A survivor of the torrential wars and everyday business of annihilation being carried on behind the Iron Curtain comes face to face with Leonardo’s most famous painting, the pièce de résistance of the Louvre and representative of European cultural achievement. One of his most haunting poems, ‘Mona Lisa’, imagines a visit to Paris. In the poem ‘Mona Lisa’, published in Study of the Object (1961), the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert wrote: What are you working on next?Ī novel set in the Swiss Alps, about grief and déjà vu and eternal love.Some days it’s not so easy -WAAX, ‘ Big Grief’ Coleman, and slowly discovering the Stella longlisted authors. The Sweatshop women writers collective out of Western Sydney, Ruby Hamad, Maxine Beneba-Clark, Carly Findlay, Claire G. What are some other Australian women and non-binary writers that you’ve recently enjoyed? How long did this book take you to write from concept to completion? I knew of colonial violence and destruction, but I didn’t know it as intimately as I discovered. I read bushtucker guides, field notes, reports and papers and museum submissions and listened and asked a lot of questions. The research was a huge component, I had to show that Poppy was a time traveller, that he knew all things, so I had to try to find out so much, because I only knew his personal stories relating to the characters. One of these – Albert “Poppy” Gondiwindi is written as a series of entries in a dictionary for Language that Poppy was composing before he died. You have three narrative lines in your novel. We don’t have to be giyal-dhuray anymore, we don’t have to pass that down anymore. The old ones, the young ones too, are ready to heal. We’ve been singing our pain into a solid thing. See, pain travels through our family tree like a songline.

It’s become part of the dictionary we think we should carry. Can you share with us your favourite line or quote from your book?Īshamed, have shame – giyal-dhuray I’m done with this word. My greatest literary goal has been to have a readership, and I felt this rush of stepping toward my goal, as if all the years of solitary writing had mattered. I felt time, as if in the passage of my life there was another marker. What was your first thought when you heard you’d been selected for the Stella shortlist?

Tara winch the yield review