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Mindy Gill

Mindy Gill

Mindy Gill’s poems have most recently appeared in Griffith Review and The Penguin Book of Indian Poets. Her criticism has been published in Australian Book Review, Sydney Review of Books and Meanjin. She is an Australian Book Review Rising Star.

Mindy Gill reviews 'West Girls' by Laura Elizabeth Woollett

October 2023, no. 458 • 24 September 2023
Laura Elizabeth Woollett demonstrates her mastery of the polyphonic novel in West Girls. The book, Woollett’s fourth, comprises eleven nimbly interwoven chapters that explore origin, agency, and delusion in a patriarchal society. The central character is Luna Lewis, whom we first meet as a pre-teen visiting family in Malta. Luna projects an innate confidence that often belies – or is belied b ... (read more)

Mindy Gill reviews 'Root & Branch: Essays on inheritance' by Eda Gunaydin

July 2022, no. 444 • 25 June 2022
Eda Gunaydin’s collection of essays, Root & Branch, centres on migration, class, guilt, and legacy. It joins the surge of memoir-as-début by millennial writers, who interrogate the personal via the political. Gunaydin, whose family immigrated to Australia from Turkey, grew up in the outer suburbs of Western Sydney – home to a historically migrant and working-class demographic. We learn th ... (read more)

'Till "real voices" wake us, and we drown: The mire of identity politics' by Mindy Gill

March 2022, no. 440 • 20 February 2022
We can learn much about a culture by listening to how it talks about its art. The way non-white writers, for want of a better phrase, tend to be reviewed in Australia tells us a lot about how we determine cultural value. Some reviewers place a premium on the author’s biography – her identity – rather than on her work itself. The reviewer avoids critical engagement with the text in favour of ... (read more)

Mindy Gill reviews 'Harlem Shuffle' by Colson Whitehead

October 2021, no. 436 • 23 September 2021
Readers of Colson Whitehead’s two recent Pulitzer Prize-winning novels, The Underground Railroad (2016) and The Nickel Boys (2019) – both historical literary novels focused on the Underground Railroad and the Jim Crow era, respectively – may be surprised by his eighth book, Harlem Shuffle, a crime novel written in the swaggering voice of a Quentin Tarantino character. Whitehead has always dr ... (read more)

Mindy Gill reviews 'Racism: Stories on fear, hate and bigotry' edited by Winnie Dunn, Stephen Pham, and Phoebe Grainer

July 2021, no. 433 • 21 June 2021
Sweatshop, based in Western Sydney, is a writing and literacy organisation that mentors emerging writers from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Racism, their ninth anthology, brings together all thirty-nine writers involved in their three programs – the Sweatshop Writers Group, Sweatshop Women Collective, and Sweatshop Schools Initiative. The section titled ‘Micro Aggressive F ... (read more)

Mindy Gill reviews 'We Were Never Friends' by Margaret Bearman

September 2020, no. 424 • 24 August 2020
Margaret Bearman’s We Were Never Friends is a novel that places the myth of the artistic male genius against the critical eye of history. Lotti, the eldest daughter of renowned Australian painter George Coates, narrates from two perspectives: her younger, twelve-year-old self and her present-day one, a trainee surgeon. In 1999 the Coates family abandons Sydney, assured that ‘Canberra would be ... (read more)