may be the case with recent campaigns emerging in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
The #publishingpaidme campaign highlighted racial disparities in publishing advances. The publisher Amistad, an imprint of Harper Collins dedicated to multicultural voices, ran the campaign #BlackoutBestsellerList and #BlackPublishingPower to draw attention to black authors and book professionals and demonstrate the market for these books. The newly formed Black Writers’ Guild, including many of Britain’s best-known authors and poets, wrote an open letter airing concerns and demanding immediate action from publishers. The hope is that these campaigns can focus the industry on bringing about meaningful change.
Catherine Harris, Research Associate, Sheffield Hallam University and Bernadette Stiell, Senior research fellow in the Sheffield Institute of Education, Sheffield Hallam University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Jen Webb, University of Canberra
This remarkable novel opens and closes in the voice of Albert Gondiwindi, the recently deceased grandfather of one of the main characters, August.
Albert was born, he says in the first sentence, on Country known as Ngurambang; and he explains how to pronounce the word. “Ngu-ram-bang. If you say it right it hits the back of your mouth and you should taste the blood in your words”.
Throughout the novel, his voice keeps re-emerging as he steadily builds a body of Wiradjuri words, and the memories that ground their definitions.
His is one of three main stories that weave their way through Tara June Winch’s The Yield, this year’s Miles Franklin winner. A second story is that of Albert’s granddaughter, August, who comes home for his funeral. August has been living in England for ten years with her “terrible inheritance” (the elements of which unpack across the novel); she provides a key point of focalisation.
Read more:
Trauma, resilience, sex and art: your guide to the 2020 Miles Franklin shortlist
The third story comes out of history, and is presented in the form of notes, reports and letters written by the Reverend Ferdinand Greenleaf, who positions himself as the defender of what he terms “the decent Natives whom I have lived amongst”, residents of the Mission he established in 1880 “to ameliorate the condition of the Native tribes”.
While Greenleaf does take a stand against the brutality of the police and townspeople, his compassion is predicated on paternalism, rather than respect. Consequently, his “contributions” play a role in the colonisation of the region, and in Albert’s life.
Albert was born, as he says, on Ngurambang, but he started life in a temporary fringe area called Tent Town before he “and all the other kids were taken away”, stolen from family and culture.
The violent history of the region is salted throughout the novel: cloaked, in Rev Greenleaf’s writings; expressed vividly in Poppy Albert’s stories; painfully in August’s memories and contemporary experiences and shamefully in the names of local places.
There is the ironically named Prosperous Mission; it stands near the town of Massacre Plains, close to Poisoned Waterhole Creek. The town itself is reached by way of the Broken Highway; the sick and dying of the region find themselves in Broken Hospital and Broken Hospice.
The deployment of such names contains a bitter truth, because although these are fictional places, there are locations right across Australia that unblushingly retain the evidence of racism and genocide. It is writers like Winch, and artists like Julie Gough, who draw attention to this practice and to the history that lies behind it.
History seldom remains tidily in the past, as so many writers have observed; and Poppy Albert too makes it clear: “there are a thousand battles being fought every day because people couldn’t forget something that happened before they were born”. And also, arguably, because what happened before we were born continues to have consequences.
The processes of colonisation that began in the 18th century; the impact of what led to the establishment (and naming) of Massacre Plains; the building of the mission and farm – all combine to shape and (attempt to) limit August’s life, and that of her family.
And these she must experience again when she returns to Australia, to the continuing absence of her disappeared sister Jedda, to Eddie – ex-schoolfriend and scion of Prosperous Farm – and to the testing family relationships she had left behind. Once back, she finds herself involved not just in piecing together her past, but also in a battle to protect her grandmother’s home, and the remnants of the beloved and deeply damaged river, from the depredations of Rinepalm mining company.
That battle itself highlights the very different communities cohabiting. For the urban protesters, it is about the broad problem of environmental destruction. For cousin Joey, it is about resistance to the original act of invasion. (“They want to take land that wasn’t theirs to take, land was given that wasn’t theirs to give!”)
And for August, it seems to offer a point of resolution: “As they walked August thought that grief’s stint was ending. She whispered to Jedda and to Poppy: I am here”.
I won’t say any more about the story; it is, after all, not mine to tell. But I will say that it is a powerful and a deeply moving book. While it is unstinting in its critical gaze at sociopolitical disasters, it also shows the forms resistance can take.
Albert’s dictionary is part of this resistance: it is in language that culture and memory and ways of seeing and thinking function, and survive. Albert’s work to recover language, to set out words and definitions, provides a memorial to those who were steamrollered by history, and a reminder that “we are here still”.
Jen Webb, Dean, Graduate Research, University of Canberra
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The link below is to an article that takes a look at the free ebooks site, ‘Standard Ebooks.’
