Tony Birch

It's so visceral.

But I think it's a genuinely frightening book.

You make the point, this book is set in regional Australia in a country town.

The male culture of alcoholism and drinking and misogyny, homophobia, it's all there.

What a great country we live in.

It's all there, but I recognize those male characters

as I did in those same male people in my life in the inner city.

So what's interesting here, although there's so many elements of landscape in that book that affect the behaviour of people, the behaviour of drunken men in that book, they could have been men in my own home or in my own street.

So there was, again, a familiarity.

And it's a book also that's had a really strong impact overseas because I know there's a conference coming up later in the year where that book about Australian Gothic...

will be part of the program.

So it is a very influential book.

And for me, I would sort of put it on my top 10.

I'm going to throw one in there quickly before I get bombed out.

And this is not going to get a ooh or ah, so don't fake it, right?

No.

LAUGHTER

The Melbourne poet Pio, his book 24 Hours, I think is the greatest work of poetry written in Australia.

It's a massive, chunky book of about 600 pages.

And what it does, it's all based inside an espresso bar in Fitzroy or in Brunswick Street.