Kate Crowcroft

Kate Crowcroft is a writer, cultural historian, and poet. She received her doctorate from the University of Cambridge where she won numerous awards for criticism and poetry. She is currently Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Queensland Fryer Library. Her first book is forthcoming with Hachette.

Kate Crowcroft reviews 'Deceit' by Yuri Felsen, translated by Bryan Karetnyk

July 2022, no. 444 • 25 June 2022

Nikolai Freudenstein was born in St Petersburg in 1894 and wrote his first novel, Deceit (обман), under the pseudonym Yuri Felsen. In 1923, he fled the Bolshevik Revolution, first to Riga then to Berlin, eventually settling in Paris, where the novel takes place. At the height of his career in 1943, he was caught in German-occupied France, deported to Auschwitz, and murdered there in a gas cha ... (read more)

Kate Crowcroft reviews 'All About Yves' by Yves Rees

November 2021, no. 437 • 25 October 2021

Yves Rees’s memoir All About Yves charts their experience of coming out as trans. The book documents the challenges of the transition in a colonial society built for and around the gender binary. Rees invites the reader into their everyday life. The point is to make their ‘gender legible in a world that refuses to see it’, and the author sets out from this premise. On the back of mounting t ... (read more)

Kate Crowcroft reviews 'The First Time I Thought I Was Dying' by Sarah Walker

August 2021, no. 434 • 22 July 2021

In The First Time I Thought I Was Dying, the photographer–artist Sarah Walker brings into focus ideas about anxiety, control, bodily functions, and the uses of breached boundaries. The essays of this book are personal, and readers of confessional non-fiction will delight in their tone: equal parts jocose and sincere. They document rites of passage: the first time Walker viewed her vulva in a ha ... (read more)

Kate Crowcroft reviews 'Poly' by Paul Dalgarno

January–February 2021, no. 428 • 17 December 2020

Paul Dalgarno’s fiction début, Poly, charts a romp through the romantic and sexual lives of married couple Chris and Sarah Flood. When the sexual intimacy in their relationship dies, Sarah opts to sleep with, as Chris describes it, ‘all but the worst of Melbourne’s walking wounded’, and takes her woebegone husband along for the proverbial ride. A reluctant Chris eventually finds his polya ... (read more)

Kate Crowcroft reviews 'Show Me Where It Hurts: Living with invisible illness' by Kylie Maslen

November 2020, no. 426 • 22 October 2020

Virginia Woolf wrote that when trying to communicate about pain as a sick woman ‘language at once runs dry’. How does one talk about wounds without fetishising their workings, and how in a society where pain is taboo does one speak of it authentically? In Show Me Where it Hurts, writer and journalist Kylie Maslen balances the difficulty of this equation: telling the story of her disability and ... (read more)