For more visit:
https://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/standard-ebooks-is-a-great-place-to-download-free-content
Tyrone August, Stellenbosch University
This is an edited extract from a new biography about Dennis Brutus, the anti-apartheid activist, poet and author. Brutus died in 2009. The extract records Brutus’s reluctance to write about his life when he was still alive. But as Tyrone August, author of the biography, writes, it was inevitable that his life story would eventually be told: “Brutus’s life is woven far too deeply into the fabric of the recent history of South Africa.”
Dennis Brutus, the South African poet and veteran anti-apartheid activist, lived in Port Elizabeth, in the Eastern Cape, during the first half of the twentieth century. This tumultuous period saw the emergence of apartheid, a legally codified system of racial segregation and discrimination. It was followed by the development of a ruthless state apparatus designed to systematically eliminate any resistance.
It was in these grim circumstances that Brutus, who was classified as coloured – a term used to refer to people of mixed European (“white”) and African (“black”) or Asian ancestry – under the Population Registration Act of 1950, distinguished himself as a student, teacher, poet, journalist, sports administrator and anti-apartheid activist.
Yet, despite this range of achievements, there was not a single biography on him – until now. Nor did he publish any extended autobiographical work in a single volume. In a letter to the South African writer and academic Es’kia Mphahlele in November 1970, he confirmed his ambivalence about
get (ing) that mess of autobiographical material out of my system.
He expressed a similar sentiment in a tape recording in October 1974, and attributed his reluctance to embark on a full-scale autobiography to his belief that there was no coherent or unifying narrative in his life.
I fail to see in my life any kind of cohesion or pattern or unifying thread which would justify an autobiography … It seems to me that autobiographies need organisation of one’s knowledge of one’s life in such a way that a pattern emerges, some kind of intelligibility is made of the mass.
He added emphatically that he saw no such pattern in his life. And, until he could impose some such order on what had happened to him, it didn’t seem to him that he was entitled to write about it. He thought that, although some instances in his life might be exciting or flattering to him, they did not justify a book.
Despite his aversion to writing an autobiography, Brutus conceded in the same tape recording that he was beginning to find the prospect “less repellant” than before. He went on to entertain the possibility of at least writing what he described as fragments of an autobiography in the form of essays.
So, by the time Hal Wylie, a University of Texas academic, approached him in 1988 about working towards an autobiography, he was more amenable to the idea. Wylie offered to assist with “spade-work and organising, etc”.
He tried to persuade Brutus that an autobiography would be preferable to an academic work on his life as it would be enriched by certain poetic and literary qualities. It could focus on existential details, memories, personal aspects that would not be appropriate for an official biography, but would be more striking, interesting, with greater human interest.
In an admittedly subjective work one would have more choice and editorial focus. It would be more direct and forceful.
In addition, Wylie submitted that Brutus’s life was closely interlinked with the rise of apartheid and, at the same time, offered “a new way of looking at the anti-apartheid struggle”. He drew particular attention to Port Elizabeth and the Eastern Cape as major sites of this struggle. In response, Brutus wrote encouragingly: “I like the project.”
Nevertheless, Brutus expressed concern about the amount of work required by an autobiography. Instead, he advised, he would still prefer a biography written by Wylie or, alternatively, a biography “as told to Hal Wylie”. Despite his reservations about writing a fully fledged autobiography, Brutus started working with Wylie on a rough draft. This effort was provisionally titled – in a handwritten addition – The Autobiography of the South African Troubadour (or, alternatively, The Story of a Troubadour/Griot).
Wylie recalled in personal correspondence how this draft was created: “It was based on tapes that Dennis recorded, which I then transcribed and typed up. It was then supplemented with additions he wrote in by hand and responses he gave me in response to my questions.”
However, this collaboration eventually collapsed. “When we got to late adolescence and adulthood he clammed up and wouldn’t respond to further questions, so it was abandoned at that point”, Wylie stated.
He then passed the project to another biographer, whose name has since escaped him, but it did not get any further. This is not surprising.
Although initially Brutus felt sufficiently comfortable about working with Wylie on an autobiography, he continued to harbour deep suspicions about the intrusive nature of biographical writing.
His discomfort with the possibility of potential biographers invading his private life is clearly reflected in an untitled poem published in 1973 in his collection, A Simple Lust:
Finding this rubbish,
this debris,
of mine after
I am dead,
when they come to pry
mouse-rustling in my papers,
ghoulishly-hopeful in my things,
what rubbish they will find!
Will I shrivel, inanimate, in my shame?
Will the dead flesh curl up in protest
being assessed by curious strangers’ hands?
