Melbournee
Stories inspired by history
Join Emily Bitto as she discusses how her research inspired her novel The Strays. Moderated by Sally Warhaft.
Emily Bitto is an award-winning writer of fiction, poetry and non-fiction. She has a Masters in Literary Studies and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne. Her debut novel, The Strays, was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, and the published novel went on to win the 2015 Stella Prize. Her second novel, Wild Abandon, won the Margaret and Colin Roderick Award and was shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal. Emily has been teaching for over a decade, and is currently a tutor and course advisor at the Faber Writing Academy. Sally Warhaft is a Melbourne broadcaster, anthropologist and writer and the host of the Wheeler Centre’s live journalism series, The Fifth Estate, now in its third year. She is a former editor of The Monthly magazine and the author of the bestselling book Well May We Say: The Speeches that Made Australia. Sally is a regular host and commentator on ABC radio and has a PhD in anthropology. She did her fieldwork in Mumbai, India, living by the seashore with the local fishing community.
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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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