Nicholas Jost

Hello, Kate.

Yeah, well, I would start with the awe, sometimes disrespectful awe, but really being...

just amazed at what other writers do.

I don't know how kind of non-writers read, if there is any such thing as a non-writer, but for me I read really to, for the things that are really going to sort of excite me or impress me, first of all, then I agree that there's that kind of critical element

thing that comes in where you might think, oh, that was very bold, but I'm not sure that that really works.

I might do it differently.

So I am conscious of things that, not that I would steal necessarily, but that I might be influenced by or absorb or want to try out for myself.

The novel I chose is Elizabeth Costello by J.M.

Curtsy.

And this may seem a surprising choice in this context because the author became an Australian relatively late in his career.

He's written...

about Australia brilliantly and sometimes with a heavy heart.

But I think he has also been inspired by being in Australia in certain ways.

And some of that comes out in this novel, Elizabeth Costello, who is herself an Australian novelist.

I mean, she's a character that he's invented, but she's a sort of famous Australian novelist who travels the world.

So it really

is asking straight out that question of you know what might it be to be an Australian writer and I don't think that we sort of have to be Australian writers but if we want to be we can and that means we're responding to the world we're in I mean I like the word conversation that um

that Deborah used and words like that that Belinda also has used in putting this together to do with community and a collective project that we're all engaged in.

And I think if we decide to be an Australian writer and to engage with Australian experience,

That intensifies everything for me anyway.