But, in the long run, renewed interest from potential biographers was probably inevitable. Brutus’s life is woven far too deeply into the fabric of the recent history of South Africa. This is true especially of the first four decades of his life, which, as the most important period in his personal, literary and political development, is the particular focus of Dennis Brutus, The South African Years, published by Best Red, an imprint of HSRC Press. Brutus died of prostate cancer at his home in Cape Town on 26 December 2009.
Tyrone August, Research fellow, Stellenbosch University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Brendon O’Connor, University of Sydney
Curtis Sittenfeld has a knack of putting her readers in uncomfortable places in her fiction. In her short story Gender Studies she puts you in the middle of a hotel tryst between a Clinton-supporting professor and a Trump-supporting shuttle bus driver. In The Nominee, a journalist vomits on Hillary Rodham Clinton.
In Rodham, Sittenfeld returns to the former First Lady, but with a twist. An imagined memoir, Rodham is propelled by a “what if” thought experiment: what if, in 1975, Hillary left Bill?
It is an alternative reality page turner, and a welcome escapist read in these difficult times.
But how does the book play with the historical record?
Sittenfeld’s first turning point in Hillary’s political career is while she watches the 1991 Clarence Thomas Senate confirmation hearings from her colleague’s office at Northwestern University.
In both the true and imagined histories — despite clear evidence Thomas had sexually harassed his former employee Anita Hill — a predominantly male Senate confirmed Thomas’s appointment.
The backlash against these widely watched hearings led to 1992 being dubbed the “Year of the Woman” when a record number of women ran and were elected to the US Congress.
In the novel, Hillary runs and defeats Carol Moseley Braun in the Democrat primary. In real life, Braun won this race to become the first ever black female Senator.
It is credibly claimed Hillary’s strength in 1992’s infamous 60 Minutes interview saved Bill’s candidacy.
I have watched the real interview with Hillary many times with my students. Questioned about Bill’s alleged affair with Gennifer Flowers, the interview was a watershed moment in the changing attitude of the media towards politicians’ sex lives.
The interview is tough to first watch: why should any couple’s most private affairs be discussed on television like this? What good does it serve?
On re-watching the interview, I am struck by the effective way in which Bill and Hillary talk down the interviewer and control the narrative. Hillary particularly does this with her famous statement:
I’m not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I’m sitting here because I love him, and I respect him, and I honour what he’s been through and what we’ve been through together. And you know, if that’s not enough for people, then heck — don’t vote for him.
In Sittenfeld’s imagined interview, Bill’s publicity-shy wife, Sarah Grace, breaks down and cries, effectively ending Bill’s run for presidency.
Rodham does an excellent job at detailing the many forms of sexism women face in academia and politics. In the first part of the novel, Professor Rodham is a successful law academic whose male students and colleagues say things they would never say to male academics.
Such double standards are also highlighted by the fictional Hillary once she enters politics as a Senator for Illinois. She laments:
The extra time female politicians were expected to spend on our appearance, known as the pink tax, amounted to an hour a day for me, but I’d learned the hard way that this was necessary. In the past, whenever I didn’t have my hair and makeup professionally done, the media would speculate about whether I was ill or exhausted.
In a delicious plot line, Bill and Hillary end up competing against each other in the 2016 Presidential primaries which leads Hillary to ask: “You know when true equality will be achieved? When a woman with these kinds of skeletons in her closet has the nerve to run for the office.”
The novel draws on the rumours published in Vanity Fair and elsewhere of Bill Clinton’s affairs and involvement in sex parties, as well as discussing the long-standing allegation he raped a female campaign volunteer in the 1970s.
Read more:
Weiner’s erotic mediation: Bill Clinton’s sex vs Anthony Weiner’s sexting
In the novel Hillary’s long-time mentor Gwen Greenberger, an African American children’s right advocate, is stand-in for a few significant figures in Hillary’s actual life, including the very impressive Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund.
The novel also features James, a stand in character for Hillary Clinton’s friend and fellow partner at the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas, Vince Foster, who died by suicide leading to conspiracy theories against the Clintons.
Throughout Rodham, Sittenfeld dissects the question of Hillary’s “likeability” by the press and the American people. In a killer debate response (that I wish she had given in 2016) she says:
[I]f you want someone to look out for the interests of the American people, for your family, for you – someone who understands the economy and education and health care and foreign policy … then vote for me.
In the real election in 2016, too many Americans ignored this appeal to experience and competence and tragically they have ended up with a president that cares little about governing or even the rising death toll of his own people.
The truth has turned out to be more unbelievable than Sittenfeld’s fiction.
Brendon O’Connor, Associate Professor in American Politics at the United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The link below is to an article reporting on The Australian Booksellers Association’s (ABA) shortlists for 2020 ABA Bookseller of the Year.
