Judges’ Report

Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & Practice opens on the image of an Australian geologist hiking in the Swiss alps, yet soon takes a swerve, interrupted by the writer herself, or a version of the writer herself, as she realizes that she no longer wants to ‘write novels that read like novels. Instead of shapeliness and disguise, I wanted a form that allowed for formlessness and mess. It occurred to me that one way to find that form might be to tell the truth’. Theory & Practice is such an attempt, and true to form (or perhaps formlessness), de Kretser’s ‘mess’ is no ordinary mess but rather instead a brilliantly autofictive knot, composed of the shifting intensities and treacheries of young love, of complex inheritances both literary and maternal, of overwhelming jealousies and dark shivers of shame. Set in 1986, in St Kilda, the narrator is a young graduate student researching Virginia Woolf, and sorting through the ‘messy gap’ between theory and practice, as the ever-compelling capital-T Theory sinks its teeth into the Melbourne set. In her refusal to write a novel that reads like a novel, de Kretser instead gifts her reader a sharp examination of the complex pleasures and costs of living.