Melbourne
Examining 13 years of Stella
Authors Jennifer Down, Jessie Tu and Katherine Brabon as they examine 13 years of Stella, and what it feels like to be a young writer listed for a national prize. Moderated by Corrie Perkins.
Jessie Tu is a book critic at The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, and a journalist for Women’s Agenda. Her debut novel, A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing, won the ABIA for 2020 Literary Fiction Book of the Year. The Honeyeater is her second novel.
Katherine Brabon is an author based in Naarm/Melbourne. Her latest novel, Body Friend, was shortlisted for the Stella Prize.
Jennifer Down is an author, editor and translator. Her most recent novel, Bodies of Light, received the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award, and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize in the same year. She lives in Naarm/Melbourne.
Corrie Perkin is a books advocate, editor, award-winning journalist, podcaster, interviewer, events host and communications advisor. For 12 years she owned a bookshop in Melbourne and continues her mission of bringing writers and readers together via her media projects. Corrie is a former board member of the Wheeler Centre. She is also the Director of the Sorrento Writers Festival.
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Further Reading
Reviews
“These interwoven stories come together seamlessly to form beautiful memoir that connects all of these lives in time and space, between Odessa and St Kilda, forming a matrix of empathy, of love, and of healing.” Magdalena Ball, Compulsive Reader
“The parade of lyrical fragments – sensual moments, family stories, ethical inquiries and daily records – that makes up The Swift Dark Tide isn’t easy to categorise, so author Katia Ariel does it for us.” Linda Javin, The Saturday Paper
Links
The hosts of Creative Criticism, Greg and Robert, discuss The Swift Dark Tide with Katia Ariel.
Judges’ Report
In delicate and delicious strokes, Katia Ariel’s The Swift Dark Tide renders the discovery and release of the “hidden self” in middle age. It is no mid-life crisis. Rather, it is a mid-life realising of desire and possibility; of queer becoming.
Ariel’s memoir reads as an unabashed re-telling of meticulous diary entries, kept to provide a constant during her love affair with a woman, a period of welcome change. There are other constants: a husband who has carefully soldered their love at its many seams; and their children. It would have been easy to square both life and the memoir on that obvious binary –family or the love of “another woman”. Ariel instead follows the scent of her unquiet body, and what she herself describes as its “animal” intent on triumph.
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