Tag Helen Garner
Edwina Preston, The University of Melbourne. Most readers of Helen Garner will be able to pinpoint a first personal encounter with her work: a book, or even a sentence, that cut through like sharp light; a local landmark suddenly immortalised… Continue Reading →
Writing in The Conversation, commentator Jen Webb records her reaction to the first major biography of Australian journalist and author Helen Garner: How remarkable that, after some 40 years of books and essays, stories, articles and movies, there have been so few major publications on the life and works of Helen Garner. The National Library of Australia catalogue lists discussion notes; a study (in Mandarin) by Zhu Xiaoying; and Kerryn Goldsworthy’s excellent 1996 monograph. Bernadette Brennan’s A Writing Life goes a considerable way to filling out this slender collection.
Brennan offers a detailed account of Garner’s writing life, tracing the influences and obstacles; psychological and emotional affordances and constraints; her research and craft; and the critical and popular reception of her books. This is a valuable contribution about a major contemporary Australian writer who has delighted, infuriated, confused, charmed and frustrated readers, and whose experimental practice has galvanised ways of writing and thinking about writing.
Leading Australian writer Helen Garner, who became instantly famous with the publication of her first novel in 1977, Monkey Grip, has made the Stella longlist for her book House of Grief. The book explores in compelling style one of the worst cases of patricide in Australian history.