Accessibility Tools
- Content scaling 100%
- Font size 100%
- Line height 100%
- Letter spacing 100%
Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen is a Vietnamese-Australian writer and critic based in Melbourne. Her work has appeared in Meanjin, The Saturday Paper, Kill Your Darlings, SBS, and Good Weekend, among others. She was an inaugural recipient of The Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter fellowship in 2018 and a fiction judge for the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.
Siang Lu’s polyphonic début novel, The Whitewash (2022), occupied a unique place in Australian fiction. It was written as an oral history, with a cast of voices, sometimes in conflict with one another, coalescing to tell the story of the rise and fall of a Hollywood spy blockbuster. The film was supposed to star the first-ever Asian male lead in such a role, but he was replaced by a white actor ... (read more)
‘The personal is political’ is an axiom that has become ubiquitous. Normally used within the context of feminist activism, in Yumna Kassab’s latest novel – for which it serves as the epigraph – it is a reminder of the human sacrifice of war and how every part of a civilian’s life reflects its surroundings.
Politica manages to be at once specific and incredibly vague. It concerns itsel ... (read more)
In the modern literary landscape, the novel about a novelist writing a novel has become de rigueur. It can provide an ideal setting for a meditation on the complexities of living a creative life. Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s début novel, But the Girl, follows in this contemporary tradition, but offers something more compelling than navel-gazing: a critique of classical literature, specifically the wor ... (read more)
Melbourne author Aisling Smith’s début begins with a question that snakes the whole way through her novel: ‘What has happened to Benjamin?’
The asker, at first, is his wife, Malti Fortune. It is 1987 and her husband, once doting and attentive, is now distant. Gone are their dreamy days bonding over their love of words (she’s a lawyer, he’s a linguist). Benjamin now frequently works lat ... (read more)
Prior to watching New Gold Mountain, the only account I had come across of the gold rush of the 1850s from a non-white perspective was in Monica Tan’s memoir, Stranger Country (2019). On a six-month road trip around Australia, Tan met Eddie Ah Toy, an elderly, fifth-generation Chinese-Australian man whose ancestors came to Australia to work on the goldfields. Recently for SBS, Tan wrote, ‘I be ... (read more)
The proliferation of trauma writing in the past few years is a double-edged sword. While giving public voice to subjects once relegated to the dark lessens stigma and creates agency, there is almost an expectation for women writers to reveal or perform their trauma, as well as a risk of exploitation and retraumatisation.
In 2018, Australian-born, London-based journalist and writer Lucia Osborne-C ... (read more)
Go to any suburban shopping centre and you will find a metropolis of consumption. ‘Buy, buy, buy’, it screeches, whether you are contemplating fast-fashion T-shirts, new-age solutions to age-old problems, or services and pampering you don’t really need, all in the harsh glare of white lights and a controlled climate, temperature just right. The shopping centre, uniform and tidy, is where you ... (read more)