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Geordie Williamson

๐Ÿ‘ค Speaker
426 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

The Bookshelf
Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair, Eleanor Limprecht's The Passengers and reviewers Nicole Abadee, Frank Bongiorno and Geordie Williamson

Have you just received it?

The Bookshelf
Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair, Eleanor Limprecht's The Passengers and reviewers Nicole Abadee, Frank Bongiorno and Geordie Williamson

I just travel in a great cloud of literary ignorance.

The Bookshelf
Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair, Eleanor Limprecht's The Passengers and reviewers Nicole Abadee, Frank Bongiorno and Geordie Williamson

And it's funny, when I started out, I really felt like I had a handle on Australian literature, past and present, European literature and translation, Anglosphere literature, particularly, you know, 20th century UK and US.

The Bookshelf
Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair, Eleanor Limprecht's The Passengers and reviewers Nicole Abadee, Frank Bongiorno and Geordie Williamson

And now I just wander down the street in a daze, just realising I'd missed so many important people and I'm continually discovering new voices.

The Bookshelf
Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair, Eleanor Limprecht's The Passengers and reviewers Nicole Abadee, Frank Bongiorno and Geordie Williamson

And that's the thing.

The Bookshelf
Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair, Eleanor Limprecht's The Passengers and reviewers Nicole Abadee, Frank Bongiorno and Geordie Williamson

They're just...

The Bookshelf
Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair, Eleanor Limprecht's The Passengers and reviewers Nicole Abadee, Frank Bongiorno and Geordie Williamson

Publication is now such a big business.

The Bookshelf
Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair, Eleanor Limprecht's The Passengers and reviewers Nicole Abadee, Frank Bongiorno and Geordie Williamson

There are so many new titles flying onto the shelves that it's sometimes easy to miss even the most significant new voices.

The Bookshelf
Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair, Eleanor Limprecht's The Passengers and reviewers Nicole Abadee, Frank Bongiorno and Geordie Williamson

Well, at the moment, what I'm doing is a bit of prep work for ahead of Sydney Writers Festival.

The Bookshelf
Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair, Eleanor Limprecht's The Passengers and reviewers Nicole Abadee, Frank Bongiorno and Geordie Williamson

And in particular, I'm looking at two books written by Australians that they will be appearing at the festival that are both quite strange and slightly askew to the usual run of books that I review.

The Bookshelf
Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair, Eleanor Limprecht's The Passengers and reviewers Nicole Abadee, Frank Bongiorno and Geordie Williamson

They're not strictly literary in inverted commas.

The Bookshelf
Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair, Eleanor Limprecht's The Passengers and reviewers Nicole Abadee, Frank Bongiorno and Geordie Williamson

And the first of those is by an activist and author named Alexis Wright, who is a one-year woman from Gulf of Carpentaria, based down south most of the time these days, but keeps one foot in home country, basically.

The Bookshelf
Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair, Eleanor Limprecht's The Passengers and reviewers Nicole Abadee, Frank Bongiorno and Geordie Williamson

And she said to me once years ago that her job was, when she went home, is to do the kind of the transcribing work for those people who couldn't write for themselves.

The Bookshelf
Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair, Eleanor Limprecht's The Passengers and reviewers Nicole Abadee, Frank Bongiorno and Geordie Williamson

So it was a question of basic literacy.

The Bookshelf
Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair, Eleanor Limprecht's The Passengers and reviewers Nicole Abadee, Frank Bongiorno and Geordie Williamson

I mean, she was writing letters to various government agencies and that sort of thing.

The Bookshelf
Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair, Eleanor Limprecht's The Passengers and reviewers Nicole Abadee, Frank Bongiorno and Geordie Williamson

But there was also a larger project where she sought through her work as an author to tell the story of many First Nations people who didn't necessarily have a voice themselves.

The Bookshelf
Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair, Eleanor Limprecht's The Passengers and reviewers Nicole Abadee, Frank Bongiorno and Geordie Williamson

She's very good at what she's done.

The Bookshelf
Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair, Eleanor Limprecht's The Passengers and reviewers Nicole Abadee, Frank Bongiorno and Geordie Williamson

She's been hugely well regarded by Australia's literary community.

The Bookshelf
Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair, Eleanor Limprecht's The Passengers and reviewers Nicole Abadee, Frank Bongiorno and Geordie Williamson

She's won the Miles Franklin for Carpentaria, which is the book that probably most people will recall.

The Bookshelf
Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair, Eleanor Limprecht's The Passengers and reviewers Nicole Abadee, Frank Bongiorno and Geordie Williamson

But this new book of hers, she's very much to the side of the narrative because this is one of her letters that she's sending for someone else.