Fiction

You hiding from me, Pa?

Item: Lullaby
Author: Cath Kenneally

by Cath Kenneally •

May 1994, no. 160

Lullaby: A novel by Janine Burke

Picador, $16.95 pb

Fiction

You hiding from me, Pa?

by Cath Kenneally •

May 1994, no. 160

‘You have your own place now; your own magic.’
‘How to make it last, that’s the question.’
‘You mean, what spell should you invent – what’s in your power?’
Bea smiled. ‘Words, I suppose. Stories.’

Janine Burke in Lullaby, is writing about writing-out. Her character, Bea, is a writer with a block, seemingly precipitated by the failure of a marriage and the temporary loss of a recent lover, but the author is trying for much more than just this one story, which looks, on the evidence of the first chapter, to have more than enough fuel in it for a novel.

Cath Kenneally

Cath Kenneally is an Adelaide poet and novelist whose book Around Here (Wakefield Press, 2002) won the John Bray National Poetry Prize. Of her six volumes of poetry, the latest is eaten cold (Walleah Press, 2013), in which each poem responds to one in the volume Cold Snack (AUP) by Auckland poet Janet Charman. Kenneally’s two novels are Room Temperature and Jetty Road (both Wakefield Press). She works as a print and broadcast arts journalist, being Arts Producer at Radio Adelaide for many years and responsible for Writers Radio, an award-winning national community radio books and writing program. She was the inaugural CAL/J.M. Coetzee Writing Fellow at the Coetzee Centre at Adelaide University in 2016. She holds an MA and PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide. Her work has appeared in many national and international journals and anthologies, and been translated into several languages.