Australian novelist Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka and immigrated to Australia when she was fourteen. She worked for many years as an editor at Lonely Planet and was responsible for setting up their French series as well as a travel literature series, Journeys. The author of several award-winning novels, de Kretser published her most recent, The Life to Come, in 2017. It won the 2018 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the 2019 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction. A short monograph, On Shirley Hazzard, was published in 2019.
De Kretser lives in Sydney, where she is an honorary associate of the English Department at the University of Sydney. Her fiction is both vividly grounded in place and transnational. Her settings include Australia, Ceylon/Sri Lanka, France, Italy, and India. A. S. Byatt has described de Kretser as “a master storyteller who writes quickly and lightly of wonderful and terrible things.” Neel Mukherjee called her “preternaturally attuned to the patient rage of history,” while Hilary Mantel notes de Kretser’s “formidable technique.”
In this conversation, de Kretser and Roberta Trapè discuss tourism as privilege, casual racism, Australian politics, Shirley Hazzard, and the role of clothes in fiction.
Roberta Trapè: Your writing is deeply connected with the idea of movement, translation from one place to another, often migration. And with history, I would say. Are there particular reasons for these interests?
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة Summer 2020 من World Literature Today.
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هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة Summer 2020 من World Literature Today.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
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Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, World Literature Today presented the 2020 Neustadt Festival 100 percent online. In the lead-up to the festival, U.S. Ambassador Yuri Kim officially presented the award to Kadare at a ceremony in Tirana in late August, attended by members of Kadare’s family; Elva Margariti, the Albanian minister of culture; and Besiana Kadare, Albania’s ambassador to the United Nations.
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A Conversation with Gloria Susana Esquivel
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