My first ‘proper’ published piece of writing was a satirical rant on being an unemployable graduate (arts/law), published in the now-defunct Heckler section of the Sydney Morning Herald. Heckler didn’t pay, but I arrived at the scene before digital overtook print and was thrilled to see my name on the back page of a weekday edition. It was a couple of years after September 11. But the Australian media had its Muslim spokespeople, and I had no desire to be a mouthpiece in this excruciating moment. So in my debut mainstream piece, I didn’t write about being Muslim in an increasingly […]

As Estha stirred the thick jam he thought Two Thoughts, and the Two Thoughts he thought were these: (a) Anything can happen to Anyone. And (b) It’s best to be prepared. —Arundhati Roy When we were children, before she entered the nursing home, my great-grandmother, a nonagenarian, used to tell stories of the untimely deaths of people from her distant past. Driving past a hill with a crater missing from its side like a bite taken from a giant apple, she remembered a friend who had fallen into the middle of it during a picnic in her youth. He had […]

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Twenty-three grams. When he was born, my baby weighed 23 grams. Only when the funeral home told me that seemingly minor detail about my son—the only tangible thing I ever knew about him—did the weight of what I had lost begin to sink in. Before that, in hospital, he was ‘remnants of conception’ and ‘foetal tissue’. My baby was anything the medical staff could call him that would protect them from the humanity of the situation. And in turn, their word play hid the truth from me too. The truth that, as we peered at the strange shape on the ultrasound […]

1. 1988. It is five years after the Ash Wednesday bushfires, which devastated many parts of Victoria, including the coastline of the Eastern Otways. It is also Australia’s Bicentennial year. A man in his early twenties sits on the step of a small fibro bungalow in the Aireys Inlet riverflat, in the thick shade of two towering old macrocarpa pines. Catching the light at his feet is a loamy brocade of russet pine needles, stretching across the yard to the sunroom of his house, one of the few buildings in the town to survive the fires.  In this yard there […]

Click here to access a Spotify playlist of Sevdah music compiled by the author   What I remember most is how yellow his skin was. He looked bilious to me, sickly. The wrinkles on his forehead were sharper because of the yellowish hue, and the way he sat in his wheelchair, hiding his amputated leg with a jacket, he seemed like he needed to get back to bed, not go on a holiday to Bosnia and Herzegovina. Like a typical wog family, we were all at the airport. My parents, my uncles and aunts, my cousins and their children—there were […]

I have always thought of myself as a good person, but I recently began to suspect that I have been kidding myself. What’s more, I began to believe that my failure to be a good person is inseparable from me being a writer—an activity that has taken on the character of something diabolical. I should clarify that I am in the habit of second-guessing myself, of being self-critical. Generally speaking, scepticism rather than faith, self-doubt rather than self-confidence, have served me well. I think of these characteristics—undoubtedly with an obnoxious measure of self-regard—as the foundation for learning, thinking, self-reinvention, and […]

It could not have been more ugly. A grey Remembrance Parks no-brand urn. To cater for/cancel out all tastes. Trying so hard not to be what it so clearly was. Modern death is all about discretion. Your name and d.o.d. were printed underneath.

‘If I don’t fall down and die it’s safe to eat it.’ Vera Deacon, 91 and impeccably dressed in a floral blouse and slim black skirt, tucks into the cake she has baked for our afternoon tea. It’s a carrot cake, made with pineapple, spices, brown sugar and walnuts. ‘I feel a bit better about it when it’s got things like carrot in it.’ Vera has cleared us a small space, rearranging the books, maps, letters and annotated newspaper articles on her dining table, in the still-working-class suburb of Stockton. On the walls hang framed historical maps of Newcastle, ranging from the […]

The bills were mounting up when an email slid quietly into my inbox: a mutual friend had given my name to a publisher. Was I interested in ghostwriting a memoir? The book’s subject was a community arts worker. The name rang a bell. At the time I was writing my first novel while scraping by as a freelance journo and a research assistant. My credit card was maxed out. A concentrated chunk of work, with a decent pay cheque, held practical appeal. The catch (or so I thought) was that I’d have just 11 weeks to write the memoir while working […]

Donald Trump has disrupted the world in so many ways that it is understandable his impact on the literary arts has been overshadowed. And fair enough too given that his actions have taken the world closer to nuclear war than at any time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. An impact he has undoubtedly had, though, as his rise to the American presidency prompted Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of Trump’s 1987 memoir The Art of the Deal, to step forward and reveal just how much art was required to make Trump look like a consummate deal-maker. An experienced journalist before […]