For more visit:
https://www.booksandpublishing.com.au/articles/2020/06/25/152566/aba-2020-bookseller-of-the-year-shortlists-announced/
The link below is to an article looking at principles of historical fiction writing.
For more visit:
https://www.janefriedman.com/dos-and-donts-of-writing-historical-fiction/
The link below is to a book review of ‘Too Much and Never Enough,’ by Mary L. Trump.
For more visit:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/12/too-much-and-never-enough-review-mary-trump-donald
Review: A Room Made of Leaves, Text Publishing
Some time ago, during the renovation of a historic house in Sydney, a tin box, sealed with wax and wrapped in oiled canvas, was found wedged under a beam in the roof cavity. The house was Elizabeth Farm…
So begins A Room Made of Leaves’ editor’s note, detailing the discovery of the “long lost secret memoirs” of Elizabeth Macarthur, wife of colonial wool baron John Macarthur. The “editor and transcriber” is Kate Grenville, author of the acclaimed colonial novel based on her family history, The Secret River.
The discovery scenario is irresistibly believable. This month, a WWII diary was found at a Woolworths in Sydney’s North Shore. In 2011, James Bell’s 1838 account of his journey to Australia was published after being discovered at a market stall. In 2018, Miles Franklin’s final 1954 diary was discovered in an old suitcase.
Elizabeth Macarthur’s actual journal detailing her voyage on the Second Fleet was discovered at her daughter’s home in England, extracts of which were published as Some Early Records of the Macarthurs of Camden in 1914.
Grenville’s imaginary memoir of Elizabeth slips into the space between hoax and history, the paradox of purporting to be true while declaring it is not. Grenville openly plays with memoir’s “autobiographical pact”, where the reader unquestionably accepts an autobiography as truth. While a novel requires a suspension of disbelief, Grenville asks the reader to suspend their belief, akin to Peter Carey’s “feat of imposture”, True History of the Kelly Gang.
Read more:
True History of the Kelly Gang review: an unheroic portrait of a violent, unhinged, colonial punk
Grenville so convincingly creates Elizabeth’s voice it is easy to forget her opening warning: “Do not believe too quickly!”
In Grenville’s telling of Elizabeth’s telling of her marriage to John Macarthur, Elizabeth astutely understands how to manage the patriarchy rather than be a “true helpmate” to her husband as she is introduced in the family history.
She writes of the notoriously difficult John: “He could not be trusted not to destroy our hopes.” Elizabeth believes John is “dangerously unbalanced”.
Through her revision of the Macarthurs’ relationship, Grenville’s imaginary memoir joins the litany of (imaginary and authentic) revisionist biographies of wives overlooked or derided because of their husband’s fame.
Read more:
#ThanksforTyping: the women behind famous male writers
Elizabeth’s friendship with astronomer William Dawes is the central relationship. Grenville’s 2008 novel The Lieutenant was loosely based on Dawes, and she was inspired to write this imaginary memoir after reading Elizabeth’s passing reference to Dawes in an actual letter describing her astronomy lessons with the scientist and naval officer: “I blush at my error”.
This blush becomes a motif throughout A Room Made of Leaves: of the true nature of their friendship, and for what remains unsaid. “I blush at my error” was, in Grenville’s eyes, a rare glimpse of Elizabeth’s feelings hidden in what Grenville describes in her editor’s note as otherwise “unrevealing” and “dull” correspondence.
As in The Secret River, Grenville once again writes of a brutal history of colonisation and resistance. Sensitive to previous suggestions of whitewashing (which she has refuted at length), in A Room Made of Leaves Grenville expresses her gratitude to the Darug Custodian Aboriginal Corporation and the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council for their assistance in writing the book.
After being told of the Battle of Parramatta led by resistance leader, Pemulwuy, Elizabeth visits the battle site and alludes to dominant colonial accounts:
There was nothing to show what had happened. Only the words of that story, snipped out and pasted onto the air.
There is historical precedence for reading Elizabeth’s actual letters with the eye for the unsaid. 18th and 19th century women’s life writing was written with the expectation it was not private and adhered to social conventions of behaviour. Self-censorship and “silences in the archives” abound.
As Elizabeth, Grenville fills the silences:
I composed a glorious romance about all this for my mother. I would not lie, not outright. I set myself a more interesting path: to make sure that my lies occupied the same space as the truth.
Michelle Scott Tucker’s referenced biography, Elizabeth Macarthur: A Life at the Edge of the World is a tempting companion to come back to reality after reading A Room Made of Leaves. But Grenville’s Elizabeth stays with you.
As you see more curls of truth in Tucker’s biography that appear in Grenville’s imaginary memoir, you wonder about how the real Elizabeth felt — rather than what actually happened.
Kerrie Davies, Lecturer, School of the Arts & Media, UNSW
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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