Tony Birch

It is a really strong critique, I think, of Australian culture, but produced...

in a way that is so original.

And I think people who, wherever they are coming to poetry as, you know, very literate or for a first time would be really reading something of great originality.

Can I just, just to comment on that, I think when you talk about the fire in the background, and I think it's a very apt word, the other issue we're seeing, I think, where fiction is dealing with dramatic weather events, such as bushfires in Australia, it is interesting the extent to which you will get these, you know, background stories

fires or natural weather disasters, often coupled with forms of either domestic violence or certainly domestic aggression.

And I don't think that is coincidental.

I think as the planet heats up, as we have more violent and dramatic weather events, its ability to impact negatively on our human relationships rather than positively, as we tried to talk about before, is really apparent with some of our contemporary fiction writers.

People in doing creative writing at universities would be aware that, you know, teaching graphic fictions in the graphic novel has become a really important genre in the last decade, maybe even two decades.

So at Melbourne University where I teach, graphic fiction is taught and has been taught for a long time, very popular.

You know, it's obviously in a contemporary environment because you have people, I think, the visual...

narrative is really attractive to people who are growing up with more social media.

Kate, maybe your problem is you didn't read enough comics as children.

That is obviously a problem.

Well, I thought I did.

Well, see, we grew up in a house that only had comics.

We didn't have books.

So I love graphic fiction and

Just as a personal aside, I didn't grow up reading Shakespeare and was very intimidated by Shakespeare.

And I remember when I went to university and I think I did Macbeth and Othello and I really, I couldn't get into it.

And someone gave me a graphic version of Othello and I got it straight away.