Christos Tsiolkas

And I think what Manolis gave Patrick White was an understanding, a further understanding of what it meant to be an outsider.

And I think those themes started to present themselves in the novels.

And I think that was a great gift that Manolis gave his lover.

I think that for most of us,

The way we come to reading, and I came to reading really, really young.

I just, you know, I got sucked in and fell in love with reading as a pleasure from a very young age.

And that element of the reading experience, that it is a pleasure, you know, what do we say about it?

We got lost in the world, is of course still one of the reasons I keep reading and want to read.

But I think there is another kind of reading that we do, or can do, which is to be challenged to do work.

And, you know, I was in my late teens when I picked up The Aunt Story, and I had read a lot of literature, but I was still reading only for pleasure.

And with the yarn story, and I describe it in the essay, I remember I was in a shared household and I couldn't unlock this book.

And I started reading it out loud.

Probably, you know, thinking back at that time, I was probably a bit stoned as I was doing it.

But what it allowed me to do was actually, I use the term unlock, is the key for me was

The Turning of the Key was actually listening to the words as I was saying them out loud and realising that there was something akin to song and poetry in what Patrick White was doing with The Aunt Story.

And that's what made me think, oh, I think I can get it.

I think I know what I need to do with this book.

The other thing I've got to say, Cassie, too, the book is dedicated to Yaroslav Javier, who was my English teacher when I was in year nine in high school.

And he also took me at the end of high school for English literature.

And he is equally as important in terms of those haltering steps to becoming a good reader because he saw that I really loved to read.