<strong>Tuesday:</strong> Rocket attacks killed ‘dozens’ of people in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Plus: UN issues ‘bleakest warning yet’ on global heating
Revisiting ‘terrifying and traumatising’ moments from his own life, the poet’s debut novel Son of Sin explores a young man’s sexual awakening in a conservative migrant community
The lives of queer Arab-Australian boys and men are vividly inhabited in award-winning poet Omar Sakr’s darkly comic debut novel, set in Western Sydney.
Tara June Winch’s The Yield has won the fiction category of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. I wrote an enthusiastic review of this novel earlier in 2020, and my admiration has not abated in the months since it won the Miles Franklin award. If anything, the heart of the story one of reclaiming language, culture, identity, and a possible future seems only more potent now.
There is nothing new about the knowledge that whose stories are told, and how they are told, matters enormously. Or understanding that a significant part of what becomes the shared “truth” of a time and culture is the product of the stories told and told again until they are embedded in a reader’s sense of the world.